So-called muscular unionism is a sign of Westminster’s fragility

Mar12 by weegingerdug

The Labour party has responded to the leak of a memo from Starmer to cabinet ministers in which he tells them not to be “deferential” to the devolved governments and not to hesitate to override them even on devolved matters. Starmer was questioned about the memo by SNP MP Stephen Gethins at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons on Wednesday, to which Starmer gave his usual snide non-answer, treating the question as an opportunity to get in one of his dubious digs at the Scottish Government and completely dodging the substance of the issue.

The Scottish branch office also gave a response, although not from the branch manager himself, who was still in hiding in case anyone asked him about his “old friend” Peter Mandelson. It was left to Labour’s constitution spokesman, the hapless Neil Bibby, to claim, unconvincingly, that the SNP’s suggestion that his party was overruling devolution was “bizarre” and “desperate”. So we didn’t really read in that memo what we did in fact read, thanks for clearing that up Neil. Like his big boss in London, Neil did not address the substance of the issue, how could he, when it was explicitly spelled out in black and white from Starmer himself that he expects his ministers to overrule the Scottish and Welsh Governments. Instead he treated us to a rehash of one of the branch office’s usual tropes, boasting about how much cash Westminster has “given” to Scotland. You know, out of the goodness of its heart.

BBC Scotland was also doing its level best to ignore the story, which has the potential to be very damaging to the political darlings of Pacific Quay in May’s Scottish election. While the story was prominently covered by BBC Wales, BBC Scotland buried it away deep down in the bowels of its digital news site where readers had to search to find it. If it was covered on BBC Scotland’s broadcast news on TV, it must have been one of those blink and you’d miss it affairs, because I don’t recall seeing it. Pacific Quay must have been thrilled that a Glasgow vape shop went on fire, burning down a historic and much loved building in the heart of the city, closed down the adjacent Glasgow Central Station, the largest and busiest train station in the country, and threw transport links throughout the west of Scotland and beyond into chaos. It was all a very convenient distraction from a story which is deeply embarrassing to the Labour party and which would otherwise have enjoyed much greater prominence.

Labour’s enthusiastic adoption of the so-called “muscular unionism” must become a central issue in the Scottish elections in May. “Muscular unionism” is simply a polite euphemism for the practice of undemocratically squashing decisions of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments which Westminster doesn’t like. When the people of Scotland and Wales go to the polls to elect their devolved parliaments, they do so on the understanding that those parliaments will have free rein to make and implement their own policies and spending decisions on devolved matters, not that the Scottish Government is only allowed to make decisions on devolved matters if the Westminster government consents to them. Yet that is where we effectively are with this so-called “muscular unionism”. Despite what Neil Bibby had to say, Labour is very much overruling and undermining the devolution settlement. Bibby hopes that we won’t remember that the devolution which Labour sold to Scotland following the devolution referendum of 1997 was very much on the basis that it would give the devolved parliaments the power to make their own decisions in devolved matters, crucially including decisions which the party in power in Westminster didn’t like. Devolution wasn’t supposed to mean “the Scottish Parliament will be free to make its own decisions on devolved matters as long as those decisions are OK with the Labour party”.

None of the major anti-independence parties can now be trusted to respect the devolution settlement as it currently stands, far less to implement the ever increasing range and depth of devolved powers which were promised during the 2014 independence referendum campaign as part of Better Together’s mendacious bid to prevent Scotland voting for independence. It seems that devolution was an event after all, and not a process. The Tories and Reform UK are hostile to the very idea of devolution and given half a chance would double down on the neutering of Holyrood and the Senedd if not abolish them entirely.

