The Lib Dems and The Barnett Formula

Nick Clegg wants to be seen as the English Leader, in contrast to the Scottish Gordon Brown and the Scot-ish David Cameron. Not least for that reason, he has told The Politics Show here in the North East that he would abolish the Barnett Formula. He has not announced this nationally, nor will he. So the rest of us are just going to have to do it for him. After all, we wouldn’t want the Lib Dems accused of saying totally different things in different parts of the country. Would we?

Perhaps this is a hint that Alan Beith is going to retire, since his constituents in Berwick see on a daily basis the iniquities of the present system, with such things as free personal care for some residents of the same old people’s home, but not for them. Promising to abolish the Barnett Formula would certainly help to prevent an otherwise highly predictable Tory recapture of that seat. It would also play well in the West Country, in the corners of Lancashire where the Lib Dems sometimes do well, and in their more recent areas of growth in the Welsh Marches.

But could they stop word of it seeping across to rural Scotland or to Mid-Wales? No, and if they were any good at politics, then they wouldn’t want to. Someone should be saying what everyone knows to be the case: that the present arrangements simply guarantee gainful employment to armies of middle-class Labour voters and upper-middle-class Nationalist voters, overwhelmingly in the Central Belt of Scotland and in South Wales.

(It is, dear readers in Scotland and Wales, those upper-middle-class Nationalist voters, and not the English, who are responsible for messing up your television schedules, not with some laughable and patronising English view of Scotland or Wales, but with some laughable and patronising Central Scottish or South Welsh view of rural Scotland or rural Wales.)

Instead, not only should resources be allocated strictly on the basis of need, but the different parts of Scotland should be assessed differently for that purpose, as should the different parts of Wales, and indeed the different parts of Northern Ireland and of the vast, unwieldy, artificial English regions.

This would involve either taking away the block grants from the devolved bodies, or so directing their allocation as to amount to the same thing. At which point, there would be no remaining reason for having those bodies, while the full exposure of the nature of their activities would make them massively unpopular in the North and South of Scotland, and in North, Mid and West Wales (insofar as this is not already the case). But that would just be a bonus. This change should happen anyway.

However, it will not and cannot happen because of anything said or done by the Lib Dems.