Lamont vs reality
So we’re told that Scottish Labour are to launch yet another devolution commission, which will report on which new governmental powers Labour has suddenly realised the Scottish Parliament needs since the Calman Commission closed down in 2009.
(We like to imagine that as they proudly published their last report, someone at the press conference casually asked what they’d concluded about fiscal autonomy, and the Commission board all slapped their foreheads and wailed “Doh! We knew there was something we’d forgotten to talk about!”)
We’ve already examined the commission’s yawning credibility gap ourselves, but over the weekend we digested a couple of articles from more impartial sources that make it even clearer just how hollow and meaningless any Labour promises of greater devolution to come after a No vote in 2014 will be.
One was an interview in Holyrood Magazine with Alistair Darling, figurehead of the “Better Together” campaign. The lengthy piece contained little Darling hasn’t already said, with the exception of a single explosive passage hidden away near the end, on the subject of a new devolution settlement:
“If you want anything more than a fairly minor change to the constitutional arrangement then at some point you are going to have to ask the rest of the UK which means that all the parties in a general election would have to have in their manifesto what they would intend to do. At the moment this question has been confined to north of the border but once you go a little bit further then you are going to have to engage with the rest of the UK.”
Let’s just look at that for a moment and take in the picture it paints. Scotland has voted No to independence in autumn 2014, before any of the UK parties have published their 2015 General Election manifestos. Independence is no longer a threat, and the demoralised SNP are more or less irrelevant in the Westminster election, as they essentially always are. England is already tired of the “whinging subsidy-junkie Jocks”, and now holds them in extra contempt for their cowardice.
So for what conceivable reason would any of the UK parties produce a manifesto pledging more powers to Scotland, amplifying the West Lothian Question still further and giving Alex Salmond a face-saving consolation prize at his moment of defeat?
Labour don’t want to do that, because it would put them under enormous pressure to reduce the number of Scottish MPs and/or restrict their ability to vote on England-and-Wales only issues. And the Tories certainly don’t want to hand over control of oil revenues – or anything else, come to that – to a hostile government in Edinburgh, whether it be SNP or Labour. (And let’s be honest, by 2015 what the Lib Dems want will be of interest only to their eight remaining voters.) It simply isn’t going to happen.
The second piece we read was in Alan Trench’s excellent Devolution Matters blog, and concerned the practical difficulties of fiscal autonomy in the UK’s devolved nations. We’ll let you digest it for yourself, though we definitely advise downloading the Powerpoint presentation document that goes with it. (If you don’t own Powerpoint don’t worry, you can get the splendid FreeOpener from here.)
The soundbite, however, is that devolving any further significant responsibility for taxation or welfare would be an extremely difficult, complicated and expensive job. And again, the reader is invited to ask themselves: why would any of the Unionist parties undertake such a process when they’d just had what could and would undoubtedly be spun as a resounding vote of confidence in the status quo?
We wouldn’t put the price of a packet of crisps on Labour’s latest devolution commission actually coming up with any substantial concrete proposals before the referendum. But in the unlikely event that it does, we’d bet even less money on any of them being implemented in the event of a No vote.
First of all Labour would have to win the 2015 election – which is no small obstacle – then it’d have to win the 2016 Holyrood election (because if you think a UK Labour government would willingly hand major powers to a third SNP administration then you must be reading this from inside some sort of secure facility for the mentally fragile), and then it’d have to want to undermine its own position at Westminster. We feel reasonably confident in asserting that even if any two of those things could be achieved, the chances of all three are within a hair’s breadth of zero.
We don’t know if Johann Lamont is extremely cunning and realises that she’s attempting to sell a massive lie to the Scottish public, or extremely stupid and has been fooled by the UK leadership into punting such a line in the genuine belief that Labour can – and intends to – successfully execute such a strategy. But either way, it’s asking a lot of the people of Scotland to fall for it.
I’ll go with: “extremely cunning and realises that she’s attempting to sell a massive lie to the Scottish public”
I’m a bird in the hand type of gal, so let’s just vote yes rather than rely on jam tomorrow and any attempt to work out WTF is going on in Slab’s heads.
Judging from her rare TV appearances I’m going for extremely stupid, though surely somebody with a degree from Glasgow University can’t be….
Speaking as someone with three degrees from Glasgow University, don’t overestimate the intellect of the average graduate who got through one of the less taxing MA courses.
But having said that, whether it’s Johann herself who is trying to be cunning and sell a massive lie, or her masters, that’s what’s being done. It’s not even all that cunning. It’s exactly what we’ve seen coming for the past year and more. I mean, EXACTLY.
But people do buy lies, especially if it’s what they want to believe. The question is, is it possible to expose the lie, and if so, how.
Hmm… if your title is a contest, I vote for reality.
