When Tony Blair finally leaves office later this year, what legacy will he have left behind? It seems fair to say that his time in power has been characterized more than anything by the chaos in Iraq and the lies that fuelled them. If that’s an unfairly narrow assessment, how about selling our schools and hospitals up the river into debt and mismanagement, cracking down on civil liberties in the name of terrorism, and selling off honours to his seedy benefactors?
That’s pretty much how I see him, but I wonder if history will agree with me. Blair followed Bush in attacking Iraq, he followed Thatcher in attacking the welfare state, and he followed pretty much the whole rest of the flock in attacking post-9/11 civil rights. None of them were really his, and the corruption thing has yet to be proved. But once the historians of the future get around to Blair’s chapter, there will be one dramatic, and enduring legacy that they won’t be able to avoid.
I’m talking about devolution. In 1997, the United Kingdom was one country, ruled centrally from Westminster as it had been for hundreds of years. In 2007, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and London each have their own semi-autonomous governments, and are doing pretty well with it. (England, as a whole, is now ironically under-represented, but the writing is on the wall that it may not be for long.) The Scots in, particular, are so happy with their parliament that the idea of Scottish independence is now being seriously floated on both sides of the border.
Indeed, why not? Unionists have long held that - despite the many examples to the countrary in Northern Europe, especially Norway - a poor, small and isolated region like Scotland can never make it on its own. The thing is, now it doesn’t have to. An independent Scotland would stay within the EU, and would actually be able to integrate itself more closely with its neighbours when freed from the more euroskeptic politics of England. Indeed, Scotland isn’t even as poor as all that. Edinburgh is one of the main financial centres of Europe, and the loss of subsidies from England would be compensated for by the restoration of the North sea oil and gas money (currently classed as an extra-regional resource, most of the oil and gas fields are firmly in Scottish territory.
A compromise position, of a semi-autonomous Scotland within a federal UK often seems like a good idea, but it all depends on the interpretation of the semi-word “semi-”. The Scottish parliament already decides how to spend its money, but it only has limited power over how it raises its money; surely fiscal freedom is not too much to ask for? That leaves foreign policy, as well as things like immigration policy and asylum. Surveys have shown time and time again that Scots tend to have far more liberal attitudes towards these things than the English, and few areas of politics are more charged or emotive; surely there’s a case for not forcing Scotland to follow England into war and xenophobia. The logical conclusion of this is a truly autonomous and independent state.
A lot of the current support for Scottish independance comes from English bitterness; Scots MPs can vote on issues that affect only England (and are widely suspected of voting based more on spite than reason), and many of New Labour’s most prominent players are and have been Scottish - the Caledonian Mafia so wonderfully satirized in The Thick Of It. When I visited Ben Nevis last summer, I heard no mention of independence until I came back South of the border, where some English newspaper was running a prominent poster campaign to get rid of Scotland. I don’t want to be associated with knee-jerk scotophobes any more than with knee-jerk islamophobes, but the under-representation of England is as unsustainable as it is unfair, and once it is addressed I’m sure we can be good neighbours again.
Incidentally, the reason I bring all this up now is that, in the eyes of the internet at least, the Union has already disappeared. You know when you have to write your address in an HTML form you sometimes have to choose your country from a long list in a drop down box. It’s frustrating at first, not knowing whether to look for Britain, England, Great Britain, or United Kingdom, but you soon realise that they’re all the same and its always United Kingdom. Well, not any more. In both the forms I’ve had to fill in in 2007 so far, the United Kingdom had disappeared. As far as facebook.com and the GRE examination board are concerned, I’m in England.
I’m fine with this velvet divorce, but I do feel that its my role as one of the children to make it a bit more complicated. Because, and as a Northerner in Surrey I feel this acutely, the deepest divide in the UK is not between England, Wales and Scotland, but between London and Everyone Else. At home, I’d always got the impression that we were being neglected in some way at London’s expense (there was a particularly bitter taste in the air when the tram extension from Manchester to our area was cancelled due to lack of funds the same week that a new tram in London was announced to strengthen its olympic bid) but, financially at least, that’s simply not true. In terms of taxes raised and spent, London generousy subsidises the rest of us.
Filthy Commie that he is, London’s first elected mayor Ken Livingston has been transforming London. Creating an integrated public transport system and pricing cars out of town is making the capital a much nicer and easierplace to be. Before Thatcher, other cities had similar things going - the dismantling of Newcastle’s world class tram and bus network was truly criminal - and, with a bit more self-determination, they could again.