Westminster and the British media are sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis for which they are as utterly unprepared as they were for Brexit. It is highly likely that following May’s elections, all three of the devolved governments will be in the hands of parties seeking to end Westminster rule, while after next year’s Northern Irish election a Sinn Féin victory will increase the pressure for a referendum on Irish reunification, a referendum which could prove to be the first snag leading to the rapid unravelling of a Westminster rule which is under pressure from three directions all while far right English nationalists look poised to sweep to power in Westminster following the next UK general election. This election could also witness the rise of an entirely new factor in British politics. The English and Welsh Greens could make an electoral breakthrough meaning for the first time ever one of the main British political parties would be in favour of Scottish and Welsh independence.

The muscular unionism of Labour and the Tories before them is not a sign of a strong and confident British state, it’s a sign that devolution is dead and a symptom of a state which is trying to compensate for its own fragility. Westminster is much weaker than it appears. Only independence can offer the people of Scotland and Wales a constitutional framework in which their democratic choices are respected.

Meanwhile Independent Voices on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/indyvoices.bsky.social has carried out a valuable analysis of the reliability of the different polling companies on the subject of Scottish independence. You can read his analysis here

https://indyvoices.info/rating-the-pollsters

To summarise, he ranked the polling companies on three metrics, Demographics: how well does their sample compare to the age profile of Scotland? Turnout weighting: to what extent does their approach to turnout mirror the reality of the last referendum? And finally use of 2014 weighting: whether or not the samples were weighted to reflect the near 12-year-old Independence Referendum.

These metrics enabled him to create a league table of pollster reliability on the Scottish independence issue. The least reliable are YouGov, Opinium, and More in Common. When we remove these three companies from independence polling, there has not been a poll showing a lead for No for almost a year. Scotland is well on its way into independence being the settled will of the people, just as we head into a constitutional crisis of legitimacy for Westminster rule.

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Devolution has run out of road

Mar10 by weegingerdug

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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It’s Gersmas Day, Scotland’s annual present of fantasy Westminster economics

Aug14 by weegingerdug

This week, Scotland had its annual Gersmas Day, when British nationalist Santa puts supporters of Scottish independence on the naughty list and the anti-independence Scottish media, which is to say almost all of it, crows triumphantly about how much of an economic basket case Scotland supposedly is. This is all thanks to the annual release of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, which purport to show Scots the extent to which they depend on the largesse of the UK Treasury. Apparently it’s a testament to the success of Westminster rule that a literal power house like Scotland is incapable of supporting itself financially. It’s an odd definition of success, but with the Gers figures we long ago passed through the mirror into the topsy turvy world of Westminster Wonderland.

Gersmas Day has been going on so long that it has developed its own rituals. The Scottish Secretary makes an announcement about the cash amount which each individual Scottish person allegedly benefits from Westminster’s munificence, this year it’s £2,669. Oh goodie! Can I get mine in National Lottery scratch cards please. You’ve got a much better chance of financially benefiting from a lottery ticket than you do from the Westminster government and the chances of winning the jackpot on the lottery are not dissimilar to the chances of being struck by lightning.

Meanwhile anti-independence campaigners who view GERS as Holy Writ denounce heretical “GERS deniers” who have their own Gersmas ritual, which is the temerity to point out that the GERS figures tell us absolutely nothing about the finances of an independent Scotland and that in any case the methodology behind the figures is as dodgy as a used Reliant Robin sold to you by Del Boy.

As financial services consultancy Deloitte noted in 2017: “Commentators suggested that, under these conditions [the global slump in oil prices that year], Scotland would struggle to operate as an independent country. However, GERS data is produced for Scotland as part of the UK – it does not model scenarios for an independent Scotland in which the Scottish government would be enabled to make its own fiscal choices.”

Independence supporters also point out every Gersmas that this annual charade was instituted in 1992 by then Conservative Scottish Secretary Ian Lang as a tool to use against his political opponents who were arguing in favour of greater Scottish self-government. 33 years later the figures are still performing the same job. In a leaked memo written at the time Lang wrote: “I judge that [GERS] is just what is needed at present in our campaign to maintain the initiative and undermine the other parties. This initiative could score against all of them.”

