Saturday 6 April 2024
Devolution has been a disaster
Sam Bidwell has a timely and useful Critic piece on Tony Blair's devolution disaster.
Devolution has been a disaster
SNP incompetence is a feature of the system and not a bug
Another week, another terrible Scottish law — this time, it’s the SNP’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act that’s in the spotlight. The new legislation has drawn criticism from the likes of JK Rowling and Elon Musk, who have rightly condemned the Act’s vague and expansive definition of “hate crime”.
So far, so standard — the Hate Crime Act isn’t the first dodgy bit of law-making to ooze its way out of Holyrood. Last year, it was the Scottish Government’s proposed reforms to gender recognition rules which provoked outrage from gender-critical feminists and unionists alike; before that, it was their heavy-handed Covid response, and the murky investigation into former First Minister Alex Salmond. Like clockwork, conservative commentators in London take to their columns to crusade against whatever the SNP is up to, each new infraction lending credence to their narratives about the madness of separatism.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how damagingly incompetent the Blair government was. Also how useless tribal voting can be when it comes to dealing with hopelessly incompetent political parties.
In fact, there is no reason to believe that devolution has produced better outcomes for Scotland. At the same time, the competing mandates of Westminster and Holyrood make it increasingly difficult for our national government to govern the whole nation. Scotland’s educational outcomes lag far behind those in England, mismanagement of public contracts has seen the cost of major infrastructure projects rise rapidly, and according to Ipsos Scotland, just a quarter of Scots think that the SNP has done a good job of managing the economy...
It’s partly a human capital problem. Scotland’s best and brightest — whether in politics, administration, or journalism — are often drawn down to England, leaving the devolved government up in Edinburgh to be staffed, managed, and scrutinised by glorified local officials. Scotland’s native media infrastructure is woefully ill-suited to probing the activities of a Parliament that exercises real power over complex areas of policy — and at the end of the day, if things go wrong, the Scottish Government can always blame Westminster. After all, it is still the man in London who — theoretically — holds the purse strings.
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10 comments:
Oft missed about so called devolution is the assumption that power/control was devolved.
Once you look at what was done, it was actually a process of centralisation of power to a subset of bureaucrats & politicians.
Whether Whitehall, Edinburgh or Cardiff, power / authority was removed from local authorities, health boards, water boards, education boards ( Example instead of 9 police forces each with a nominally accountable chief constable we now have the egregious Police Scotland under Edinburgh/ SNP control)
The answer to devolution failure is to put power back to local authority level or to remove it from political control altogether not to centralise further at Whitehall.
— and at the end of the day, if things go wrong, the Scottish Government can always blame Westminster.
But there is a corresponding 'benefit'... if things go wrong in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, the Government can suck its teeth and say "Well we would like to address that problem but the devolved powers won't let us."
It's Blame Musical Chairs - when the music stops there is always a chair for the bottom of any circling politician or bureaucrat. None shall be blamed.
Any rational being would say "We tried the experiment and it was an awful flop. Discard it."
How much of the damage is irreversible e.g. to the schools and the legal trade? The civil service and the police? The NHS?
Blair seemed to have the reverse midas touch. Not only devolution, but also opening the immigration floodgates, and the introduction of the Supreme Court, and the "Equality" legislation. Opinion seems to be split between those who think he was a fairly dim failed barrister who managed to get his undergraduate enthusiasms adopted because of a lack of effective opposition, and those who think he was an intelligent revolutionary who moved the locus of power away from the plebs and into the hands of an international class of liberal lawyers - the last reforming PM with a defined agenda.
I'm tending to think the latter these days. He was probably a dreamer who had big ideas, and we should at least be grateful that he was useless at detail. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the human rights lawyers to express the view that we have a right to choose our neighbours, type of fuel, and pothole-free roads.
There is no end to their daftness. Local Aldi removed 6 or 8 car park spaces and built, a substantial single story roofed structure to deal with the following. Money down the gurgler.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/10/how-did-scotlands-ambitious-recycling-plan-go-so-wrong
They decreed that the minimum price for booze would be 50 pence. Not a tax increase, UK government deals with that. Maker and retailer split the increased profit. Surprise surprise booze sales by unit and any associated health problems have increased.
Deaths from taking of illegal drugs have again increased, to make Scotland a European leader. Hooray.
Additional reading :- Edinburgh Trams. The subsequent inquiry. Ferries. Hospitals. NHS waiting times. A9 killer road improvement. SNP fund funnies the SNP election campaign camper van. Prestwick Airport. BiFab construction.
The Hate Law farce.
If Blair had been an agent of the USSR/Russia, what would he have done differently?
Proud to have never voted for Mr. WMD.
Nessimmersion - yes, putting power back to local authority level sounds like a way out of the mess. Whether it is achievable politically, I don't know. Sounds much too radical for Starmer for example.
DJ - layers of bureaucracy seem to blame each other as a matter of course. If roles were clearly defined and known to voters things might change, but clearly defined doesn't appeal to bureaucracies either.
dearieme - it all looks irreversible until unmissable collapse sets in. Possibly not even then.
Sam - I tend to go with your latter possibility too. He probably always saw himself on a transnational stage, where national plebs don't count.
Doonhamer - I wonder if talented people will leave in significant numbers? At some point it must be a possibility, or maybe it's already happening.
dearieme - probably not much different apart from Iraq.
James - me too.
"talented people will leave in significant numbers": our younger generation lives and works abroad.
Of my generation of 10 first cousins the number who have, at some time, lived and worked abroad is 5. The number now left in Scotland is 3.
But then 2 of my grandparents ended up living and working abroad.
dearieme - yes, often it was just the availability of work or better work coupled with enough initiative to move away and take advantage of it and that still goes on.
I used to have a large number of uncles, aunts and cousins living in or around Derby. Originally that was the lure of railway work in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Only two of us left now. The drift away was better or more congenial work elsewhere.
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