While Scotland is engaged in a vigorous discussion about its own future, it is becoming increasingly clear that the referendum, whatever its outcome, is likely to trigger major soul-searching about constitutional arrangements in the rest of the UK as well, and particularly about the devolution of power within England (e.g. see this letter to the Times, 11th September 2014).
This should be a real opportunity for the Liberal Democrats, as only party which has long been serious about seeing a federal model developed in the UK. However, I am worried that last spring, we made it a lot harder for us to contribute sensibly to this debate. Last spring we voted on a policy paper titled Power to the People’, which contains a policy on federalism so unworkable that it will be a serious obstacle for us, and for progress in this matter. Given the length of the policy paper, there was little chance for a proper detailed debate, and an amendment designed to fix the problem was not carried.
The problematic policy is ‘devolution on demand’, which means that “legislative devolution is available to Cornwall …, to London …, and to any principal local authority (or group of principal local authorities with contiguous boundaries) outside London which has a population of a million or more people.” – the motion can be found here, F14 on pp.54-56; the relevant lines are 70-76.
This means that soon we could have a patchwork of areas devolved to different degrees and at different speeds. This policy has rather worrying implications.
One is that this turns the already fiendishly complex West Lothian Question into constitutional mayhem. Remember, this is the question about MPs from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland who can vote on devolved matters, e.g. health or schools, in England, without their vote having consequences in their own constituencies. Now imagine this with our ‘devolution on demand’ situation, where you may well end up with twenty different kinds of MPs, for whom different sets of areas are devolved, or not, as the case may be; areas which aren’t devolved may then have many policies decided for them by a majority of MPs in whose constituencies the bill in question no longer applies.
The most problematic matter, however, is accountability. In recent days, because of all the NHS propaganda in Scotland, it has perhaps also become clearer to people in England that in the devolved nations, the ruling parties thrive on confusing their voters about which areas of policy are devolved. Welsh Labour’s success depends on this tactic to a degree where the Welsh education minister considered it appropriate to demonstrate against his own schools policy. This particularly blatant attempt at confusing the voters was pointed out by the media, but on the whole, those few journalists focusing on the goings-on in the Welsh Assembly are not very helpful in informing the voters properly – for example here ITV reports a Labour campaign, launched in the Senedd, to save hospitals from their own government’s policy, without ever pointing out the deliberately confusing absurdity of Labour’s behaviour.
Imagine how easy it would be for politicians to do the same if we had a whole patchwork of areas devolved at different speeds? I believe that current party policy on ‘devolution on demand’ is essentially a charter for politicians to avoid accountability to a degree which would seriously jeopardize democracy in this country. In a way, England in particular would be remade in the image of the famous LibDem organizational diagram, and we know how well this works when it comes to abdicating responsibility.
What we need is proper federalism, but in a shape that fosters transparency. I think that England is too big and too diverse to function as one federal unit alongside the other nations. My favoured solution would be to consult widely and to hold a constitutional convention in order to determine appropriate English regions (similar to the Euro-regions, but with considerable tweaks, including splitting the south-east region), and then devolve the same powers to all of them. Perhaps we could get everything to the same level as Wales and Northern Ireland, while Scotland’s Devo Max, if Scotland stays with the rest of us, would presumably always remain a step ahead. In most cases, however, such a system would make it easy to understand what is devolved and what is not, and the mainstream media would have to engage with the system, thereby not leaving accountability entirely to the underfunded local media
sector.
If we want to be taken seriously in a national debate about federalism, the party urgently needs to re-open the debate about this issue and undo the recent conference vote. We cannot possibly arrive at the table proposing a system which is only a recipe for power without accountability.
* Maria Pretzler is a Lecturer in Greek History at Swansea University. She blogs at Working Memories , where ancient Greekery and Libdemmery can happily coexist.