Labour to mothball assembly plans?

'When Labour's Convention fails to deliver, the Scots will be OK, because the SNP and its policy will be there intact as the only way out of the unionist prison.' Jim Sillars, in the Scotsman July 1st 1989.

Editorial The Scotsman 5th June 1996

This is not just because Michael Forsyth's campaign against the tartan tax has got Labour worried. That has played its part, of course, for it has exposed the intellectual in-coherence of the Scottish Constitutional Convention's proposals which Labour adopted.

Anyone not caught up in the enthusiasm for devolution could see that granting a Scottish parliament the right to vary the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound not only involved all sorts of administrative difficulties - concerning, for example, people working in Scotland whose PAYE tax was paid by companies in England, or what the Inland Revenue would charge the Scottish administration for adjusting tax codes and collecting extra tax due - but also created political difficulties.

For only an innocent could suppose that a decision by the Scottish parliament to use this power of varying the tax rate in Scotland would not lead at least to questioning at Westminster of the appropriate level of the block grant which Westminster would be making to Edinburgh.

Now, rattled by Forsyth's attack on the tax-raising power, Labour is feebly defending it with the suggestion that the parliament might be pre-cluded from exercising this right to tax during its first term. As a defence against the Tory criti-cism, this is as preposterous as it is feeble.

The tax question is only one side of it. It is evidence, along with the refusal to consider the West Lothian question or the position of the Secretary of State or the level of Scottish repre-sentation at Westminster, of the curious blindness of those who framed the convention's plans, of their inability to understand the nature of the undertaking on which they had embarked.

From the time when the convention first met, some of the more sceptical among us argued that, while independence might be essentially a matter for Scotland alone (even though its terms would of course have to be negotiated with London), any scheme of devolution required the consent of the rest of the United Kingdom. We argued thus because we conceived of the UK as a partnership, and we recognised that if you want to change the terms of a partnership, you have to agree the new terms with your other partners; contracts cannot be changed unilaterally. Yet the oddity of Labour's devolution plans is that they appear to have been worked out by the Labour Party in Scotland without, or almost without, reference to the views even of the Labour Party in England and Wales. This is one reason why the commitment of the Labour Party as a whole is now doubtful.

There is another, and it is perhaps even more important. For 17 years, there has been one good argument for a Scottish parliament and hence for political devolution to match the administrative devolution we already enjoy. It is that Scotland has been governed by a party which has not been able to command a majority in Scotland. Even the staunchest of Unionists must have had moments when they agreed this was unsatisfactory. The reluctance of George Younger and Malcolm Rifkind as Secretary of State to expose Scotland to the full vigour of Thatcherism offered a tacit recognition of this.

But if Labour wins the next election this argument withers, or begins to wither. The question will be asked whether a Scottish parliament would really deliver services, and express the will of the Scottish people (or at least of the Labour-voting Scottish people), better or more efficiently than a Labour-run Scottish Office working in harmony with the new unitary authorities, themselves, mostly Labour-controlled. Given that such a parliament might arrive in the third year of a Labour government when dissatisfaction with its performance might be at its height, the answer is quite probably "No" - from Labour's point of view.

Moreover, if Labour wins the next election with a majority that is big enough to make at least two terms of office probable, then the urgency of creating a parliament which will guard Scotland against an unrepresentative Tory government naturally diminishes. Might it not, Labour unionists will be saying, be wiser to coast for a bit? After all, what could a Scottish parliament do for Scotland that a securely-based Labour Government couldn't?

If, on the other hand, Labour has only a small majority, is it really worth stirring up trouble and devoting an inordinate amount of Parliamentary time to such a contentious issue, which is at least as much distrusted and disliked by some Labour backbenchers as the Maastricht Treaty was by, originally, a handful of Tory backbenchers? And we know, don't we, how big a part the Maastricht debates played in damaging the authority of John Major's Government. Is Tony Blair prepared to run that risk? Would he be prepared, for instance, to pass a Scotland bill, if it contained an amendment to reduce the number of Scottish MPs to, say, 57? Would he even be prepared to do so if the Tories announced that they would certainly so amend the Act when they returned to power?

Of course, there are Labour members who will fight hard to retain the party's commitment to a Scottish parliament or to prevent current proposals from being watered down. Robertson is certainly among them. Moreover, they can still fall back on the argument which first converted Labour to devolution: that it is necessary to thwart the SNP and prevent Labour support from seeping away to the Nationalists. They may be right in that judgment, although it would look more convincing if Alex Salmond hadn't accepted devolution as a first step leading to independence. Either Salmond or Robertson must be mistaken in his estimate of the consequences of setting up a Scottish parliament.

In any case, there is another argument: that (a) the SNP hasn't improved its position in 20 years and (b) its strength is in part a reflection of the Scottish distaste for the Tories and the feelings of impotence aroused by subjection to a minority government; both should fade away once Labour is in office. So why set up a parliament to appease the Nats, who won't be appeased by it, when all the evidence suggests that the establishment of a parliament ranks pretty low among the concerns of the mass of Labour voters?

At the moment I should say it is still odds-on that Labour will abide by its promise to set up a parliament in Edinburgh. But that could change. It may be significant that the Labour leader appears to attach more more importance to the reform of the House of Lords than to a Scottish parliament. We shall see.