The campaign to which Lang was referring was the campaign for the creation of a Scottish Parliament which the Conservatives vigorously opposed, mounting a scaremongering campaign which alleged that the creation of a Scottish Parliament would lead to massive tax rises and the decimation of Scottish public services. Decades later, the Westminster parties are still deploying scare stories from the same playbook to argue against greater Scottish self-government.

The reality is that the GERS figures have long since ceased to make a credible or meaningful contribution to Scotland’s constitutional debate, opponents of independence still view them with veneration as though they were chiseled on tablets of stone by God himself and handed down to his faithful on Mount Sinai, while supporters of independence see them as discredited political tools which only distort and mislead the debate, but we continue to go through this annual farce every August as it is politically useful to the Westminster government . It also supplies the anti-independence Scottish press with something to write about during the silly season when there’s otherwise a dearth of political news.

The immense utility of the GERS figures to those opposed to independence is why they defend them so ferociously, refusing to concede that these figures are a political and not an economic tool and attempting to characterise those who call GERS into question as being conspiracy theorists akin to Flat Earthers or vaccine deniers. That’s the very definition of an ad hominem attack.

However, as Professor Richard Murphy, points out, the supposed deficit in GERS attributed to Scotland is in its entirety a creation of Westminster. Professor Murphy, who as a professor of accounting practice knows infinitely more about accountancy than the “We’re not nationalists we’re British” types who annually salivate over the imaginary “Union benefit” is scathing in his assessment of the methodology of GERS, as an Englishman he has no personal axe to grind in the Scottish independence debate, but as a professor of accounting practice he cares deeply about misleading accountancy practices.

The truth is that the Scottish Government has a legal obligation to balance its books, as do Scottish local authorities. The deficit which GERS attributes to Scotland comes from the actions of the UK Government. It has to, because nobody else can create this deficit on behalf of Scotland because nobody else has the legal power to do so. And, therefore, if Scotland is running a deficit, we know who to blame. It’s Westminster, and nobody at Holyrood is responsible.

Every year the GERS figures tell us that Scotland is running a large public finance deficit; one that is far larger than that in the rest of the UK.

Murphy dismisses the GERS figures as CRAp a Completely Rubbish Approximation to the truth, and calls it “accounting abuse on a giant scale.” That’s damning indictment of a set of figures which form the bedrock of the economic case against independence.

A man who has spent a career in accountancy and who for years has been a respected professor of accountancy practice can be trusted to understand the reality of the GERS figures far better than anti-independence pressure groups with a vested interest in maintaining the myth that Scotland is too poor to maintain current levels of public services as an independent nation.

You can watch Professor Murphy’s expert take down of the fantasy economics of the GERS figures here:

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Starmer continues the Tory war on devolution

Dec6 by weegingerdug

The Labour party isn’t even pretending to respect the devolution settlement now. Labour’s idea of Scottish devolution is that they’ll support it as long as Scotland votes for a Labour controlled Scottish Government. It’s the do as we say because you can’t be trusted school of British nationalist paternalism. It’s not for a government in Westminster to second guess the democratic choices of the people of Scotland at a Holyrood election, but that is exactly what the deeply undemocratic Keir Starmer is doing. When the devolved Scottish Parliament was established in the late 1990s, Labour genuinely thought Scotland would be Labour’s plaything and powerbase forever. The voting system imposed on Holyrood was supposed to produce a Labour Lib Dem Scottish Government in perpetuity – or rather a ‘Scottish executive’ because we can’t have Scotland getting ideas above its station now can we?

Things did not go to plan and since 2011, the Labour party has been sulking like a spoiled child whose toy has been taken away as a punishment for bad behaviour. They still believe Scotland is rightfully theirs.

Following a disastrous start to his new government – even Tony Blair managed to get through the first couple of years without making more than half the country hate him, on Thursday Keir Starmer set out a re-set for his government in a vain attempt to pretend that the past five months hadn’t happened. In a speech Starmer laid six new “milestones” which set out targets for his government to achieve over the next five years. These supersede his previous promises, most of which are now lying dead beside the political highway, having collided with Starmer’s opportunistic dishonesty.

