Devolution in the United Kingdom: Ireland, Scotland and Wales - Part 2

Continued from yesterday

Chanaka Amaratunga Memorial Lecture delivered by Warwick Lightfoot. he is a member of the British Conservative Party, Former Mayor, Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

CAPACITY: This second episode of devolution illustrated the capacity of the issues to dissolve party localities and reconfigure the relative strengths of the parties for a lengthy period.

The Labour Government believed devolution to be in the party's interest and reluctantly had agreed to it, but it could not carry enough of its supporters to ensure that it was implemented.

Devolution exposed the Labour Government to a no confidence motion at an exceptionally ill opportune moment for the Callaghan Government, just months after the so-called winter of discontent. The devolution had divided the Labour Party and culminated in a fiasco, which helped the Conservatives and damaged all the parties including the Liberals that had supported devolution.

While the Conservatives had ridden high under Mrs Thatcher during the economic problems and the IMF crisis in 1976, it was not quite so clear in, for example, 1978 that the Conservatives would win an election with a comfortable majority.

In May 1979 Mrs Thatcher got a majority of 45. Without the help of the timing of the no confidence motion, brought about by devolution, the Conservatives may have secured a much narrower majority. It is not clear that Mrs Thatcher's administration would have weathered its first three difficult years, as comfortably, if it had a much tighter majority.

It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to assert that devolution gave Mrs Thatcher and her Conservatives an opportunity that they used and ultimately contributed to eighteen years of uninterrupted Conservative Government.

The UK's Constitutional Problem

The fact that devolution was defeated and abandoned for eighteen years did not mean that the awkward constitutional issues that the Royal Commission on the Constitution has wrestled with had gone away. These can be roughly summarised. Britain was apart from Japan, the world's largest unitary democratic state and one of the world's most centralised democracies.

In the context of a modern welfare state with extensive intervention in housing, education, health and economic and social regeneration, such centralisation poses practical problems of accountability and management.

In Scotland and Wales there was extensive executive devolution to the territorial departments, the Scottish and Welsh offices, but that was not matched by a comparable devolved legislative oversight. And it probably resulted in too little direct political oversight by ministers.

In practice many decisions were taken and implemented by the elite administrative civil service to a greater degree than would normally happen in a non-territorial department such as Health or Education. In Scotland the lack of a devolved legislature was even more pronounced. Scotland has a separate legal system based on a civil rather than a common law tradition and a separate judiciary and separate law officers.

Similar issues applied to the English regions with concern being most acutely felt in the North East of England and the far South West of England, particularly in Cornwall.

At the same time from the publication of FE Schumacher's Small is Beautiful in early 1970s there has been a growing interest in specifically local social and economic experiment and innovation.

To be continued