Wales is a bit tricky due to the lack of fiscal power, but with Scotland it’s easy: cut from the block grant the cost of extending throughout the UK any better service currently available only in Scotland, and let the Scottish Parliament use its fiscal powers to make up the difference. Nobody would lose out in any way.
Of course, like so much real damage, the real damage here began in the Eighties. The wholesale Thatcherisation of England and Wales, while Scotland and Northern Ireland were left largely untouched, was a device for making common cause impossible, and at least as great an example as any today of Scottish MPs voting to implement in England and Wales policies that they knew would never be implemented in their own constituencies. That process also incorporated the Thatcher and Major Governments’ successively more draconian impositions of the Welsh language on English-speaking parts of Wales, at once detaching Welsh interests from those corresponding elsewhere and stoking up divisive resentments against the Welsh-speaking minority on the part of the English-speaking majority.
The Tories in that period did far better at both parliamentary and municipal elections in Scotland than in several comparably populous parts of England, although they did nowhere near as badly in Wales. Whether this was precisely because of the lack of Thatcherism, or whether it was an expression of desire for Thatcherism, who will ever know? But either way, the figures are clearly there. Imagine if Attlee had declined to implement nationalisation in Scotland because it was unpopular there and there were lots of Scottish Tory MPs to prove it, although plenty of Scottish Labour MPs as well. Yet Thatcher did the equivalent.
Why?
Well, because by such means, the central power-elite, the Political Class, began to silence nationwide bourgeois, proletarian, agrarian, Catholic, Church of Scotland and Free Church, and other dissent. That silencing is now all but complete. Anyone even passingly familiar with this country’s history should give that fact a moment to sink in.
And let’s have no blather about the Poll Tax. The Scots only got it early because they begged for it early. Not much could melt the heart of Margaret Thatcher, but their entreaties on this point managed to do so. The Poll Tax was always much more popular in Scotland than anywhere else, which is why only the Tories increased their representation in Scotland at the 1992 Election, and why there was no such increase in any other part of the country. The SNP - say it again, the SNP - is about to revert Scotland to something so strikingly like the Poll Tax that Labour politicians at Westminster routinely rule it out specifically by that comparison.
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The SNP are wanting to introduce a local income, yes INCOME tax, not a poll tax.
ReplyDeleteYou pay 3% on what you earn, not a lump sum that everyone pays.
Concerning the structure of the NHS, there are three and a half NHS's in the UK. That is the NHS (England with a semi-autonomous Wales), NHS Scotland (Scotland) and the Health Service of Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland). The UK NHS in reality has always been a federation with its own bureaucracy etc.
For example (I used to worke for the NHS Scotland prescriptions department), a Scottish GP's prescrition form is a GP10, an English and Welsh one a FP10 and Northern Ireland a NH1. These can be used throughout at UK pharamacies but there is some twoing and froing concerning re-imbursement of services etc.
This has been the case since Bevan. The three NHS's were all created by different acts of Parliament. Inbdeed in the case of Northern Ireland, it was an act of the Stormont Parliament that created the Northern Irish Health service.
Since you want a single UK health service, I presume you want abortion to be available in Northern Ireland where of course it remains illegal?
What have you against Scotland? Come to think about it, Welsh speakers?
Nothing, but the fact remains that making Scotland and (almost incidentally) Northern Ireland as different as possible from England and Wales, and then emphasising the difference both of and within Wales by means of the language (which eighty per cent of the Welsh cannot speak, and which is in fact largely an indicator of impenetrable upper-middle-classness), really does seem to have been done on purpose by the Tories.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I never cease to be amazed at how the evisceration of local government, which probably mattered more than any other aspect of Thatcherism, simply never happened in Scotland, where councils continue to employ school caretakers directly and such like.
No previous government ever just exempted any one part of the United Kingdom (or, at least, of Great Britain) from practically its entire domestic agenda.
Perhaps Thatcher really did (very uncharacteristically) buy into the Scottish elite insistence that Scotland is so "different" as to be beyond the ken of anyone except the Scottish elite.
But she never accepted that sort of argument from any of the many other old oligarchies with which she came into what could very politely be called contact. If she did fall for it in the Scottish case, then she was the first Prime Minister at least since the War to do so.
And in any case, Scotland really wasn't very "different" at all in the post-War period, or even as "different" as all that for at least a hundred years before the War. Until she made it so by not doing there what she did in England and Wales. Major, Blair and Brown have all followed suit in this as in so much else.
For, by so doing, she and they have divided the British middle class, the British working class, and various other bastions of this country's traditional pluralism and criticism. They have done this throughout the United Kingdom, and they have specifically done it in the Kingdom's "heartland" politically (and, in the past, economically): Wales, the Midlands, the North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands. That is where General Elections are won and lost, and that is where the various class and other interests are most concentrated in immediate proximity to each other.
As for the Poll Tax argument, the first thing that any Westminster or English Labour politician says when a local income tax is suggested is "It's the Poll Tax", and argument which everyone seems to accept.
