In his big speech this week, Andy Burnham said politicians need to cooperate more and spend less time arguing and more time “pulling in the same direction” (north, presumably). But something Mr Burnham said in the speech about Scotland has, with grim inevitability, caused a disagreement with the First Minister John Swinney, specifically a disagreement about what people might be thinking in Dundee. Mr Burnham says one thing. Mr Swinney says another. And there goes the new age of collaboration.
I guess you could say it was Mr Burnham who started it really because he was the first to mention Dundee. Everyone knows, because he tells us, that Mr Burnham was a DJ and everyone knows, because he tells us, that he’s a fan of The Smiths, which makes me wonder if his choice of Dundee as an example in the speech was influenced by his days in the 1980s listening on his Manchester stereo in his Manchester bedroom in his Manchester house to lyrics about DJs in provincial towns being led triumphantly to the gallows. Maybe.
But whatever the reason for choosing Dundee in particular, his argument is that the city and other places like it need more devolution. The UK, he says, is one of the most over-centralised countries in the world and his mission is to change that by extending devolution further: “taking power deeper down”. He said in the speech that “the people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster,” which is the bit that’s caused the disagreement with Mr Swinney.
The First Minister’s response to Mr Burnham was that Dundee doesn’t feel distant from Holyrood at all, far from it. “The city of Dundee just re-elected SNP members of the Scottish Parliament and the Labour Party got terrible results in the city,” he said. He also said Mr Burnham’s remarks about Dundee demonstrated his “lack of knowledge” about Scotland (sub-text: Mr Burnham is English).
Read more
Can the plan to save the Egyptian Halls in Glasgow work? | The Herald
SNP MP Lara Bird's accent is a sign of what we’re really like | The Herald
SNP reaction to ruling on trans prison guidance is a new low | The Herald
Clearly, there is some truth in what Mr Swinney says about support in Dundee. You’ll remember some people called it Yes City in 2014 because the result there was 57% for independence and many of its voters have remained bewilderingly loyal to the SNP ever since. As Mr Swinney says, the SNP won both the city’s seats in the Holyrood election, with big leads over the second-placed parties. But compare the results to the Holyrood election before and, even in Yes City, like everywhere else, the SNP vote has atrophied. The Yes is a lot less loud.
As for Mr Swinney’s other accusation, that Mr Burnham’s support for extending devolution is down to a “lack of knowledge” about Scotland, it is much less justifiable – in fact, it’s a bit rich coming from the leader of the SNP. Mr Burnham’s argument essentially is that while national government has got bigger, particularly since the pandemic, local government is “threadbare” and that the imbalance between national and local government is holding back growth. His solution is to extend devolution, including more powers for rural economics to address issues specific to them and more powers for areas undergoing industrial transition such as Aberdeen, the other Scottish city he name-checked in his speech. The question for the leader of the SNP is: what exactly has Mr Burnham got wrong here?
Let’s deal with the things he said in turn: first, his claim that the UK is one of the most over-centralised countries in the world. We can safely say it’s much less centralised than it used to be before the creation of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, but it is not a federal system in the true sense: the genome of the British state carried over into the new Scottish system, meaning Scotland is still highly centralised except it’s centralised in Edinburgh instead of London. It was interesting to hear Mr Burnham cite the German Basic Law in his speech because Germany is genuinely federal; there is a law, for example, forbidding central government from interfering in the fiscal affairs of its municipalities. They have many lessons to teach us.
Secondly, Mr Burnham’s claim that national government has got bigger. Again: yes, it has, strikingly so in Scotland and one of the ways in which it’s happened is that the Scottish Government has dramatically increased the list of government priorities local government has to deliver. To put it another way, council autonomy is being undermined because there’s an increasing proportion of their spending that’s controlled by national government. To put it yet another way, national government in Scotland has got bigger.
Which leads directly to Mr Burnham’s claim that local government is “threadbare” – the facts in Scotland back him up once more. Local government’s share of the Scottish Government’s revenue budget has declined significantly: it was 34.7% in 2013/14 and is projected to be 24.8% by 2028/9. Not only is that another example of the centralising of the SNP - the tightening of control through money - it’s happening at a time of rising commitments which means local authority budgets are getting gappier, or threadbare if you prefer, and councils are struggling. Mr Burnham also makes a strong point when he says the imbalance between national and local government is holding back growth: the think tank Centre of Cities says that if Glasgow’s economy performed in line with its size, Scotland’s economy as a whole would be 4.6% larger.
Mr Burnham’s solution to all of this, as he said, is to extend devolution further, and it’s interesting he should cite Aberdeen and rural areas. The people of Aberdeen are absolutely feeling that power is centralised in Edinburgh and that decisions – on oil and gas for example – would be better made locally; it’s why they voted Tory at the by-election. Many people in rural areas also feel politically distant from Holyrood and a good example is Arran. The locals there told the government they needed quick, small ferries or catamarans but the Edinburgh government didn’t listen and did their own thing, with disastrous results. Another quick fact that might help you see what’s been going on here: Nicola Sturgeon’s ministerial diaries between 2021 and 2023 show only one solitary diary entry on a rural subject in the whole two-year period. It’s hard to listen when you’re not even in the room.
So my response to the First Minister would be that he should back off a bit with his accusations of “lack of knowledge” as Mr Burnham’s assessment of devolution in Scotland looks a lot more accurate than Mr Swinney’s. It’s the thing we always come back to with the SNP isn’t it: they denounce UK governments for centralising power to Westminster (when they’ve consistently and explicitly done the opposite) and yet do nothing to decentralise power within Scotland itself.
And we know why. They are unitary nationalists. They rail against a state they say is centralised but isn’t, while creating a new one that actually is. They seek to act for the nation because they see themselves as the nation. And so when an incoming prime minister makes a speech and suggests there might be a better way of doing things, they don’t like it much, do they?
Share