The devolution fallacy

It is easy to see why Labour leader Keir Starmer should find himself tempted into the idea of greater devolution. Electoral geometry indicates that he might end up having to negotiate with the SNP after the next election. It is harder to see why Gordon Brown’s advice should be sought, given how badly his own attempts at devolution have backfired.

As Tony Blair’s shadow chancellor, Brown argued that a new parliament in Edinburgh would scotch the snake of independence. It was a view widely held by Labour at the time. In the words of the then shadow Scotland secretary, devolution would kill the SNP ‘stone dead’. This has not, to put it mildly, gone according to plan. Had Brown not retired from the Commons in 2015, voters would have done it for him: all but three seats in Scotland were won by the SNP. Devolution has left Scotland in a trap: on one side a powerful independence movement which will not give up, on the other a decisive ‘no’ vote in the 2014 referendum.

None of this, however, has dissuaded Brown from putting forward yet more devolution – a proposal that Starmer has happily adopted – for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and also for English regions. It is hard to see what problem the former prime minister thinks such a programme would solve, nor whose support he hopes to win by proposing it. Brown has even failed to spot the contradictions in his suggestions. He speaks of wanting to ‘empower towns, cities and regions’, but you cannot empower all three at once. If you want power to rest with the regions then you will take it away from cities, several of which would inevitably end up competing to dominate regional politics. 

As Labour found to its immense cost in 2019, there is a big difference between the interests of cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds – which have enjoyed a strong economic revival over the past few decades – and the smaller, more remote towns of the Midlands and North.