3 August 2015 · 12:58 pm

A ‘reserved powers’ model of devolution for Wales: what should be ‘reserved’?

This post also appears on ClickonWales, the Institute for Welsh Affairs’ blog, here.

Since at least 2004, when the Richard Commission proposed one, there has been significant support in Wales for adoption of a ‘reserved powers’ model – as Scotland and (in a different way) Northern Ireland have.  The call was strongly endorsed by the Silk Commission in its Part 2 report and became UK Government policy with support from all four main parties following the St David’s Day process.  There seems to be an assumption now that a reserved powers model is essentially a technical matter and that the Scottish model can and will be taken off the shelf and applied, with appropriate modifications, to Wales.  That might not be a bad way forward – there’s a good deal to be said for the Scottish legislation, though it’s not a magical way to solve all problems.  But real devils also lurk in the detail of what ‘appropriate modifications’ might be.

What appears to be underway is a process by which Whitehall departments are consulted about what functions they want to see retained, and what they are happy to let go.  The Welsh Government is a marginal player in this process, if it is a player at all, and the Wales Office does not appear to have a strategy to go with its consultation list.  The first fruit of that trawl appeared in the Powers for a Purpose Command paper published in February at the end of the St David’s Day process, as Annex B.

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7 July 2015 · 4:41 pm

English votes for English laws: a brief comment

Given Tuesday’s Commons debate and vote against the Government (also reported in a Guardian liveblog here), I thought it was worth reposting here an amended version of a short piece which appeared earlier on the Democratic Audit blog. 

Chris Grayling’s proposals for English votes for English laws (EVEL) should not be much of a surprise.  They are very largely a straightforward implementation of ‘option 3’ set out by the party in the December 2014 Command paper, endorsed in a speech by William Hague in February 2015 and set out in the party’s election manifesto.  The Conservatives will claim credit for having done what they said they would.

In doing so, they have not addressed some key problems.  First, they have abandoned the McKay Commission’s test of provisions having a ‘separate and distinct’ effect for England.  That had the merit of principle.  Instead, the test is whether a provision ‘relates exclusively’ to England.  But, second, that test is mis-applied; provisions may relate to England in a legal sense but have a major effect on devolved governments, whether through the Barnett formula and consequential changes in funding, or their effects across a border (a major issue for Wales if not Scotland).  This means, third, that the problems arising from a piecemeal approach to constitutional change have been maintained and aggravated, not resolved.

There are ways of implementing EVEL that would give England the distinct voice in the Union that it badly needs.  That needs a much further-reaching reconstruction of how legislation works, and perhaps the machinery of government too.   We canvassed these issues in the recent Bingham Centre devolution review, and set out a path to achieve it.  (The report can be downloaded here.)  Instead, the Conservatives have ticked a box on their to-do list, but stored up yet further constitutional problems for the future.  To work properly, EVEL needs to form part of a much broader programme of reform in Westminster and Whitehall, not be a one-off revision to Commons procedures.

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24 May 2015 · 2:26 pm

The Bingham Centre devolution review: the UK at a constitutional crossroads

This post also appears as a guest post on the Centre on Constitutional Change blog here, the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog here, and the Institute of Welsh Affairs blog ClickonWales here.

The impact of the Scottish independence referendum has been wide-ranging. It raises a number of questions about how the UK works as a whole and its territorial constitution, as well as ones about Scotland.  But for all the importance and urgency of these issues, they have not yet been subject to any wide-ranging or sustained scrutiny.  A new report from the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, available here, seeks to change that and look at what issues the UK as a whole will need to address in the coming months and years.  The review commission has been chaired by Sir Jeffrey Jowell QC, and its membership is here and remit is set out here.

The Commission’s starting point was to consider the implications of the piecemeal, ad hoc approach to devolution taken so far.  Its view is that this has reached the end of its road.  The knock-on effects of the Smith Commission proposals for Scotland mean that this now creates serious constitutional difficulties beyond Scotland.  A more systematic view, considering the UK as a whole, is badly needed.

The first big recommendation to address that is a Charter of the Union, to be passed as a Westminster statute with consent from the devolved legislatures, and setting out key principles for the working of a devolved union.  These draw on what already applies – they include such principles as respect for democracy, the rule of law, autonomy of each government and comity and respect for each other in their dealings with each other.  Subsidiarity and social solidarity are also key principles for the Charter of the Union.

