York, London and Edinburgh
I
The Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson has raised the f-word from its academic dust. Will it help her cause? She is right to equate ‘devo-max’ with a type of federalism (there’s even a Tory precedent in the ideas of F S Oliver): powers systematically shared between regional and central legislatures. But will this – at a perilously late stage – save her party or prevent Britain from breaking up?
That was 1983. Neal Ascherson welcomed the idea in the Scotsman and it surfaced at various conferences where devolvers recuperated. There are elements of it in the constitutional ideas of the BBC’s Scotland 2000 in 1986-7: the brainchild of Alasdair Milne before Thatcher cut him down.
II
I made the federal case in the first ‘Scotland 2000’ TV programme ‘Grasping the Thistle’. It was influenced by six years’ teaching at the University of Tuebingen, and by devolution in CDU-dominated Baden-Wuerttemberg (Ba-Wue) forging new types of hi-tech industry. Manufacturing is over 30% of GDP against 12% in Scotland, its population now double ours. I have as MSP, like an auld dominie, played that tawse regularly on the rump of Holyrood Toryism. To some effect, it seems. But has Davidson converted in time?
The Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 has some federal elements, as both the great proponent of parliamentary sovereignty Prof A V Dicey and Labour’s Harold Laski argued. The historian Nick Phillipson has written of the ‘semi-independence’ of key institutions: kirk, law, universities, local government, sport, and the oligarchs of business and banking. As their power waned after the first world war, administrative devolution picked up some of the ‘semi-independent’ slack.
But four things distorted this: first the sheer male-dominance of those Scots ‘estates’: only since 1999 has there been, both in Scotland and Wales, any sort of gender balance, pushing women from insignificance to around a third of legislators.
Second: the economic impact of Mrs Thatcher, who in 1979 switched investment from Britain to Europe. The bounty of the North Sea fuelled West German eco-hi-tech in the 1980s, helping it to manage, against the odds, the integration of East Germany after 1989.
Third: throwing convention aside, Thatcher’s naïve ‘marketism’ tore British politics apart. The Conservative Party was collateral damage; it only survives as a ‘British’ party through devolution and PR.
Finally: the post-Communist ‘kleptocracies’ strengthened the predators of metropolitan tax-haven London, reinforced by the ‘masters of the universe’ who launched themselves on UK finance, enterprise and culture. ‘Bank’ became a four-letter word.
III
‘All politics is convention’ said Disraeli. The great Scottish constitutionalist Lord Bryce recognised in his American Commonwealth of 1889 that federalism didn’t replace convention, but multiplied it: particularly through parties with their local bosses, precinct captains, favoured ethnic groups. This wasn’t straightforward. Bryce also found this culture crude, reductive and often corrupt. In 1861-5 it broke down in one of the century’s most destructive wars, and its learning-process has conserved an eccentric power-system in which tiny states like Wyoming (576,000) outgun Chicago (1.7 million).
In Germany ‘co-operative federalism’, centred formally in the Bundesrat, underpins 16 Laender and the Bund with a dense network of convention: from federal institutes, ministerial conferences and consultative bodies, to the bureaucracies of trades unions and churches. It’s physically replicated in the engineering of the Bundesbahn. Stephensonstrasse, Frankfurt, coordinates not just its huge network but much of the UK’s ‘privatised’ system. By contrast, in post-devolution UK a Scottish first minister recorded the many months that lapsed before the chancellor got in touch. This wasn’t Alex Salmond but Labour’s Jack McConnell.
Convention within the union tradition depended on decentralised manufacturing firms: banks, railways, town councils, the middle class press. In the first world war, under Lloyd George, 1916-18, the provinces saved the centre, just as the Allied High Command became a confederation of sorts. Market mania since 1980 has destroyed most of manufacturing, with appalling consequences for actual as well as political ecology. Can a political nation without a major commercial publisher, which lets tax-dodging oligarchs and multinationals loot its economy, function for much longer? Federation takes time, needs consensus, and we haven’t got either. Another Lib Dem cause? Another ‘Alternative Vote’ disaster?
De Valera was part-creator of the modern Commonwealth with his concept of ‘external association’: if you got rid of the rhetoric of empire, the framework was there for former rebels to use in London the World City, like Danny Boyle’s fairy dust settling on the Olympics last summer. Indeed, something that Fitzgerald helped create, the British-Irish agreement of Easter 1998, actually laid the confederal basis: tackling a 30-year sectarian stand-off with the integration of ad hoc bilateral treaties into common action. Surely a confederal Railway Commission or Finance Police would enforce better than the pigs’ breakfasts of private rail, or the FSA?
A federal constitution is ‘rigid’, when the drift has been away from politics to expressions of opinion, and indeed decisions, that are instant and fleeting. This hasn’t helped today’s USA as its hemispheric control declines with the oil economy, ‘fracking’ notwithstanding – and the terrifying ecological downslide of Chinese ‘Leninist Capitalism’. As Chris Smout recently put it, Scotland claims a 13% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, 1995-2004, but ‘if we count the gas generated by manufactured imports, they rose by 11%’. Against this he notes that about two-thirds of the UK’s annual 20,000 million coal-equivalent tonnes of renewable energy splurge around Scotland’s coasts: as strong a motive for autonomy as Norway had in 1905, with the world’s third-largest merchant fleet.
Against such oncoming crises, confederalism – ‘Scandinavian’ independence followed by a series of ‘strong’ alliances, perhaps replacing the Lords with a ‘Council of the Islands’ (in Dublin?) can combine bespoke systems that work efficiently. It can restore local power – by decentralising taxation – yet develop internationality. There has always been a strong element in Scotland, not of formal theory, but the ethos of the Covenant, from Greyfriars Kirk to the UN: understanding how responsive institutions function, and enabling them to evolve.
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland
and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany
and Scotland
