From The West Highlands To The West Country

The appointment of Danny Alexander as Secretary of State for Scotland is interesting in several ways. Not least, it puts the SNP firmly in its place, reminding it of its failure to gain a single seat in this most recent test of public opinion throughout Scotland, of its scuppering of any Rainbow Coalition by its mere existence, and of its manifest reduction to a level of support not very much higher than that of the Lib Dems, or indeed of the Tories.

Alexander has more than once popped up on Radio Four sounding like a next-generation Brian Wilson, bemoaning the happening of that which everyone knew would happen, namely the wholesale neglect of the Highlands, among other places, under devolution from a London which largely thinks of the Highlands and Islands when it hears the word “Scotland” to a Central Belt which does not really accept that anywhere beyond that Belt (and, in the SNP’s case, the North East) is in Scotland at all.

The supposed federalism of the Lib Dems is more to please the sort of people who vote for them in the South East of England and who like the idea of it, rather than the sort of people who vote for them in the North of Scotland and who have to live with it. This is very much like their stance on the EU, since they represent a slew of fishing constituencies from the whole of Cornwall, where UKIP last year topped the poll for the second European Election in succession, via North Norfolk, Berwick-upon-Tweed and North East Fife, to the Highlands and Islands, up to and including Orkney & Shetland.

On the special Ten Years On edition of Eorpa, it was in Gaelic that the view was expressed that devolution and the EU had given the speakers twice as many tiers of government as they had any need of. At least one of Alexander’s colleagues, meanwhile, will not suffer the words “West Lothian Question”, or anything else to do with devolution, to be uttered within his hearing. Nor let anyone forget that the SDP carried over much of the Old Labour Right’s profound reservation about devolution, including the very person of George Cunningham, who is still alive.

But what we really need is a new movement in the tradition of Bevan’s ridicule of the first parliamentary Welsh Day on the grounds that “Welsh coal is the same as English coal and Welsh sheep are the same as English sheep”. In the tradition of those Labour MPs who in the 1970s successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of its ruinous effects on the North of England. In the tradition of those Labour activists in the Scottish Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, who accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution.

In the tradition of the high vote against devolution – relatively in Scotland, absolutely in Wales – in areas where the Liberal Democrat vote is also high. In the tradition of that same clear tendency in the referendum on a regional assembly in the North East, when there was also an enormous No vote in traditionally Labour areas. In the tradition of the feeling among English, Scottish and Welsh ethnic minorities and Catholics that they no more want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” English, Scottish or Welsh than Ulster Protestants want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” Irish.

And in the tradition of the historic success of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries (often with the word “British” in their names) in creating communities of interest among and across the several parts of the United Kingdom, thus safeguarding and strengthening the Union.

Here in the North East of England, we suffer dreadfully as a result of the Barnett Formula. But the Lib Dem heartlands of the West Country suffer most of all, just as the Lib Dem heartlands of Northern and rural Scotland, one of whose MPs is now the Secretary of State, suffer dreadfully as a result of the pouring of money into the Central Belt, and to an extent the North East of Scotland. Securing economic and political justice for rural areas and for those remote from the centres of power is one of the finest features of the historic Liberal tradition, to be carried over into the emerging realignment of British politics. Let Danny Alexander be in the vanguard.

After all, the Parliament of the United Kingdom can still enact any legislation that it likes, and it is only among think tank boys and certain grandees that the Lib Dems are either British federalist or European federalist on principle, whereas most of them are local cummunitarian populists battling for causes, and do not mind who gives them what they feel that their voters need, so long as those voters get it. If Westminster delivered it where Brussels, Holyrood or Cardiff had failed to do so, then not only might that be right in itself, but it would also strengthen loyalty to the United Kingdom both as against Eurofederalism and as against separatism.