Exit pursued by McBear. This week Tony Blair will announce his going as prime
minister. Let us give him a break. His boldest legacy to British history,
devolution, has come good.
Local governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have proved their
maturity. In the first two, electors have given the ruling Labour regimes
the worst hiding for half a century and Scotland has fallen to nationalists.
Blair said on Friday that they had “given me a good kicking”. They have also
honoured the trust he put in them in 2000. It was a noble kick, sort of.
British local elections are normally boring affairs. These rituals of
democracy - so vigorous abroad - in Britain are treated as relics of a lost
age, like steam trains, debutantes and aldermen.
Since local accountability is nearly defunct they are hijacked by commentators
and used as proxy opinion polls. They are discussed solely as “if repeated
at a general election”. Any result that diverges from the national swing is
dismissed as polluted by “local factors” and in need of help.
Not so this year. The elections were galvanised by being staged alongside
voting for the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, with a hilarious
guest appearance by the re-re-launch of a power-sharing executive in
Northern Ireland. The elections displayed all the strengths of Blair’s
innovation. They reinvigorated local politics. Turnouts rose by nearly 6%
(to 44%) in Wales and 10% (to 60%) in Scotland.
They made local politicians publicly answerable for public services. They also
put on the hustings the separatist gene latent in all Europe’s subsidiary
regions.
That the Scottish and Welsh elections were a mid-term poll on Labour’s third
term at Westminster is a patronising London assumption – one that dominated
all BBC discussion on Thursday and Friday. It could thus be used as a grim
marker for the Scot Gordon Brown’s forthcoming accession as prime minister.
Yet those who visited Scotland and Wales during the campaign noted how far
the elections were about the performance of the relevant governments and
assemblies. They were about local names and faces, about the quality of
schools and hospitals, policing and planning. Was the Nationalist, Alex
Salmond, the right man to represent Scotland over the next four years? Was
Rhodri Morgan’s old Labour regime in Cardiff a busted flush?
Salmond’s triumph was a rebuff to a century of Labour’s Leninist tradition of
central statism. It put Britain in the European mainstream, where regional
politics are fundamental to the politics of the nation. The Nationalists in
Wales and Scotland smashed the London-oriented tri-party system. The SNP’s
hold on power may be tenuous, but the mould is broken.
I do not believe this had anything to do with separatism in the manner of
Quebec or the Basques, despite the scaremongering. Polls show that few Scots
and even fewer Welsh want an end to the Union. What they want is an end to
Union public administration. However much they criticise their devolved
executives, they want more local power, not less. Scottish railways may be
decrepit but if the Scots want to run them, that is surely their business.
The Welsh NHS may be dreadful but at least it is dreadfully “ours”.
Westminster’s federalist fallacy holds that nationalism is a soggy sentiment
that can be bought off with subsidies and threats of poverty if withdrawn.
This is not true. Nationalism is fuelled by a shared identity, activated
when central authority imposes its will in an authoritarian way, as London
has regularly done in Scotland and Wales. Europe’s new autonomous and
semi-autonomous polities, such as once-poor Slovenia or Catalonia, began
with a simple plea to order their own affairs. Ireland suffered decades of
poverty but never craved a return to London rule.
Westminster should now have the courage of Blair’s original convictions.
The Treasury subsidies that have 40% of workers in Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland as employees of the state should be phased down and out.
The average Scot last year received £8,265 from the UK exchequer, the Welsh
£7,666 and the Northern Irish £9,088 (against an English average of £6,762).
Full taxing powers, including over property, transport and business, should be
remitted to the assemblies. Such subsidies have corrupted labour markets and
smothered private enterprise. If the Union is to survive it should be based
not on colonial bribery but on respectful equality.
That is the good news. The bad news is how hard this will be to achieve.
The elections have revealed the “poison pill” that Westminster inserted in the
devolution legislation, proportional representation, made worse by
computer-assisted vote-counting. (Anyone seeing a civil servant carrying a
computer brochure should drive a stake through his heart at the next
crossroads.) The virtue of majoritarian democracy is that it gives a clean
answer to a simple question: does the electorate want the present lot to go?
It exaggerates swing and gives a new administration clear accountability.
PR was intended by Blair to stifle the Nationalists by making it hard for them
to gain overall control and thus forcing on them the curse of “rolling
coalition”. This has been made immediately apparent. Policies and manifestos
were suddenly smothered in secret deals, as if mandates could be sold on
eBay. Asked the fate of policies on which they had just been elected,
politicians went silent and disappeared into smoke-filled rooms to trade
them for jobs.
Scotland and Wales should have been given powerful directly elected first
ministers, as London was given an elected mayor. That would have enabled
party PR to reflect the balance of voting in assembly membership. As a basis
of government, PR means instability, inordinate power for minorities and a
discount on courageous decision. Ask the Italians, the Dutch and the
Israelis. Remember the “Lib-Lab” pact of 1977, product of that merciful
rarity, a “hung parliament”. The chief horror in politics at present is that
this may be repeated after the next general election.
But what of the sickly Cinderella lingering in her scullery, England?
Why is she not allowed to go the all-singing, all-dancing carnival of
democracy held to her north and west? Neither England, nor its component
counties and cities have their champions. They enjoy no devolved powers and
their councils have, under Brown, lost their free-to-spend block grants.
They are little more than Whitehall agencies. The success of the Tories in
revitalising their localist base was barely mentioned in last week’s
histrionics, but for “confirming the national opinion polls”.
The potency of devolution is that it has taken root within a national politics
that has been fiercely hostile to it. Blair’s English localism was wholly
cynical. John Prescott tried to give his administrative regions elected
assemblies but they were fashioned in Whitehall not in the hearts of English
men and women. They were even named after compass points in the style of
Orwell’s 1984, to suppress territorial identity. They were soundly rejected.
Britons do not live, breathe or love their region. Their sub-national loyalty
is to Liverpool, Yorkshire, Birmingham, Kent or Bristol.
Thoughtful ministers such as Gordon Brown, Ruth Kelly and David Miliband make
occasional speeches about localism, but they have no clue what it means. In
10 years they have only centralised.
That same decade has seen the politics of Edinburgh and Cardiff transformed.
Devolution will take time to yield a more competent generation of leaders.
But voters are roused and have challenged and punished failure. Reverting to
rule from Whitehall is unthinkable.
The Scots and Welsh have shown that Britain can handle constitutional
localism. Why not the English? Why not restore to English cities and
counties at least the powers they enjoyed half a century ago and would enjoy
in any other European state?
I sense that whoever is in power in Westminster will one day pay a heavy price
for this neglect of England. Some 90% of politically active Britons are in
local government. Blair and Brown have despised these party footsoldiers, a
contempt that must have played a part in their crushing defeat in the
English polls. We have heard the trumpets and drums of the new politics. We
should also see its next battlefield.
