A Spectator reader and Kemi Badenoch enthusiast gets in touch occasionally to remind me of my brief flirtation with Robert Jenrick as a preferable Tory leader to the woman Isabel Hardman has christened ‘the Iron Dame’. Each time, I offer the same defence: it was a mistake, it was a one-time thing, he meant nothing to me. After reading reports that Badenoch would consider removing powers from the Scottish Parliament and restoring them to Westminster, I feel even more ashamed of my infidelity. If he wants to win me back at this point, Bobby J would have to bulldoze Holyrood, bring back Taggart, and make refusing Scottish banknotes a capital offence.
The Scottish Daily Mail quotes a source close to Badenoch saying: ‘We will review the Scotland Act and consider withdrawing powers if it would ensure better governance of the UK.’ As regular readers of Coffee House will know, I have repeatedly agitated, urged and pleaded for Westminster to recognise that devolution was a historic error and take remedial action. So much so there is a Coffee House post abridging all my other Coffee House posts on the subject.
One area in particular where Badenoch’s people would like to reassert Westminster’s control is education. A Scottish education, once considered among the most academically rigorous in the world, has been driven into a ditch by 19 years of SNP rule in Edinburgh. The most recent Pisa research shows Scottish pupils trailing their English counterparts in mathematics, reading and science. The Scottish Tories are enamoured of Michael Gove’s reforms as education secretary but know the SNP would sooner turn the Stone of Destiny into driveway gravel than adopt a successful English policy. We could save the taxpayers a fortune if we just annexed Scotland to 22 Old Queen Street.
I am forever scolding Westminster politicians for their indifference to the failings of devolution, and so Badenoch’s willingness to think about the matter – and think outside the box – is greatly encouraging. For the London political establishment, devolution has been a licence to neglect vast swathes of Britain and no longer even factor them in when thinking about politics or policy in ‘national’ terms. Not for nothing is this constitutional arrangement known as ‘devolve and forget’. Far from assuaging the grievances that spur on support for separatism, devolution has created fresh grievances which the SNP has been only too happy to exploit.
By any metric you care to consult, devolution has been a policy and outcome desert. Significant investment has habitually been followed by insignificant changes, or stagnation, or worsening results. See the failed, ten-year £1.75 billion project to eliminate the educational attainment gap by this year. See the revising downwards of routinely missed NHS waiting times targets. See the £250 million spent between 2021 and 2026 on bringing down drugs deaths which instead saw an 11 per cent increase. See the £97 million ferry procurement that has so far cost the taxpayer close to half a billion pounds, required the nationalisation of a shipyard, and produced two vessels, delivered a decade late, neither of which is currently in service.
However, none of these examples of fiscal incontinence is as objectionable as the profound injury Scottish devolution has done to the constitutional integrity of the UK. New Labour’s 1997 manifesto sold devolution to the voters on these terms: ‘The Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed.’ Within just eight years of its establishment, the devolved state was in the hands of the SNP, where it has remained ever since, and the Nationalists have proved adept at using a gone-native, Scotland-based civil service to push at the boundaries of devolution while convincing Westminster to expand Holyrood’s powers not once but twice. Amid all this, they demanded a British prime minister give them a referendum on breaking up Britain and, for reasons never sufficiently explained, that prime minister agreed.
Westminster politicians understood, and most still understand, devolution to be about making government more responsive to regional circumstances. Nationalists understand that devolution is a logical ratchet: each turn justifies another turn and only ever in one direction. Devolution is one of the few issues of the last 30 years where the Conservatives were right from the start. They opposed a Scottish Parliament on the grounds it would kindle support for the SNP and its independence agenda. For this prediction they were roundly derided by all the clever people. We have, to coin a phrase, had enough of clever people.
Despite their prescience in opposing devolution, the Tories would end up going much further than New Labour, not only showering Holyrood with all those additional powers but even amending the Scotland Act to make the Scottish Parliament and Scottish government ‘permanent’ institutions. As Chesterton explained: ‘The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition.’ This paradox is why we cannot expect the Tories to come to the necessary, patriotic and conservative conclusion: that devolution is contrary to the UK’s national interests and must be abolished.
While abolition should be the long-term Conservative goal, opponents of devolution should adopt their own ratchet strategy, pushing the Tories (or, if they refuse, Reform) to dismantle the devolved state turn by turn. Introduce an indivisibility clause explicitly declaring the Union permanent. Create a legal duty on Scottish ministers to refrain from official actions which could frustrate Westminster’s exercise of reserved powers. (No more cheering on mobs who block asylum removals or meeting foreign officials to lobby against Brexit.) Restrict the Scottish government’s spending to devolved matters (no more foreign aid budget) and close its overseas ‘embassies’.
Kemi Badenoch has sent an encouraging signal, but that is all it is
Legislatively amend Holyrood’s standing orders to make substantive debate on reserved matters disorderly. (Farewell endless sessions on independence, nuclear weapons and Palestine.) Prohibit Scottish ministers from providing more than one-quarter of the funding of any non-governmental organisation and ban Holyrood civil servants from undertaking research or preparatory work on any reserved matter without the approval of the UK cabinet secretary. By all means repatriate powers but don’t do it by half-measures. The slightest involvement of Westminster in Scottish education will see it assigned 100 per cent of the blame when things go wrong.
Kemi Badenoch has sent an encouraging signal, but that is all it is. Westminster politicians legislated the constitutional self-harm that is devolution and it is they who must repair the damage. Doing so will occupy more time, resources and political capital than Badenoch or those around her realise, which is why devolution reform cannot be just a line in a speech. She must see it as an ideological mission and, though she might resist the end goal of abolition, however much reform she believes necessary she must see through to the end. As Thatcher tamed the unions, another Thatcher is needed to tame devolution.
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