If pushed that it is about to be introduced in Scotland, they will in private explain that everyone knows that the Scots really rather liked the Poll Tax, and certainly preferred it to the rates, otherwise known as the Council Tax. I have heard a very prominent Westminster figure, who is Scottish and who sits for a Scottish seat, say exactly this as if it were simply not in dispute.
As you say, David, the Tories were much more popular in Scotland in the Thatcher and Major years than they were in several parts of England with comparable populations.
ReplyDeleteThe SNP are Tories. They are just Tories who have believed that the Tory subcultural interest would be best served by independence. And the Scottish Tories are Nationalists. They are just Nationalists who beleive that there is more to Nationalism than independence, and that all its other aspects are better served by the current half in and half out of the Union.
These two Tory Nationalist parties are already functioning almost as one at Holyrood. The SNP have given up on independence except to raise a cheer at conferences. And the Tories have absolutely no desire to reverse devolution or to do anything remotely Thatcheristic.
So I predict a merger, leaving Hard Left diehard Nationalists and Hard Right diehard Unionists to set up their own fringe parties for nobody to vote for. Well within 10 years, probably within five.
I would not exactly call a seperate education system, legal system and church "not much different"
ReplyDeleteCompared to what? And even the claim that the education system or the church was especailly different doesn't really stand up.
ReplyDeleteThe schools were run by local councils as elsewhere in the UK, a situation which had not applied anywhere (except haphazardly, because of myriad local initiatives) at the time of the Union, and which was introduced across the board by the Westminster Parliament at much the same time everywhere.
They had shifted from selection to comprehensivisation over the same period, for exactly the same reasons, and actually in the Scottish but not in the English case formally on the orders of central government.
The English universities had become rather Scottishised, training lawyers and doctors and such like in the way that the Scottish universities had historically looked down on them for failing to do. The two allegedly distinct systems were paid for in exactly the same way, and the UK has had a single academic culture since well before living memory.
The extremely close links between the Church of Scotland and the English Free Churches, between the Kirk's Conservative Evangelical wing and that of the Church of England, and between its Moderate school and English Broad Churchmanship, go back as far as any of these things has existed, and have never been remotely threatened with interruption.
And so one could go on.
These are very middle-class things to focus on, of course. And Scotland was not a predominantly middle-class place in those days, if even now. But Nationalism was, as it still, positively posh rather than in the middle of anything. Hence the focus on these matters.
The unions used to scorn even devolution on exactly the ground that their members' interests were identical throughout the UK. In their heart of hearts, they probably still do think that. Old Labour in general certainly does. (It remains a bit of a mystery why devolution of all things was carried over into New Labour from the Smith years, when so much else wasn't. Frankly, it seems to be because the concerns underlying the other things were a bit non-U. Poverty, and such like.)
And then there is the single Social Security system, vastly more important than any of the above, and the reason why Westminster is a far bigger spender in any given part of Scotland than Holyrood will ever be, making the benefits culture undoubtedly the guarantee of a No vote in any referendum on independence.
I've thought this for years, as a Scot from a working-class background.
ReplyDeleteThe emphasis on the separateness of Scotland from England by reference to education, the law and the Kirk not only isn't true from at least the educational and ecclesiastical perspectives. It also defines Scotland in terms of teachers, academics, advocates, and high-ranking Kirk ministers and elders. All of these people are middle-class or even upper-class by definition, and most are by hereditary right.
Like the SNP, in fact. And certainly like most people who vote for it. Whereas the cause of the Welfare State and workers' rights is a Unionist cause, as the Attlee Government itself strongly held.
The anonymous predication of a Tory-SNP merger is spot on. And your own reference to the heartland and its dividing up by the centre is genius.
And note that both employment law and the entire Social Security system are reserved.
ReplyDeleteJust as well, too. New Labour might be bad, but after a couple of years of the SNP it would a case of "What employment law?" and "What Social Security?"
ReplyDeleteOr in any independent Scotland, regardless of the party running it.
ReplyDeleteI am also a Scot and I have lived my whole life in Scotland, though I have many English connections through my work.
It was Labour's portrayal of the Tories as "English" that did for them here, not any objection to Thatcherism. On the contrary, as David has said, Thatcherism was in principle quite popular in Scotland, and we hardly experienced it anyway.
Mainstream English opinion on these matters is much more progressive and humane than mainstream Scottish opinion, I'm afraid. Total opposition to help for the able-bodied poor, at least, is a perfectly respectable view for a sober person to express in public here.
Much of Thatcherism's intellectual ballast came from Saint Andrews University, and all of it looked back to Adam Smith and David Hume.
You are absolutely right about Wales and the language issue. Welsh is the language of toffs here in Wales.
ReplyDeleteWay back in the run up to the first devolution referendum, Leo Abse said that devolution would lead to rule by a Welsh-speaking elite that used Welsh to keep out the common people.
Well that happened anyway under the Tories, who were eventually led by an Englishman who had married into the Welsh-speaking elite. And devolution has entrenched it completely.
All Welsh-speakers are completely bilingual, you know. Absolutely nobody at all can only speak Welsh. Do people in England know this? Do they know that eight out of 10 people in Wales don't speak Welsh? And do they know that they, the English, are paying for the totally unnecessary double-sized road signs?