THE GREAT DEVOLUTION DISASTER
Grotesque levels of corruption. Pygmy politicians. An obsession with woke dogma. And an upsurge in the nationalism it was supposed to tame. Twenty-five years after the birth of Tony Blair’s pet project, a distinguished voice laments...
TODAY marks a very significant day in our country’s history. Exactly 25 years ago, the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh and the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff sat for the first time.
What high hopes there were in some quarters! Scotland’s parliament hadn’t met for nearly 300 years. Wales had never had its own assembly. Tony Blair’s New Labour promised the United Kingdom nothing less than a new constitutional settlement.
We were told – and many believed it, though I certainly didn’t – that Scotland and Wales would be better governed under Devolution than they had been from Westminster.
The Union would supposedly also be safe. George Robertson, a Scot and member of the New Labour Cabinet, had promised Devolution would ‘kill nationalism stone dead’ north of the border.
Was ever a political forecast so comprehensively confounded? Nor have assurances of improved governance been remotely fulfilled.
Devolution was New Labour’s pride and joy, though Blair later claimed in his 2010 memoir that he ‘was never a passionate Devolutionist’. Perhaps the sinuous former PM could already see things were not turning out as well as he and his fellow constitutional iconoclasts had hoped.
In Scotland, the political tribulations of the Scottish National Party have recently attained new heights. Twelve days ago, we endured the spectacle of a third-rate, over-promoted Scottish First Minister committing political hara-kiri.
Two weeks before the hapless Humza Yousaf stabbed himself in the back, there had been an earlier earth tremor north of the border.
Peter Murrell, husband of former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and ex-chief executive of the SNP, was charged by police in connection with the embezzlement of funds from his party.
Mr Murrell may of course be innocent. But his arrest after a year-long investigation, combined with the pantomime of Mr Yousaf’s resignation, somehow symbolises the dysfunctional nature of Devolution in Scotland.
This week the SNP chose a new First Minister, John Swinney, unopposed. He is a plodding politician who failed to set the heather alight as the Scot Nats’ leader two decades ago. Why would he do any better this time?
Wales’s predicament is almost as dire. Newly-installed Labour First Minister Vaughan Gething, no titan in the political firmament, is facing accusations over a £200,000 campaign donation from a company whose owner was twice convicted of environmental offences.
What grieves me as a Unionist who sees himself as British first and English second is that our fellow citizens in Scotland and Wales have in effect been abandoned to the devices of incompetent, mediocre and sometimes corrupt politicians.
Conservative ministers look at the pitiable state of the Labour-run NHS in Wales, where waiting lists are even longer than in England, and jeer. One can understand their wanting to make political capital. But shouldn’t they be showing concern for Britons trapped in what increasingly resembles a madhouse?
The theory is that democracies adjust when people are badly governed and voters will sooner or later turn to alternative political parties that offer more sensible policies. Unfortunately, this theory doesn’t obviously apply to Scotland and Wales.
Despite its corruption and serial ineptitude, the SNP remains in government after 17 years. Polls suggest that a resurgent Labour Party could win more seats than the flagging Scot Nats in the forthcoming General Election. It might even form the next administration in Holyrood when elections, due in May 2026, take place.
But Scottish Labour is in many respects indistinguishable from the SNP. Both are centre-Left. What mainly separates them is independence, with Scottish Labour against (though its former leader Kezia Dugdale has recently revealed she is increasingly drawn to it) and the SNP wildly in favour.
On many other issues the two parties think alike. For example, Scottish Labour supported the Scots Nats over the Gender Recognition Act. This would have enabled transgender 16-year-olds to declare themselves male or female without medical endorsement – if the Westminster Government hadn’t blocked it, using a power that hadn’t been exercised before.
Similarly, Scottish Labour backed the SNP’s recent illiberal and nearlunatic hate crime laws, which have enraged people such as JK Rowling. Its leader, Anas Sarwar, has said that Scottish Labour won’t repeal the Act if his party forms the next government in Holyrood.
SCOTTISH Labour has also mostly gone along with the SNP’s tax-raising heists following Holyrood’s acquisition of new powers in 2016, recklessly bestowed by the Tories. Nicola Sturgeon and her cohorts set about fleecing Scottish taxpayers.
God knows, south of the border we are groaning under the burden of excessive taxation but it’s worse in Scotland. People there earning more than £26,562 a year pay 1p in the pound more tax than in England, which is increased to 2p more in the higher income bracket. Top earners are subjected to an extra walloping.
The upshot is that even those on relatively modest incomes are paying thousands more in tax than counterparts in England. Mr Sarwar has suggested that Scottish Labour might trim tax for middle earners but, given his party’s traditional love of high taxes, voters would be wise to be sceptical.
So in tax as in other matters there’s little to choose between the SNP and Scottish Labour. Unless voters turn in droves to the Scottish Tories – an unlikely event for all kinds of historical reasons – our fellow citizens are, as a consequence of Devolution, imprisoned in a high-tax economy.