The idea of regional assemblies was floated in the 90s, but the regions were huge and meaningless, the assemblies’ powers ill-defined, and the referendum for the North-East gave such a resounding “no” that they didn’t even bother asking the other regions. But while I would be suspicious of a vast, nebulous North-West Assembly, I can see a London-style Manchester Assembly with an elected mayor going down well, and one for Liverpool, for Sheffield, Birmingham and all that. This model works well for the big industrial cities North, though care would have to be taken not to isolate rural areas and smaller towns; it would certainly serve us better than regional devolution.
Of course, all that’s just a tiny part of what’s messed up with our system; maybe a divorce from Scotland would provide and opportunity to address things like the abolition of the monarchy, democratisation or abolition of the House Of Lords, an independent judiciary, proportional representation and such and such. But all the Scot-bashing just distracts from the real issue - the Londonification of England.
I could go on. Indeed, I intended to. But it’s getting late and i’m getting tired; the paragraphs I was churning out about the causes and effects of London’s disproportionate growth were exhausting in their incoherence. i’ve had to delete them. Check out this article, though, and remember that those surveys that said a Scottish accent sounds “trustworthy” also revealed systematic prejudice against the lazy and dishonest Scousers, Brummies, Geordies and other provincials. I think I’d better start planning these things before I write them, and maybe writing them before 1am.
A really interesting read, and as a northerner myself I agree with your analysis of our London-centric England. You are also right that a lot of the English reaction to devolution is characterised by anti-Scottishness, which as a campaigner for an Englsh Parliament, but lover of the Scots and semi-resident at times - I myself detest.
Your economic analysis of Scotland’s potential future is problematic though. The claim to whatever oil reserves are left needs to account for the English claim to same said reserves. England’s territorial waters used to extend in a firm NE direction, cutting through the current North Sea oil fields. Who’s to say they wouldn’t again? Also, Scotland has an enormous dependency culture which would make enterprise and economic growth challenging, and a quite radical change in ideological mindset would be necessary for Scotland to develop the economic power of say, Ireland - which otherwise might make a good comparison. In Eire they have a low tax, enterprise economy.
Talking to people I know in Scotland there is a kind of ironic hangover from the devolutionary settlement of 1998 in that they equate the UK parliament to an ‘English’ parliament still, and no matter what the Scots parliament does, the Auld enemy still runs things, de-facto, south of their border. This is why to preserve the Union, a federal or con-federal symmetric devolutionary settlement with a full English parliament is needed to balance powers and opinions.
It is interesting comparing the two nations. Scotland is independence-minded yet seemingly happy with the EU. England is eurosceptic and independent minded. I do wonder whether Scotland’s pro-EU stance is a cultural throwback to the Old alliance, and ‘anyone but England’. The reality I think, given both nations popular independent-mindedness, is that Scotland would tire of the EU as soon as it became enterprising enough to escape it. Of course, for an independent England - leaving the EU would be a no-brainer, and in any case separation of the two nations would in theory force renegotiation of EU membership - and thus almost certainly a referendum.
It could be interesting changing £s for Euros to go shopping on Princes Street . . .
Even if one discards the oilfields, one has to ask why Scotland’s growth is so much slower than, say, the Baltic states or Eire. The difference in tax policy to which you refer is a red herring. Anyway, Eire’s fantastic progress over the last few decades is very much thanks to its investment in education, a stance that Scotland seems likely to follow.
Perhaps there is some throwback to the Old Alliance, but small countries like Scotland are the ones that get the best of the EU deal anyway. I don’t believe either country would leave the EU, especially not Scotland - but if you are right and they did, what difference would that make? I’m not sure how much sense it would make for Scotland to join the Euro, though.
You’re right that the Parliament in Westminster represents the Scots as well as the English, but many groups can legitimately complain of being sidelined. I’m not just talking about uneven investment in the regions either - with our increasingly presidential system of government, whatever the dominant clique wants to push through, gets through.
An independent Scotland would not have gone to war with Iraq, nor undertaken in the PFI looting of our schools and hospitals. I think that really, if the Scots think they could run Scotland better without the English bogging them down, then why not? I’m not making a case for independence, so much as saying that a don’t really see a strong case against it.