The man who needs to Scotch his own broth

25th June 2007
By Arthur Aughey

Free Access

This article is provided free-to-view for all visitors to thepolitician.org.

In his 1992 Charter 88 Sovereignty lecture on Constitutional Change and the Future of Britain, Gordon Brown argued that Labour’s prospective reforms signalled ‘a decisive shift in the balance of power in Britain, a long overdue transfer of sovereignty from those who are governed, from an ancient and indefensible Crown sovereignty to a modern popular sovereignty, not just tidying up our constitution but transforming it’.

Reading the lecture again what suggests itself is the old saying: Be careful what you wish for. It may come true. The results of the Scottish Parliamentary and the Welsh Assembly elections can hardly make the prime minister-in-waiting so certain that the reforms which the Labour government instituted after 1997 have brought into being Brown’s vision of Britain as ‘a community of citizens with common needs, mutual interests, shared objectives, related goals and, most of all, linked destinies’.

Where Brown too easily synthesised the ideas of popular and constitutional sovereignty, the new Scottish National Party Executive in Edinburgh and the new first minister, Alex Salmond, have a very different notion of who and what is sovereign. And in present circumstances it becomes ever clearer that the constitution really does need a proper tidying up.

The electoral success of the SNP has provoked some rather apocalyptic speculation about the future of the United Kingdom. The historian Michael Fry, who had already abandoned his Unionism to advocate Scottish independence, wrote in The Sunday Times that there had been nothing like this ‘since Sinn Fein took a majority of seats in the general election of 1918’.

One part of the UK would now be ruled by politicians hostile to its existence. Fry could have added that one other part of the UK, Northern Ireland, is also (partly) governed by parties hostile to its existence and yet another, Wales, almost had Plaid Cymru in a governing coalition (it now forms part of the ‘rainbow opposition’ to Labour).

The Times columnist, Tim Hames, thought that within three years Gordon Brown could end up as a foreigner in the country he was governing if the SNP (as Hames thought possible) were to win a referendum on Scottish independence.

And, as if on cue, up popped in opendemocracy the godfather of break-up, Tom Nairn, to proclaim yet again that nothing could be done to save the ‘Austro-Hungarian package’ of the ‘Holy Family’ Union.

If all of this reads uncomfortably for Brown then part of the blame must be his as he — and Blair — fully supported a campaign in Scotland which had made separation the key issue.

Commentators were also quick to invoke the ‘English Question’. Writing in The Herald, Ian MacWhirter asked what England was going to make of the ‘grudge match’ between two very different Scots, Salmond and Brown, and he believed that the only conclusion they would come to is that Scotland had already become a separate country. The English would act on that assumption and, as a consequence, the end of the Union could be much closer than anyone thought.

As Melanie Phillips suggested in the Daily Mail, once the Scots are thought to be on the road to independence English nationalism will take on ‘the force of historical inevitability’. Certainly, the case for an English parliament is being made intelligently and for such an intelligent case one need look no further than Tom Waterhouse’s Devolution in the United Kingdom: Answering the English Question.

As I argued in Parliamentary Brief in January, this could indeed happen not because the English bear any deep animosity towards the Scots (all surveys show that they do not) but because the English attitude has been to accommodate whatever the Scots either want or appear to want. And politics, as the Blair years have taught us, are as much about appearance as reality.

This is obviously how Salmond also sees it and a wager on English complaisance constitutes one part of his strategy. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Salmond displayed those qualities that define him — superficial benevolence and condescending malevolence. His superficially benevolent message was that the SNP would promote an era of good feelings and close co-operation with its English neighbour and his condescending malevolence pointed out that the people of England were just a bit slow at acknowledging the benefits of self-government (for which read: breaking up the United Kingdom).

The ingenious Scots just happened to be ahead of the game both ‘in thought and deed’ but the unimaginative people of England could catch them up (if they tried).

The SNP, of course, would be happy to help them, and since it now controls a budget of £30bn and has at its disposal the intelligence of the civil service in Edinburgh, Salmond has the resources to make English opinion aware of just how different he intends Scotland to be.

The other part of the Salmond strategy is to make as much trouble as possible between Holyrood and Westminster. The list of issues upon which the Scottish Executive could provoke confrontation ranges from the symbolic — a distinct Scottish Olympic team for 2012 — to the iconic, the control of oil and gas revenues and all populist issues in between, such as the closure of post offices and opposition to nuclear power stations.

And there are intimations enough of a policy of co-operating with the other devolved administrations in Belfast and Cardiff to make life difficult for the Treasury in London.