The new “milestones”, which he really means this time, honest, are: higher disposable income per person; 1.5 million new homes in England; 92% of patients in England waiting 18 weeks or less for elective treatment ; 13,000 new police officers; getting 75% of five-year-olds in England “ready to learn” when they start school and 95% clean power by 2030, much of which will be produced by Scotland.

It’s high time that the Scottish Government and pro-independence politicians started screaming from the rooftops about Westminster’s theft of Scotland’s renewable energy, it’s the cheviot, the stag, and the tall tall wind turbine. Scotland produces more energy than it needs for its own consumption yet Scottish households pay some of the highest energy bills in Europe. All that electricity is produced by natural resources which are the communal property of the people of Scotland, yet the profits from it flow south along with the electricity itself.

Notably missing from Starmer’s list is any mention of tackling child poverty, wealth inequality, or social exclusion. The pledge to achieve 95% clean power by 2030 has watered-down a manifesto commitment from Labour to achieve “zero carbon” electricity by that year. Starmer insists that the new commitment is exactly the same as it previously was, forgetting perhaps that we can read too. But the shameless rewriting of past statements is very much on brand for Starmer. His claim that he never said Israel has the right to withhold food and water from Gaza springs to mind. He was literally recorded saying it.

There was little mention of Scotland, so much for the promise that Scotland would be at the centre of a Labour government’s decision making. However in a press release issued after the speech, Downing Street wrote: “The message is clear – devolved or not [italics in original] – we will collectively make a difference across the UK sharing best practice and aligning efforts across every level of government, business and with civil society.”

Labour mentioned policing, health, and “giving children the best start in life” as specific areas in which they would work in Scotland, given that these are devolved but also fall under Starmer’s new list of “milestones”.

The UK Government said that its pledge to work in devolved areas was part of a “genuine partnership with devolved governments on shared priorities of working people”. By genuine partnership what they mean is they tell the Scottish Government what to do in devolved matters and will deploy the levers made available to them in the Scotland Act in order to ensure that Starmer gets his way. All this is of course perfectly legal, legality is what Westminster says it is. Westminster doesn’t do co-operation or partnership, that is alien to the DNA of a body which sees itself as the sole possessor of unlimited sovereignty. In its dealing with other elected bodies Westminster is strictly a top-down institution, it gives instructions which are meant to be obeyed.

Labour is citing its victory in Scotland at this year’s Westminster general election as giving it a mandate to overrule the Scottish Government even though “trashing the devolution settlement” wasn’t mentioned by Labour either in its Scottish manifesto or at any point during the election campaign. This is the same Labour party which denied that the Scottish Government had a mandate to hold another independence referendum following a decisive victory by pro-independence parties who had prominent manifesto commitments to holding another independence referendum in a Scottish parliamentary election campaign which was dominated by the issue of a second independence referendum. For the Labour party the definition of mandate is “whatever suits the Labour party.”

The lesson ought to be clear by now. If you vote Labour in Scotland you are giving Keir Starmer licence to do whatever he likes. His interest in you and your needs ends the moment you mark an X beside the name of the Labour candidate and drop your ballot in the box.

Faced with this blatant contempt for the devolution settlement, it’s not enough for the Scottish Government to complain about the Labour party acting undemocratically. Labour knows it’s acting undemocratically and it doesn’t care now any more than it cared in the aftermath of losing the 2021 Holyrood election. Labour knows that it won’t be taken to task by the media in Scotland, it will be enabled and platformed. It’s time for some constructive obstruction. It’s time to seize the initiative.

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Biting the hand of Project Fear

Tag Archives: devolution

So-called muscular unionism is a sign of Westminster’s fragility

Devolution has run out of road

It’s Gersmas Day, Scotland’s annual present of fantasy Westminster economics

Starmer continues the Tory war on devolution