Wings Over Scotland

You can’t heave a brick into the Scottish political media and blogosphere without hitting half-a-dozen Labour MPs, MSPs or activists all claiming that they belong to “the party of devolution“. This self-awarded title is based on the premise that Labour “gave” Scotland the limited degree of home rule it currently enjoys. It’s a premise of dubious merit – given that it was the Scottish electorate which actually made it happen by voting for it – but let’s be generous for a moment and treat it as truth.

Labour also regularly claims ownership of the phrase “devolution is a process, not an event” – although despite it being commonly attributed to Donald Dewar (whom the party self-aggrandisingly dubbed the “Father Of The Nation” in much the same way that Michael Jackson presumptuously crowned himself “King Of Pop”), the term was in fact coined by the former Welsh Secretary, the pre-disgrace Ron Davies.

So how can it be that Labour is suddenly so desperate to disown and deny the thing it claims so proudly to have invented? Because the party’s extraordinary outbreak of poisonous hostility towards devolution as an ongoing process – in the shape of its advanced forms, so-called “devo plus” or “devo max” – since the SNP won a majority in the Scottish Parliament can only be interpreted, on any sort of remotely rational examination, as a complete reversal of its entire ideology on the subject. But why?

Devo max is, in poll after poll after poll, currently the Scottish people’s most favoured constitutional choice. On that nobody disagrees. But Scottish Labour has been so spectacularly and deftly manoeuvred off this ground by Alex Salmond in the last eight months that it now finds itself in the absurd position of actively and bitterly opposing the policy it has advocated since 1999, and which most of its own supporters also back. Pitifully, the party’s leader Johann Lamont is now reduced to feebly offering the Scottish electorate a vague promise of “some extra powers, sometime, somehow“, with neither the powers nor the schedule nor the method specified.

(Which makes a hypocritical mockery of the party’s obsessive demands that the SNP must detail every last microscopic “i” and “t” and “p” and “q” of life in an independent Scotland before the referendum, as if independence would grant the Nats the right to govern Scotland and determine its policies in perpetuity.)

But let’s take a quick look at just how illogical and unviable that position is. To actually make good on their “promise” and deliver this undefined greater devolution to the Scottish people at some unknown point in the future rather than now, what would Labour have to do? The list is considerable:

1. For a start, it would need to decide which powers it wanted to give the Scottish Parliament. As we’re talking about a party that recently spent three years looking for an alternative to the Council Tax as the means of funding local government, only to eventually throw up its hands in defeat and offer no ideas whatsoever, that’s no small job in itself. At a bare minimum, then, we’d better allow four years for any sort of blueprint for Devolution 2.0 to take shape.

2. Then it would have to secure a democratic mandate for the proposals by winning control of the Scottish Parliament. A great many Labour supporters have all but conceded the 2016 election already, and while an awful lot can happen in four years it’s about as easy to see Hamilton Accies winning the SPL as Lamont being the next First Minister. (Lamont could of course go the way of Wendy Alexander and be ditched without fighting an election, but who on Earth would they replace her with?) So we’re probably up to 2020 at the earliest.

3. To be able to actually implement the changes, Labour needs control of both Parliaments. So the party would need to win a UK General Election too (because an SNP-controlled Holyrood could reject any new Scotland Bill from Westminster in the way it may well reject the current one – Labour would never be able to resist imposing terms the SNP would refuse to countenance, such as the return of planning controls to Westminster to enable the building of new nuclear power stations). And again, even the most optimistic Labour cheerleader can’t be realistically placing that any earlier than 2020.

So throw in a year or two to get the bill actually through Parliament and we’re already at least a decade (and a whole load of luck) away from Labour being able to make good on their pledge, uphold the wishes of the majority of Scots and devolve any more powers to Edinburgh. And in reality, Labour’s trajectory in Scotland seems locked in freefall – the party currently looks more likely to crumble into complete irrelevance by 2022 than storm back to power.

(In so far as we can detect any coherent strategy operating in the nerve centre of Scottish Labour at all, it’s counting on a No vote in the referendum damaging the SNP so badly that Labour would be able to win Holyrood in 2016. But we already know that around 40% of SNP voters in 2011 didn’t back independence and voted for the SNP on the basis of competent domestic governance, so that seems like deluded fantasy.)

Of course, there’s a much easier way. Labour could throw together an enhanced-devolution package right now (or let civic Scotland do it, or even pinch whatever the Lib Dems’ much-derided “Home Rule” commission comes up with), call the SNP’s bluff and force it onto the referendum ballot paper, and very likely win it. Any imperfections in the plans could be thrashed out in the negotiations with the UK Government which would have to follow – the SNP would have to grit its teeth and allow Labour a big voice in the discussions, as the “owners” of the victorious option. (The boost to Labour’s popularity might even make success in the 2016 Holyrood election a believable scenario, strengthening its hand further.)

If Labour truly believed in the ongoing “process” of devolution, it’d be a no-brainer. They’d be near-certain to secure a popular mandate for a popular policy backed by most of their own voters, from opposition, while at the same time making it much harder for the SNP to secure a Yes vote to independence. It would be a political triumph on a par with the SNP’s 2011 landslide – even if they didn’t get all their demands from the coalition, they’d be bound to achieve at least some substantial advances, to the gratitude of the Scottish electorate. So why aren’t they doing it?

The only conceivable reason (if for the sake of argument we discount the actual most likely one, namely that the party is so utterly blinded and paralysed by hatred of the SNP it just can’t think straight) is that Labour, just like the Tories, doesn’t actually want devolution to go any further at all. And there are two main driving forces behind its fear of the prospect.

Firstly, because horrified by the idea of ceding any additional power to possible future SNP governments it’s reflexively retreating behind its safety blanket – the status quo, where if the nasty Nats threaten to shake things up too much Labour can always run to Mummy Westminster, knowing that even if the Tories are in power the Unionist parties all share a single voice when it comes to Scotland.

And secondly, because the reality of the situation is plain – the people with by far the most to lose from greater Scottish devolution are Labour MPs and MSPs. The former because their influence at Westminster would almost certainly be reduced significantly in the devo-max negotiations: the Tories would demand a solution to the West Lothian Question as the price for granting greater powers to Holyrood (marginalising Labour’s Scottish delegation by isolating them from a large percentage of UK Parliamentary business), and/or a further reduction in the number of Scottish MPs altogether. And the latter because either of those scenarios would make the beefed-up Scottish Parliament grow enormously in attractiveness to Labour MPs (compared to staying in the Commons in their much-diminished roles) and lead to a brutal cull of the, let’s be kind to them, B-team which occupies the Holyrood benches at present.

There’s no other intellectually coherent explanation of Labour so furiously fighting against the best chance it will ever have to secure the policy it still publicly claims to believe in. If you want a clear democratic mandate for enhanced devolution, a referendum is overwhelmingly the best possible way to get it. (And doubly so if you’re not in power.) The alternative option means waiting half a generation or more to even have a chance of progress, and perhaps much longer. So ask yourself the question: what exactly is it about devo max that Labour’s so afraid of?