Adam Tomkins is not a typical politician. At least not yet. I hope he doesn’t become one. Too few of our politicians have an edge; an ability to think outside of the constraints of the daily ‘lines to take’.
Tomkins remains unafraid to do so, and often publicly. He does this again today, in the Herald on Sunday, when he calls for directly-elected mayors to oversee the delivery of Scotland’s city deal projects.
This devolutionary streak is outside the boundaries of Tory policy, but much more importantly it is also outside the boundaries of Tory orthodoxy. This orthodoxy is tough to expel. When people join the Tory party they are exposed to an instinctive deference to Westminster. They bend the knee. This centralising party, in this centralised country, has historically allowed the liberalism which has led so much of its economic action, and some of its social action, to be snuffed out by conservatism on decentralisation.
Tomkins has a baked-in advantage here, because he hasn’t been a Tory for particularly long. He is a post-devolution Tory. He can see, I presume, what many Tory ‘lifers’ cannot. Tory MSPs who, from 1999 until at least 2011, swam against the tide of devolution, were effectively attempting to switch off their own life support machine.
Devolution saved the Tories in Scotland. Not because they suddenly went from zero representatives to (at the time) 18 - that was simply the manifestation. It saved them because devolution creates responsibility, and responsibility creates Tories. This is a factual, rather than political, point. It is empirically clear that in times where responsibility, particularly financial responsibility, is most needed, Tories do well, with 1979 and 2010 being the most obvious recent examples.
Tomkins has correctly identified the need for such responsibility to be exercised around Scottish city deals, which were intensely political, rather than economic, events. The economic and governance models for many of these deals could have been written with a thick marker on the back of a postage stamp, and the deals would still have been signed.
A strong, credible, directly-elected mayor for these pan-local authority regions would not only inject ballast into the process, but would make the deals’ benefits more tangible by giving them a face.
For Tomkins, though, I wonder whether the mayor plan is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Opposition to independence and/or to another independence referendum has been the one and only ‘big idea’ the Tory party has had during devolution. Independence is a political cash cow for the Tory party. It is likely to remain profitable for another electoral cycle, after which, post-2022, it may no longer be.
What then? The answer may lie in building a new, modern, centre-right movement from the bottom up, using the vehicle of more powerful, muscular city-regions, with empowered local authorities underneath.
Local authorities are relatively powerless. They have little responsibility to exercise, so the electorate has little incentive to elect a party which sees its central selling point as its ability to exercise financial responsibility. The truth is that it doesn’t really matter which party runs our local authorities - the outcome is basically the same.
But just as the Scottish Parliament gifted the Tories a meaningful role at a Scottish level, mayors could gift them a role at a local and regional level. This is important not just as an end in itself, but as a means to create a national movement which is built upon the rock of local delivery, not the sand of the independence question which, one way or another, may soon have an answer.
The Tories need a big idea. Perhaps this is it.
Andy Maciver is Director at Message Matters
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