Admittedly, largely thanks to the Westminster government transferring more than £8billion a year to Holyrood under the so-called Barnett formula, the Scots enjoy perks unavailable to the English.
They have free prescriptions (as do the Welsh and Northern Irish) and don’t pay tuition fees at Scottish universities. Council tax has been frozen in Scotland during this tax year.
These handouts engender justifiable resentment in England towards the Scots and further undermine our already weakened Union. Just one more instance of the pernicious effects of Devolution.
As for the Labour-run Welsh government, it has so far been given fewer taxraising powers than Holyrood, though this hasn’t prevented it from squeezing extra cash from taxpayers wherever it can.
Sir Keir Starmer has said that he wants to increase the scope of the administration in Cardiff. He declared last year that if he moves into No 10 he will make changes leading to ‘Wales having power over its economic destiny’. That implies enhanced tax-raising capabilities.
It seems practically insane to give yet more powers to a government that has presided over the never-ending calamity that is the Welsh NHS, as well as plummeting educational standards.
The latest Pisa international rankings show that Welsh schools have fallen further behind those in the rest of the United Kingdom, while Scottish schools, once famed for their excellence, have declined in reading, science and maths.
By contrast, English schools showed modest improvements across the board.
Why would anyone propose further powers – these could include a second chamber (even more politicians!) for the devolved nations – to a government in Cardiff that has failed on so many fronts?
One of its latest idiocies, championed by First Minister Mark Drakeford before his recent retirement, was to impose a 20mph speed limit in all built-up areas. This measure has proved so unpopular, even Mr Gething’s administration is considering reversing it in some places. Wales is dominated by the more populous Labour-vot
Shouldn’t we be showing concern for our fellow Britons trapped in what resembles a madhouse?
ing south of the country. However misguided its policies, however mediocre and occasionally sleazy some of its politicians, Labour has a tribal following that apparently ensures its survival as the ruling party no matter what sins it commits.
With breathtaking effrontery, ministers in Cardiff recently instructed farmers across Wales to set aside 10 per cent of their land for permanent tree planting. Unsurprisingly, many of them resent being pushed about in this way. Would Westminster in pre-Devolution days have been so high-handed?
The tragedy is that Wales never really wanted Devolution in the first place. In New Labour’s 1997 referendum, only about half of Welsh people bothered to vote, of whom fractionally more than 50 per cent supported Devolution. A constitutional and cultural upheaval took place even though only about a quarter of the country voted for it.
What a disaster this has been! I don’t, of course, suggest that England has been perfectly governed for the past two decades, but the experience of the Welsh and Scottish has been far worse. Devolution has spectacularly failed to deliver the promise of better and more efficient government in either country.
It’s also almost certain that both Scotland and Wales are poorer than they would have been without Devolution. According to official figures, between 2011 and 2023 gross national product per person increased appreciably more in almost every English region than in Scotland. We may not have done very well down south but Scotland has performed even worse.
Yet rather than question the wisdom of New Labour’s misguided revolution, Sir Keir proposes more of the same. More powers for devolved governments that have made such a hash of things.
As for the Tories, they’ve forgotten that they ever opposed Devolution and cheerfully hand over new powers to Holyrood and Cardiff. Whenever things go wrong, they can barely suppress their feelings of schadenfreude. Look what happens when the centre-Left takes over!
What has happened is that millions of British people have been consigned to government by pygmy politicians from which they seem unlikely to escape.
Does the implosion of the Scot Nats offer a thin silver lining? It’s true that the party’s collapse almost certainly pushes the prospect of independence further into the future. Nevertheless, polls suggest that around half of Scots remain in favour of it. Devolution – which has splintered the country once known as Great Britain into mutually uncomprehending parts – will surely one day lead to an independent Scotland.
In the meantime, we can only look on forlornly as British citizens in Wales and Scotland suffer its baleful consequences.
The 25th anniversary of Devolution will doubtless elicit sanctimonious claptrap about its glorious benefits from politicians who – unlike the people they govern – have profited from it.
Although the Holyrood Parliament first met on May 12, 1999, its official opening took place months later, on July 1. Queen Elizabeth attended the ceremony in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland.
Donald Dewar – New Labour’s main architect of Devolution and the new First Minister – delivered a stirring speech in which he welcomed ‘the day democracy was renewed in Scotland, when we revitalised our place in this our United Kingdom’.
He declared that Rabbie Burns’s poem A Man’s A Man, which had been movingly sung, reminded us that ‘honesty and decency are priceless virtues’.
How bitterly ironic those words now sound. Democracy hasn’t been renewed. Far from it. Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom has been weakened and there’s precious little evidence of honesty and decency in the corrupt and incompetent SNP.
Yet this is our country, Britain, and it is our fellow Britons who are paying the price for Labour’s catastrophic project.
Devolution will surely one day lead to an independent Scotland