For some observers the SNP is now in a win/win position in which any failure can be blamed on Scotland’s lack of independent powers and any success to its own heroic leadership. ‘Gaddafi-gate’ , for example, provides Salmond with a populist issue to challenge Blair’s sovereign power to do a deal with the Libyan leader over the transfer of the Lockerbie bomber.

However, there are good grounds for caution and for reflecting that nothing in politics, as in life, is an unmixed blessing. It is uncertain, despite the claims of those like Nairn who are always detecting great subterranean shifts, that the current support for the SNP is solidly based.

It was able to secure less than one-third of the vote in an election which, despite the loud proclamation of its historic significance, produced a turnout of only 50 per cent. The SNP fought an election on a populist platform which is likely to make its confrontations, on hospitals for instance, not with the political class at Westminster but with its own policy communities in Scotland.

And given the confluence of support for nationalism that ranges from Fry’s desire for the discipline of a free market Scotland to Christopher Harvie’s desire for a Scottish version of European social democracy, the tensions can be exploited by the Unionist majority in Holyrood.

Moreover, Salmond himself may find life difficult managing the tensions between the advanced ‘one last push’ members of his party and those who seek to prove that the SNP is capable of good governance. None of this is unusual in a nationalist party and nor is it necessarily fatal; but it is enough to qualify the notion that a tipping point in Scottish-UK relations has just been reached. It is alarmist and does not do justice to the evidence to suggest that there is a mandate, subterranean or otherwise, for separatism.

For those interested in sustaining the United Kingdom the danger comes from something more traditional and that is the rivalry between Labour and Conservative parties. There is an irony here because in his brilliant book Understanding the United Kingdom, written in the early 1980s as a Unionist riposte to the break-up of Britain thesis, Richard Rose argued that what acted as the major integrative element in politics was the party system.

The major parties (Northern Ireland excepted) helped to translate regional and national concerns into the common language of British politics. However, that party competition today could have the opposite effect. There are those, like Simon Heffer, who argue that the Conservatives should campaign on Home Rule for England, and the SNP relish the prospect of the Conservatives being unable to resist the temptation to play the English card.

Angus Robertson, the SNP deputy leader at Westminster, hopes that they will harass Brown on the West Lothian Question — English votes for English laws — such that he will be neither trusted in England nor believed in Scotland.

Even John Major has written that ‘a Scottish prime minister with a Scottish constituency will highlight afresh the constitutional anomaly’ of devolution which the Labour government ‘for partisan advantage’ arranged ‘with no regard to the effect across the United Kingdom’. Major, of course, was not advocating a constitutional crisis; he was merely drawing attention to a problem that cannot be ignored any longer.

In a recent article, Vernon Bogdanor wrote of how far-reaching the changes in the constitution have been: a spectacle unique, he believed, in the democratic world where a country has transformed its uncodified constitution into a codified one. But like the Empire, this transformation appears to have developed in a fit of absence of mind.

This point was made by Professor Lord Norton when he likened Blair’s constitutional reforms to the voyage to the new world of Christopher Columbus: he did not know where he was going; when he got there, he did not know where he was; and when he got back, he did not know where he had been.

If one can detect any emerging consensus of informed opinion it is that a serious review of the constitution is now urgent. This has to be other than a metaphysical quest for British values which Labour’s intellectual confidant, Sir Bernard Crick, believes is playing the wrong game anyway. He is right.

Lord Norton has suggested a Royal Commission, Sue Sterling of the Institute for Public Policy Research has advocated a UK-wide constitutional convention and Robert Hazell of the Constitution Unit has argued for the new prime minister to take the lead by setting out a vision of the United Kingdom which would specify the distribution of power between the levels of British government.

Sensitive to this intellectual current, Jack Straw has spoken of the need to develop a common British ‘story’ but this can only make sense within a coherent institutional structure. The ghost, in other words, must be part of the appropriate machine.

There are signs in Brown’s address to the Commonwealth Club in February and in his first speech as prime minister-in-waiting, where he spoke of building ‘a shared national consensus for a programme of constitutional reform’, that he too acknowledges the necessity of this approach.

Whatever name or form such a constitutional review may take it must be non-partisan (addressing Major’s criticism), it must be conducted in the best traditions of British good sense and it must involve all parts of the United Kingdom. It should be designed, as Brown declared in 1992, ‘not to catch the next day’s morning headlines but to reflect on questions that are rather more enduring’.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the last decade was a politics that often did put next morning’s headlines before more enduring questions (as the tortuous course of the Northern Ireland peace process all too often proved). Britishness and its constitution deserve better.

Arthur Aughey is professor of politics at the University of Ulster. His latest book, The Politics of Englishness (2007), is published by Manchester University Press.

Filed Under: Scotland, Brown, United Kingdom
Back to Top^