The Guardian view on Super Thursday: Boris Johnson is unmaking a nation
Nations are not born; they are made. Whether nations last is entirely up to the people who manufactured them. This provides one important reason to pay attention to the results of last week’s “Super Thursday” elections. In Scotland, the Scottish National party, which has been in power for 14 years, increased its representation in Holyrood. In Wales, Labour upped its vote share by 4% this year, having won 27 general election victories in a row and triumphed six times in devolved polls. Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford will remain first minister of their respective nations.
Boris Johnson’s first response was the right one: to ask the two leaders to work with him. Had he refused to make direct contact, the prime minister would have looked like he could not come to terms with his opponents’ success. As the political scientist Roger Awan-Scully has pointed out, Welsh Labour campaigned for more powers. Mr Drakeford wants to embed the devolution settlement so it cannot be “pulled back by the whim of a prime minister”. Compromise should be possible. But Mr Johnson prefers to centralise power rather than give it away.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in England. Mr Johnson’s government has broken a manifesto promise for “full devolution”, it seems, because his plan to use metro mayors as bridgeheads in Labour heartlands did not pan out. The opposition won five of the seven mayoral contests last week. But, as the local democracy expert Colin Copus has noted, metro mayors are exercises in “decentralisation not devolution”. He points out that mayoralties have responsibilities and influence over aspects of the public sector, but no greater political and fiscal freedom, nor any primary legislative powers, unlike the devolved parliaments and assemblies.
Mr Johnson will offer a “levelling up” white paper, which will no doubt continue the Treasury’s disgraceful practice of letting state cash intended for economic regeneration end up disproportionately in Tory seats. One might have thought that Conservative success in local elections would have whetted Mr Johnson’s appetite for more local government. The Tories won 270 council seats and Labour lost 300, many in former strongholds. It was a result that revealed Sir Keir Starmer’s poor election strategy, and his ill-advised move against his deputy backfired, exposing a troubling lack of political nous.
But the prime minister offers no transformative agenda. He sees local elections as a way for the Conservatives, rather than their Westminster rivals, to control the provision of public services and substantial budgets. Local councils, in his view, are just battlegrounds in which to replicate national arguments. Mr Johnson does not seem to want politics to be local, seeking to snuff out new channels of citizen engagement and disallow new forms of political activism. About 90% of England’s 17,500 councillors are drawn from
the main parties, which have a vested interest in salting the earth for new local rivals. Sir Keir’s party lost control in Sheffield due to a green surge sparked by a protest over chopping down trees and attempts by the council to avoid scrutiny.
Democracy can’t be wished away. Nationalist parties in Scotland won with unambiguous manifesto commitments. It makes sense to allow an independence referendum, but the options to be presented to voters need careful consideration. Such a momentous decision needs arguments and facts to be appraised beforehand in a deliberative manner. Gordon Brown’s proposals would help in this regard. A broader debate, rather than a binary choice between union and independence, would legitimise the process. So long as a rigid constitutional dichotomy is centre stage, the SNP and Tories will benefit. But to save the union he professes to cherish, the prime minister should put national interest before party self-interest.