There is so little substance to Andy Burnham that it seems almost churlish to attack the one area where he amounts to more than ambition, sentiment and unfathomable vanity, but his big policy idea happens to be one with which I have some familiarity.
In his speech this week at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, the soon-to-be prime minister pledged ‘new opportunities to extend devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’ and the devolution of employment support to mayors in England. He complained about government departments opposing ‘our legitimate requests to improve our places by devolving a fraction of the power and resources they hold’, and warned them: ‘The days of Whitehall fighting the devolution of power into the regions and nations are over, for good’.
A truly radical government would accept that devolution has failed
This again. Devolution is to the managerial centre as communism is to the radical left. No matter how much is devolved, it’s never enough, and should anyone point out that devolution has not led to significantly better outcomes for those living under it, the answer is simply that not enough was devolved last time. For political elites, real devolution has never been tried.
As his latest speech confirms, Burnham believes it’s devolution or barbarism. He vows to take more powers from central government and relocate them closer to those affected by their exercise. What this means, of course, is an expansion of the apparatus of the state – more politicians and more officials. Power is not devolved in the interests of better government but in the interests of more government. If Andy Burnham becomes prime minister, I would advise you to buy shares in lanyards.
Devolution was sold in Scotland and Wales with claims of a ‘democratic deficit’ – the Scots and Welsh voted Labour in the Eighties but got Tory governments – while metro mayors were pushed with appeals to grievance about the Midlands and the North being overlooked by London decision-makers. But did any of this devolution actually make things better? Scotland is a stark case study. Since control of most domestic policy was transferred from the Westminster political class to its Holyrood rival, Scotland has become the drugs deaths capital of Europe, has seen educational outcomes plummet, emergency and cancer care targets missed for years on end, and a shipbuilding nation has spent more than a decade building two fault-ridden ferries at several times their original budget.
As for democratic deficits, devolution has not pushed power down from the top to the people but from a vaguely competent, if out-of-touch, elite in Westminster to a lumpen-nomenklatura at Holyrood, an ingathering of third-rate activists and over-promoted councillors who aspire in their cultural attitudes, if not the calibre of their exercise of public office, to the status of an elite.
For at least the past decade, only a few socially or economically significant policies have been delivered by Holyrood, its MSPs mostly preferring to push fashionable causes like gender self-identification, hate crimes legislation, and Palestine.
Polling consistently shows a gulf between the preferences and priorities of the governing class and the governed, and this chasm is reflected across much of the political spectrum. Holyrood has become so insulated from the voters and fixated on fashionable causes that a majority of its members now refuse to identify themselves as male or female.
When power is concentrated in one political seat, like Westminster, it is easier to scrutinise. London is a global media city, teeming with reporters, broadcasters, bloggers and commentators, all with their attention turned to one government in its various branches.
When a tranche of that government’s powers are rerouted to a national legislature like Holyrood or regional body like the North East mayoralty, media resources are not reassigned along with them. When Scottish devolution was being proposed, there was lots of excited talk about a Scottish Parliament reinvigorating the fourth estate north of the border. More news outlets and more journalists would be needed to hold the new institutions accountable.
In fact, a quarter-century of devolution has seen a pronounced contraction in news and current affairs, with Scotland’s smaller media market unable to sustain the kind of journalistic infrastructure needed to investigate a sprawling devolved state and no incentive for London-based outlets to turn their focus to policies and decisions that affect only a fraction of their audience.
Today, the Scottish Government has more communications staffers than the BBC has journalists in Scotland. If you’ve ever wondered why the SNP gets away with failure after failure and scandal after scandal, even as governing parties at Westminster are routinely toppled over much less, this is the reason. Power devolved is scrutiny contained.
All this lies in wait for England if the next prime minister gets his way. There is no point in trying to tell Andy Burnham that devolution does not work because it has worked for him, and that is what matters. Without devolution, he would still be a Commons backbencher, perpetually contesting and losing Labour leadership elections.
Indeed, Burnham has already let it be known what he thinks of the efficacy critique of devolution: in Scotland and Wales, he is proposing to devolve more powers to local authorities, rather than Edinburgh and Cardiff, because ‘the people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster’.
To anyone else, this would be an indicator that something had gone wrong; to the devolutionist, every failing of devolution is proof that more devolution is needed.
A truly radical government would accept that the devolution experiment has failed and resolve to reverse course rather than allow this constitutional malady to fester further. Saving Britain from national decline will require a national government, made up of men and women of ability, united around a common purpose, not the fractured nation-state Britain has devolved into, with power fragmented across rival seats of political authority which share no vision for the future.
Why does Andy Burnham want to be prime minister if he would rather give power away than use it?
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