Gordon Brown needs a hobby. Golf, perhaps, or jazzercise. Anything but meddling in the constitution. He means well but his answer is always the same: make things worse but in a way that sounds really clever to Westminster types. To a hammer everything is a nail and to Gordon Brown there isn’t a problem in all Creation that doesn’t call for a commission, a committee or a convention.
His own commission into ‘the UK’s future’ has now reported and all I can say is the future ain’t what it used to be. A New Britain is a backwards-looking prospectus, its new constitutional settlement largely doubling down on the old settlement. That old settlement has been a stunning failure but can’t be acknowledged as such because Brown was partly responsible for it.
I don’t enjoy being rude about Gordon Brown
As one of the architects of Scottish devolution, the only thing Brown should be consulted for is an apology. In his day, New Labour sold a Scottish parliament to the British people thus:
‘The Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed.’
And that was the last we heard from Scottish nationalism.
Brown’s report declares:
‘The way forward is to consider all measures that are best to reinforce self-government within the United Kingdom without losing the benefits that co-operation on concerns common to us all can bring.’
Note that devolution is ‘self-government’, an implicit rejection of Westminster sovereignty and an insinuation that, prior to legislative devolution in 1999, Scots were being governed by someone other than themselves. Of course, Scots were self-governing before devolution because they are UK citizens and voted in UK elections for UK governments.
The UK is also reduced to a ‘cooperation’. Not a sovereign country in its own right, where forms of local autonomy are permitted in the interests of more efficient or responsive governance, but a glorified credit union with nuclear weapons. The UK envisioned in Brown’s paper is held together by cash transfers and buzzwords granted constitutional status. It is a country with no common identity and no future.
Brown proposes to ‘entrench the constitutional status of self-government across the nations of the UK’. The Tories already amended the Scotland and Wales Acts to make their respective parliaments and governments ‘a permanent part of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements’. This isn’t enough for Brown, who wants to ‘strengthen the Sewel Convention and protect it from amendment through the new second chamber’.
Sewel is the provision that says Westminster doesn’t normally legislate in devolved areas without the consent of the devolved parliament. Brown wants ‘a new, statutory, formulation’ that would be legally binding so Westminster wouldn’t be able to pass any more legislation like the Internal Market Act, which was opposed by the Scottish and Welsh governments. If it adopts this policy, Labour will go into the next election asking to form a government whose hands it will then tie and in doing so make it even less relevant to Scotland. ‘Things Can Only Get Better Via Holyrood’ doesn’t sound quite as catchy.
The report urges Labour to ‘broaden the powers held by the Scottish and Welsh governments’. Gordon Brown is the Father Beeching of constitutional politics:
‘Is there anything to be said for another Scotland Act?’
Labour set up devolution with a wide array of powers which the Tories then expanded in further Scotland and Wales Acts. In the case of Scotland, the architects of both Devo 1.0 and Devo 2.0 assured us their update was the one that would finally dampen separatist sympathies. Since then, the SNP has been in power for 15 years at Holyrood, holds three-quarters of Scottish seats at Westminster and has convinced half the electorate on the merits of independence. But I’m sure Devo 3.0 will fix all the glitches.
One of Brown’s notions is to give Holyrood ‘greater powers to promote Scotland across the world’ including to ‘represent Scotland as a nation’ and ‘enter into agreements with international bodies’. He cites as examples Unesco, the Nordic Council and Erasmus. Because that’s how you strengthen a UK under threat from separatists: by allowing the separatists to join a UN agency and cosplay as world leaders.
The SNP government is already pursuing an independent foreign policy even without the powers to do so. Brown wants to hand them not only more powers but international legitimacy. You could put this man in charge of political reform or you could hand a sledgehammer to a chimpanzee and point it to the remaining load-bearing walls of the British constitution. The effect would be much the same.
The flaw in Brown’s third-wave devolutionism is the same as that in the first wave. It assumes ‘the benefits of cooperation between Scottish, Welsh and UK institutions’ because ‘we can achieve more within our islands working in partnership than ever we can achieve working on our own’. But the SNP doesn’t want to cooperate with UK institutions, it wants to secede from them. It doesn’t want to work in partnership across ‘our islands’, it wants to run its own sovereign country.
As I’ve written before, devolution ideologues refuse to accept that Scottish nationalists sincerely believe in Scottish statehood. They have no interest in a better-run UK because they don’t want to be part of the UK. They will bank every Westminster concession then redouble their campaign for sovereignty. Trying to satisfy an appetite for independence with more devolution is like trying to wean a pyromaniac off lighters by promising him a steady supply of matchbooks.
I don’t enjoy being rude about Gordon Brown. Unlike most of his critics, I think he was a good chancellor and a better prime minister than he is given credit for. He’s unusually thoughtful for a British politician and even more unusually concerned with the moral dimensions of leadership and policy. He has dedicated his life to public service rather than personal enrichment. It’s an example more often admired than followed.
But he is also an arrogant idealist determined that the world will fit his theory. Brown is prepared to break whatever needs to be broken until it does. The constitution is broken enough and for that he bears some responsibility. Labour ought to be seeking power to transform the social and economic conditions of the UK, not to weaken the ability of national government to deliver that kind of transformation. If Labour lacks faith in the UK, why should the UK put its faith in Labour?
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