The problem with the big lie is that you have to ensure no one can compare it to reality. The minute people see tory policies on benefits, council house tenancy, NHS reforms, education and public services reforms, being rolled out and the real pain they will cause…thats when the lie gets exposed for what it is.
Labour is on the backstep from that point onwards, arguing for a realignment of Scottish institutions to resemble the English model. Your status quo enthusing dries up at this point and no amout of scare stories of cuts will cut it with the Scottish voter.
Seeing Lamont on Newsnight shows you that when put on the back step they lose the ability of coherent thought and speech.
I am opting for the badly thought out and stupid angle, rather than Labour being Clever and farsighted.
Best to vote Yes. At least you’ll have an idea of what you’ll get if you win. But No, as was seen with the AV referendum, that’s much harder to pin down. A Devo-something supporter might think that by voting No all they are doing is saying No to independence. But that’s not how Westminster will read it. A No vote will be interpreted as one which enthusiastically endorsed the status quo.
That’s what happened with the AV vote. Before the votes were in, No meant that you opposed AV, not electoral reform. (Not always though. To be fair to the Telegraph, it alone among newspapers seems to have argued that a No vote would be a positive endorsement of FPTP before the vote. But it’s not like the Telegraph matters.) Afterwards all No votes were endorsements of FPTP. Here, for example, is the fragrant Peter Hain making precisely that claim in July 2011: “the scale of the result was a massive vote of confidence in the first-past-the-post system”.
So, not so much “jam tomorrow” and more “We never wanted the jam anyway”.
@Morag
S’easy. Get Mr Darling and Ms Lamont into a studio and ask them who’s right?
Mr Darling? All UK parties need to sign off on UK constitutional change within devolved settlements.
or
Ms Lamont? We’ll huv a commission an look at mibbies seein’ whit further powurs a Labour Gov. oan it’s Jack Jones kin deliver athoot ony consultation wi onybuddy else.
Then watch the fur and feathers fly as they try to reconcile their positions.
I already came to my own conclusions on this. Rather than repeat myself, here’s a link – Peter A Bell: Lamont’s error of commission
Did youse jist caw me stupit?
I actually don’t think it is because she is either too stupid or too smart; I think it has more to do with simply being a dinosaur, which has found itself totally unprepared for the pace of change, and thus rendered vulnerable to a mass extinction event when conditions change.
I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis, and have thought for some time that this is the line the SNP, the YES campaign and all independistas should be pushing over the next vital 24 months: the dependency parties are hopelessly divided about what further devolution measures they would offer, and even if they could come up with a coherent programme, they have no will to reforge the Union to accommodate the aspirations of the Scottish people, and even less chance of pushing any such programme through Westminster.
It seems to me that Lamont’s recent move of her party decisively to the right is a gift for the pro-independence camp; the narrative should not be difficult to construct to persuade a significant number of former Labour voters that Scottish Labour has in effect abandoned them. Far from being dead, the zombie of the nauseating New Labour project has been re-animated and has finally done for what was left of the Labour movement in Scotland.
I can see the posters now: Vote No for and end to free prescription charges and bus passes, the introduction of university tuition fees, and the imposition of more cuts and austerity to make it plain that we really are all better together, and in it together (I think we can leave them to figure out what “it” is!).
It must be patently obvious that they don’t want to discus it because they have no intention to offer anything. So if they get a no vote they can back peddle on any noises and grunts they may have made before hand.
Now with Johann’s little mean-spirited intervention last week (Mc-Scrooge), we now know that staying in the UK means accepting cuts, and neo-liberalism and it is clear the only way to avoid them is independence. I expect to see a huge shift to the YES camp in opinion polls in the next few months
Like I said before, who can believe Labour now after they’ve seemingly advocated dumping all the social democratic policies they supposedly supported before in favour of Westminster-style neo-liberalism? It’s not just the prospect of them doing this, but the question arises in people’s minds as to whether they ever really supported these policies in the first place (the answer is no, they were forced into it to try and compete with the SNP). Labour have put any trust people still had in them into serious question this week.
In today’s Scottish Daily Mail (Scottish Labour’s new mouthpiece), Unionist propaganda loon, Allan Massie has this to say:
” … Johann Lamont who is, to the surprise of many, proving the most effective Scottish Labour leader since Donald Dewar, has announced the formation of a commission to examine the question and draw up proposals for the further powers to be given to the Scottish parliament. …Mrs Lamont’s decision to establish this commission makes good sense, and it is likely to be backed by the Scottish Liberal Democrats.”
“The best way of saving the Union is to loosen it and to accept that Scotland will be part of a quasi-federal UK.
The important thing is to devise a scheme which will be fair and acceptable to the English, Welsh and Northern Irish as well as us Scots.”
“Johann Lamont has made another important intervention this week.
