Look at the near-total lack of coverage of the defeat of the Scottish Budget, and see how one of the most outward-looking places on earth has become a funny little backwater. Tragic. Truly tragic.
All that this thing does is spend a central government grant. It can raise taxes, but refuses to do so. This cannot now be blamed on Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, unless Alex Salmond is somehow in one or other of their pockets. Is he? I don't think so.
Hell's teeth, even Lanchester Parish Council uses the revenue-raising power that it has. That is the element of responsibility in politics, at whatever level. The Welsh devolved body statutorily, but the Scottish one voluntarily, is therefore at sub-parochial level.
The "success" of the Lib Dems over this budget will not endear them to their brethren at Westminster, who realise that no one would be hit harder than they, either by any restriction of the voting rights of Scottish MPs, or by any reduction in those MPs' numbers. Devolution on something like the Welsh model to the Highlands and Islands, or the Borders, they might have liked. This, they certainly do not. Labour MPs who had broadly envisaged a glorified restoration of Strathclyde Regional Council are none too happy, either.
So don't bet against either of those becoming their respective parties' policies, and being legislated for in the next Parliament (because the Tories are not really going to win) without any reference to Holyrood. I am not advocating them. But don't bet against their coming to pass.
All in all, I give it 10 years before no one can be bothered to keep it going any more. Children being born now will marvel that there ever was such an entity. "What for?", they will ask. What, indeed?
The Parliament has not used its tax-raising power as this would lead to Scotland being the most taxed part of the UK with discernable benefit for the Scottish authorities.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you keep banging on about Highland and Border Lib-Dems. They are federalists. The Scottish Lib-Dem no.2 Michael Moore MP is not thumping devolution. Carmichael for Shetland and Orkney is not thumping devolution.
Who exactly are these people you say are thumping devolution from the Lib-Dems. Name me a politican?
Well, of course they don't go on television and say these things. Not yet, anyway.
ReplyDeleteBut Danny Alexander, for one, has come close enough to get the message across more than once on Radio Four. Carmicheal, I happen to know, forbids discussion of the West Lothian Question in his presence. And so on.
If they really are federalists, then they really believe in their respective parts of Scotland as in their own right members of the federation, just as their partisans in Mid-Wales or the West Country, if they really are federalists, believe in Mid-Wales or the West Country as in its own right a member of the federation.
But their voters don't care about such matters, so neither do they on any day-to-day basis, if at all. They care about whether or not rather more bread-and-butter things are getting done. Which, in the Lib Dem parts of Scotland (and Wales), they aren't by the devolved body.
And MPs care, understandably, about their own position. Some sort of restriction of Scottish MPs' voting rights, and some sort of further reduction in their number, remain very much on the cards. Either, never mind both, would devastate the Lib Dems nationally. And they know it.
What did Danny Alexander say exactly?
ReplyDeleteI will check with my sources in the Lib-Dems to verify what you said about Carmichael.
All this reactionary stuff reminds me of how people like you helped Austria-Hungary collapse. I was watching the film "Colonel Redl" - based on an Osborne play - the other night. Full of reactionaries fantasising about what they wanted to do to Hungarian and Czech autonomists/nationalists.
They wanted to strip any autonomy gained and unify the state by having a short glorious war with someone. Like Serbia
Then the film ended with footage of the A-H army going off to World War I with that A-H unionist anthem "Radetzsky March" playing in the background to emphasise the irony!
It is people who want to revive long-defunct states who are "reactionary", with a very nasty racial side just waiting to get out. No wonder that, once the process has started, there are demands for even older and smaller entities to be brought back. Including those with historical alliances to each other and the English against rule from the Central Belt.
ReplyDeleteAlexander has more than once popped up on Radio Four sounding like a next-generation (or two) Brian Wilson, bemoaning the happening of that which everyone knew would happen, namely the wholesale neglect of the Highlands (among other places) under devolution.
Of course, devolution was 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.
My source on Carmichael is impeccable.
As is the source who has just emailed me to say that, yes, some sort of London-style, but probably (though not necessarily) Mayorless, Assembly is being considered both for the North of Scotland and for the West of Scotland, to be legislated for by Westminster without reference to Holyrood if the Lib-Lab coalition there doesn't come back at the next election.
If those assemblies were set up then Holyrood would look like an expensive, superfluous, remote irrelevance both from my native Highlands and from my adopted Glasgow. So no change there.
ReplyDeleteAnd there are only so many politicians that anywhere can stand.
ReplyDeleteScotland already has an awful lot of local councils, by no means only in very rural areas. Westminster is just a given. And people don't really think about the EU in those terms (although they should).
So if Westminster created Assemblies, never mind Mayor-like figures called Presidents or whatever, in Glasgow and (presumably) Inverness, then I think we all know with which tier the people of the West and North of Scotland would see no point in maintaining a relationship.
And what about the Borders? They'll come to that, no doubt.
But I am not advocating any of this - I believe in Parliament and in local government, and I am horrifed at the creation in London, the capital of this constitutional monarchy, of a city-state with an elected head.