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Filed under Conservatives, Devolution finance, English questions, Northern Ireland, Publications and projects, Scotland, Wales, Westminster

12 May 2015 · 11:43 am

How Labour messed up 1998-model devolution

It’s intriguing to see various senior figures from the New Labour era call for a return to something much more like new Labour to revive the Labour Party. Those figures seem to overlook how responsible New Labour’s politics and legacy are for the mess Labour now finds itself in. (On the nature of that mess, I agree with quite a lot of what Paul Mason says here; it is very clearly a structural problem caused by the collapse of an electoral coalition, not just a question of policy detail or leadership.)
New Labour helped create the mess, at least in its territorial dimension, in two particular ways. First, its political economy depended on getting London to generate large tax revenues to pay for redistributive benefits and much of public services in the rest of the UK, and satisfying those already owning property in London through a property boom. This has left a lasting and damaging legacy by creating or at least magnifying huge inequalities and resentments arising from different regional economies and levels of prosperity.  (In technical terms, it sought to use a huge vertical fiscal imbalance to redress horizontal inequalities.  What actually happened was that those horizontal inequalities increased.)
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6 May 2015 · 4:39 pm

Devolution, territorial politics and the general election

This post also appears on the Constitution Unit’s blog, here. Constitution-unit.com has a number of other election-related posts which are well worth reading.

It is hard to think of a general election that has ever been so freighted with questions about the UK’s territorial constitution. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the outcome of the 2015 election, and actions of the government that takes office after it, will either reshape the UK significantly or ease the way to its breakup. This post considers what the manifestos tell us about what the various parties propose to do and how they propose to do it, when it comes to the reshaping of devolution arrangements across the UK, and then discusses some of the issues that will loom larger after 7 May.

The pro-UK parties

The 2015 manifestos contain a welter of devolution-related commitments. Those in the three pro-UK parties (Conservative, Liberal Democrats and Labour) are all strikingly similar, though not identical. For Scotland, all commit to implementing the Smith Commission’s recommendations, and to retaining the Barnett formula. (Interestingly, they do not commit to the UK Government’s white paper Scotland in the United Kingdom: An enduring settlement, raising the possibility they could scrape off some of the barnacles that paper puts on the Smith proposals). Labour want to go further in a ‘Home Rule bill’ in unspecified ways, though it appears that wider scope for the Scottish Parliament to legislate on welfare matters is key to it. These commitments rather resemble those made by the same three parties in 2010 about the implementation of the Calman Commission’s recommendations, though with Labour somewhat breaking ranks with the two governing parties.

There is also similarity when it comes to Northern Ireland: endorsement of the peace process and commitments to support it, along with the economic rebalancing package agreed as part of December’s Stormont House Agreement. For Conservatives and Lib Dems, this includes support for sustainable public finances, welfare reform and corporation tax devolution subject to adequate progress being made on financial matters. Labour’s commitments appear to embrace similar policies, but are confusingly worded. They say they will: Continue reading →

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3 May 2015 · 7:09 pm

Minority nationalist parties and their leverage in a national parliament: Canada and Spain

With all the speculation about what impact a large contingent of SNP MPs (or other regionally-based minor parties like the DUP) might have at Westminster after 7 May, it is worth looking at experience in some other countries. This situation may not be something the UK is used to, though it was key to how British politics worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century once the Parnell/Redmond Irish Party became the dominant electoral party in Ireland. There are more recent parallels from two other parliamentary systems with minority nationalities: Canada (and the Bloc Québecois), and Spain, particularly with Convergència i Unió but also other parties from Catalonia, and indeed the Basque Country and Galicia.

Canada
To make sense of what has happened in Canada, it’s necessary to know a bit how Canadian politics works. Federal and provincial party organisations are quite separate there, except for the New Democrats. The main party of Quebec ‘sovereignism’*, the Parti Québecois, has limited itself to Quebec provincial elections (as has the federalist Parti Libéral du Québec). Its counterpart for federal elections, the Bloc Québecois, was established in 1991, between the 1980 and 1995 referendums and after the failure of the Meech Lake process that was expected in Quebec to lead to a renewed form of federalism including a special status for Quebec. Its first leader, Lucien Bouchard, had been a minister in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet and an advocate for the Meech Lake deal. The Bloc was highly successful in its first election in 1993, winning 54 of 75 Quebec seats, and with the implosion of the Progressive Conservative Party it found itself forming the official opposition to the Liberals in the 1993-97 Parliament. It remained the dominant player in Quebec federal politics until 2011, winning over 40 seats in each election (and usually over 50) except for 2000, when it won 38.

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Filed under Comparisons from abroad, Elections, UK elections, Westminster

2 May 2015 · 9:16 am

Bingham Centre review of devolution in the UK

For the last few months, I’ve been working with the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law on a major inquiry into devolution and how it should develop, from the point of the UK as a whole. The starting point has been constitutional: what sort of constitutional system has emerged given the fragmented nature of the process of devolution in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and across England. Our committee has been chaired by Professor Sir Jeffrey Jowell QC, Director of the Bingham Centre, and includes such figures as Professor Linda Colley, Gerald Holtham, Sir Maurice Kay, John Kay and Philip Stephens of the FT. (Full details of the committee are here.) Adam Tomkins and I have acted as advisers to the committee.
We’ll be publishing the report on 20 May, with a launch at Middle Temple Hall, and have a number of important recommendations for how the UK should work which we hope will shape the actions of the incoming UK Government, whatever political complexion it may have. Key to these is the need now to think about devolution as affecting the UK as a whole, and what the nature of that Union is – not unitary, but not federal either. No new government can afford to ignore these issues, or fail to try to tackle them.