Her attack on freebies and her insistence that that we are not going to be able to to continue to afford all the universal benefits …
… much of what she says is true. The good times are over and it will be years before we regain the prosperity which made everything and anything affordable.
Moreover, in the context of the referendum, she may have played a trump card.
The more people accept that we are living in tough times and that those tough times will continue, the more they may wonder whether they might be tougher still in an independent Scotland.
What happens when the North Sea is drained of oil?”
Yes, he really did say these things … And that cracker of a last sentence, too!
So this is what Labour has come to, being cheered to the rooftops by arch-Conservatives in The Daily Mail!? Labour and its supporters must be so proud and happy …!
Lamont’s not giving up:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-19785051
She’s talking about raising tases now (in 2016). Funny that Ian Murray MP was saying at the Labour conference that the Scottish Government should use its powers (are they switched on yet?) to reduce income tax by 1p to ‘boost the ecomony’. Red Tory / Blue Tory – will merge to become Purple Tory, the colour of imperial delusion and madness.
Em.. Ah dinnae ken. Shid we pit thon incum tax up or doon? Em, Ah kno we’ll dae baith at the same time, eh! Sortit. Ah’m clivir so Ah’m ur.
One of the criticisms which you don’t seem to hear as much at the moment is the costs of implementing independence, e.g. stuff like creating Scottish versions of UK institutions. Apart from most of it being rubbish anyway, what Alan Trench is saying is basically that any worthwhile further devolution would require such costs anyway – except it would mean replicating the changes throughout the whole UK rather than just in Scotland.
So the next time someone DOES try to use the “oooh so much upheaval” argument, just point out that the only thing that WON’T cost money to implement is retaining the status quo indefinitely.
I think the following analysis sums up pretty well whats happening in the Labour party at the moment:
http://reidfoundation.org/2012/09/is-this-the-end-of-scottish-labour/
Lamont’s speech is an attempt to reconcile her power base and take control of local Government from Labour’s MP group. The fact that it makes them unelectable in Scotland for as long as its on the table is probably seen as being irrelevant to their own personal careers at the moment.
With Scottish labours massive shift to the right wing,can you call that Metamorphisis? kinda where the Toad tuns intae a Frog? Scottish labour evolves into the Scottish tory’s and Johan Lamont in to Maggie Thatcher……I wonder if that will qualify Johann to gie a sermon oan the mound!
I can NOT believe for one second that these “individuals” has anything other than the most basics in intelligence. AS many others have posted on various posts the Labour party, be it London or Glasgow based, is interested in one thing and ONE thing only, maintaining the status quo. Their SOLE interest is ensuring that their “lords and masters” at Westminster continue to sup at the “trough of plenty!”
The current devolution set up was quite easy to implement. The Scottish NHS was already separate, the education system was already separate and the legal system was already separate and all came under the Scottish Office.
All that happened was that control of Scottish Office responsibilities was handed over from the Scottish Office to the Scottish Parliament and the funding changed not one whit from the Barnett formula.
It achieved one of the primary aims of devolution which is to inflict minimal change on central government.
Any further devolution of powers will involve major changes in central government departments. I wrote a post on Bellacaledonia in January giving that as one of the reasons that devo-max will never appear on the referendum ballot paper but it applies just as well to the situation after a no vote.
http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2012/01/18/max-headroom/
After a no vote I can’t see English based MP’s spending a lot of time and effort reorganising the British machineries of state just to give the Scots more things to play with in their devolved parliament after they’ve just rejected independence.
English based MP’s will look at any proposals, and as is their duty, see how these affect their own constituents. If Scotland is to get any advantages either directly or indirectly over their constituents from devolved powers then they will simply vote it down. If they didn’t they would be failing in their duty as constituency MP’s. No devolved corporation, tax, no crown estates and no oil for Scotland.
We are already at devo-max for Scotland and Calman was just the dead-cat bounce. If anyone says that a no vote is going to result in significant additional powers for Scotland then they are either lying, stupid or both.
Yes, absolutely. But is it possible to get that through to the majority of voters against all these jammy promises?
Morag,
I know the SNP believe the positive message alone will win. But there may come a point where just arguing for the status quo – in terms of the country we currently live in – becomes almost as important as arguing for independence itself.
It seems to me that a ‘no’ vote is not a vote for the status quo. Our entire status would be undermined over a period of time.
It might happen very slowly, but Gordon Brown’s wish to be a North Briton would happen over time. All distinctions would be abandoned and abolished. Because we had been a nuisance to the elite’s that live in Hampstead and Islington. They prefer not to have to think about the rest of the nation, it is so exhausting.
Any distinctions would be taken apart piece by piece. We would be, more or less, acquiescing to being treated as illiterate and inumerate children.
That is what is at stake here. We retreat, they exterminate. Yes, they are Daleks!