Devolution has run out of road
Speymouth
This always happens, every time I decide to take a bit of time off, a big news story breaks and it’s back to the keyboard. On Tuesday, a Labour government memo was leaked which proves that Keir Starmer is hell bent on undermining the devolution settlement. In the memo, sent to all members of the cabinet, Starmer tells his minions: “We should be confident in our ability to deliver in those nations including through direct spending even when devolved governments may oppose this.”
In other words Labour the [checks notes] party of devolution, is quite happy to override the wishes of the democratically elected governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland whenever it feels like it. In the document, Starmer writes writes “each of us will maintain a professional and respectful working relationship with our counterparts in devolved governments” but that “an overly deferential or laissez-faire approach to devolved government engagement almost inevitably creates political challenges or misses positive opportunities.”
Translated this means – those uppity Celtic provincials need to be slapped down and reminded of their place. Ever since the betrayal of just about every promise made by the Better Together parties during the independence referendum in 2014, anyone who has been paying attention has suspected that this neo-colonialist attitude towards Scotland and Wales was what really lay behind Westminster’s actions towards the smaller nations of the UK, but now we have it confirmed in black and white.
Shortly after the leaked letter was shared by journalist Will Hayward Plaid Cymru leader Rhun Ap Iorwerth raised the issue during Tuesday’s session of First Minister’s Questions in the Senedd in Cardiff and said: “There we have it in black and white: Keir Starmer’s own version of Boris Johnson’s muscular unionism, not only dealing with devolution in bad faith, but undertaking a direct assault on the democratic views of devolved governments.
“By staying ever loyal to him, the first minister [Labour’s Eluned Morgan] is aligning herself with efforts to undermine her own government.”
He went on: “Why has the Labour Party turned against devolution to this extent, and why has the first minister allowed the UK’s Labour Prime Minister to treat our parliament, our government, and the people of Wales with such contempt?”
What this confirms is what supporters of independence have long said, devolution cannot protect Scotland from decisions which the Westminster government decides to foist upon us, that is true irrespective of whether the government is Labour or Conservative, both parties are equally British nationalist and both are equally wedded to the doctrine of the total supremacy of the Westminster parliament. This doctrine does not permit the flourishing of elected parliaments in Scotland and Wales which have democratic mandates in their own right to carry out policies which may be at variance with the wishes of the ruling party in Westminster.
Devolution was always conceived by the Labour party as being little more than a mechanism for allowing the Labour party to continue to maintain a power base even during those periods when it was out of power in Westminster. It’s clear now, that with Scotland consistently voting for a Holyrood with a pro-independence majority and Wales poised to evict the Labour party from its century of dominance in Welsh politics and replace it with a Plaid Cymru led government, devolution has run out of road.
Devolution cannot survive in its current form, not while the governments of both Scotland and Wales are in favour of independence and the government of Northern Ireland as of next year will most likely be pressing for a referendum to reunify the island of Ireland. Meanwhile Westminster governments maintain the position of the absolute supremacy of the Westminster parliament and hold as Starmer has explicitly spelled out that Westminster has the right to overrule the democratic choices of the people of Scotland and Wales.
A devolution settlement which was designed and built as a safety boat for a Westminster centric Labour party is incompatible with the political landscape of the UK in the 2020s. Starmer has decided to confront this incompatibility by bludgeoning the devolved parliaments into submission.
This is all the more galling as the instrument which the Labour party is using to override the devolved parliaments and impose it will on devolved matters is the UK Internal Market Act, which the Labour party opposed when it was introduced by the then Conservative government, only to change its tune once it became the party wielding the big stick over the heads of the devolved governments. The Act was passed without the consent of either the Scottish or Welsh parliaments.
As recently as October 2023 the Labour party in Scotland and Anas Sarwar backed a vote in Holyrood calling for the Act to be repealed. Sarwar had previously condemned the Act as “an attack on devolution. Sarwar led Labour MSPs to vote in favour of a motion calling for the repeal of the Internal Market Act because it had “undermine[d] democratic decisions of the devolved legislatures … to the detriment of the people of Scotland”.
However by February last year Sarwar had decided that undermining the democratic decisions of the devolved legislatures is perfectly fine as long as it’s a Labour government in Westminster which is doing the undermining.
The devolution settlement is dead, killed by the party which posed as its champion. The prospect of ever deepening devolution which was held out to Scots during the independence referendum campaign was just another of the many lies of Perfidious Albion. Devolution has run out of road, the only choices facing Scotland and Wales are independence or the increasing and accelerating neutering of their devolved parliaments until their eventual reincorporation into a unitary United Kingdom in which all decisions are made by the leader of whichever political party secures the majority of Westminster seats, the overwhelming majority of which are in England. That’s it, that’s the choice.
As Scotland goes into May’s Holyrood election the people of Scotland can vote for pro-independence parties which will resist Westminster’s power grab and will continue to push for full independence, or we can vote to throw in the towel and submit meekly to whatever indignities Starmer, or in the future Nigel Farage, chooses to impose on us. But the devolution settlement has run out of road. Only independence can guarantee that decisions which affect Scotland are made in Scotland.
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