UPDATE: Anyone wanting to come to the launch should email Sandra Homewood on s.homewood[at]binghamcentre.biicl.org to confirm their attendance. 

UPDATE, 21 May:  The report, A Constitutional Crossroads: Ways forward for the United Kingdom, can now be downloaded here as a PDF file.

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25 April 2015 · 7:30 am

An ‘English rate of income tax’: six questions in search of an answer

In a speech on Friday launching the Conservative Party’s ‘English manifesto’, David Cameron apparently proposed an ‘English rate of income tax’, on which voting in Parliament would be limited to English (or non-Scottish) MPs.  (There’s also Telegraph coverage here and BBC News coverage here.)  There’s not much detail about this – Cameron’s speech isn’t available on the Conservative Party website, nor is the ‘English’ manifesto.   But from what we can tell of it, this proposal raises a lot of questions.

The first question is whether this is a move beyond the Conservatives’ manifesto commitment for a veto for English MPs (or English, Welsh and Northern Ireland) MPs on non-Scottish income tax decisions, after the Smith Commission proposals are enacted.  This proposal caused quite a stir  when it was first announced, back in December 2014, and raises the hackles of Labour and other parties (and see also here), but it’s not actually new.  This may just be a rhetorical shift, using heightened language to get news coverage for an old story, but if so it has been publicised in remarkably insensitive terms: what the Conservatives are proposing is not an ‘English rate of income tax’, but relates to Wales and Northern Ireland as well. This may be an attempt to curry favour with English voters, but England is not the only part of the UK it affects.

The second question is what this proposal relates to: the Scottish rate of income tax which is due to come into effect in April 2016, and on which a decision will need to be taken this autumn, or the Smith Commission proposals? The latter probably won’t come into effect until April 2018 at the earliest, so this will not be something that could be put in place for England very quickly, or would need to be.  If the former, it implies very quick action indeed – and it’s hard to see a rationale for excluding Scottish MPs from voting when only the Scotland Act 2012 powers are in effect.

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15 December 2014 · 7:00 pm

Improving intergovernmental co-ordination: better intergovernmental relations and better devolution

I’ve a report out today on the procedural aspects of intergovernmental relations.  This was commissioned by the UK Changing Union project through the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University, and can be found on their website here. Today was also the day when the plenary Joint Ministerial Committee met; it agreed, among other things, a full-scale rewrite of the Memorandum of Understanding.  As this post argues, such a rewrite is overdue. 

Intergovernmental relations are key to making devolution work effectively. The Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales and Northern Ireland Assembly all operate in a wider context of governance across the UK, and how their functions overlap with those of the UK Government (and other governments) is vital for all four governments and all UK citizens. The Smith Commission’s recent report pays a good deal of attention to the need to ‘scale up’ intergovernmental co-ordination as part of the package of further devolution.

The UK Government is not very interested in managing intergovernmental relations, however. It put in place an attenuated under-institutionalised set of mechanisms in 1999, and has allowed that to weaken or fall further into disuse since then. The key institution is the Joint Ministerial Committee. Plenary meetings of that ceased altogether between 2002 and 2008; they have been more or less annual since then, but are characterised by grandstanding rather than productive work. The JMC’s ‘Domestic’ format has nearly ceased to function, as so few policy issues concern more than one devolved government. The only established format of the JMC which does meet regularly, and does more or less what it was expected to, is the EU format which helps formulate the UK ‘line’ for major EU Council meetings, though there are problems even there. In reality, most intergovernmental issues are bilateral, but with few exceptions they are dealt with in an ad hoc, casual way, out of sight of public or legislatures, and many important issues slip through the net.

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1 November 2014 · 3:59 pm

Stevenson Lecture in Glasgow, 11 November

I shall be giving a lecture in Glasgow at 6pm on Tuesday 11 November, in the series of Stevenson Trust Lectures on ‘Scotland’s Citizens: The Referendum and Beyond’.  My lecture will be on ‘Devo More not Devo Max: The realistic possibilities’, and I’ll be explaining the issues relating to further devolution, what might be practicable and what isn’t, and why.  There should be plenty of time for questions afterward, both in the lecture hall and informally over drinks.

The lecture takes place in the Sir Charles Wilson Building on Glasgow University’s main (Gilmorehill) campus.  Further information is available from the organiser, Kevin Francis, at kevin.francis@glasgow.ac.uk, or stevensontrust@gla.ac.uk.

UPDATE, 12 November: The slides from my lecture can be found here.

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