English devolution

My Times column on English devolution following
the Scottish independence referendum:

 

As part of the 1 per cent of England’s population
that lives north of Hadrian’s Wall, I have found the past few weeks
more than usually intriguing. It was fascinating to find that
nearly everybody in the media seems to think the wall is the
Scottish border; some news takes 1,500 years to reach the
metropolis. And we northeasterners have been banging on for decades
about the unfairness of the Barnett formula, which guarantees
£1,600 extra in public spending per Scottish head per year, so it’s
nice to see the rest of England waking up to that one, too.

Labour needs to be reminded of its biggest electoral defeat. Ten
years ago, almost to the day, the northeast was asked by John
Prescott if it wanted an assembly and it said “no” in the most
emphatic way imaginable — by 78 per cent to 22 per cent in a
referendum. That’s not a landslide, that’s an entombment.

Labour’s attempt to squirm off the hook — on which the prime
minister impaled it last week with his call for English home rule —
will probably include giving the regions more power. That’s what
Brussels wants too (and therefore the Liberal Democrats): the
European Union’s notorious map of a future in which power lies at
the European and regional level does not recognise England as a
region. Only by breaking down England into fragments does the
nation’s disproportionate size become compatible with
federalism.

Yet if anywhere in England should feel ripe for semi-detached
regional devolution it would be us in the northeast. We are as
chippy as they come about southern condescension, we live farther
from London than any other English people, our cities are so
isolated by sheep-infested hills from other English cities they
might as well be on an island. We speak a patois that southerners
claim to find impenetrable, our patriotic regional anthems are
about a fictional bus crash and a large worm, we wear very little
on a Friday night and we spent hundreds of years joining any doomed
rebellion against the crown that was on offer.

Nonetheless in 2004 the people of the northeast spoke with one
voice, or at least by a margin of almost four to one, against the
idea of a regional assembly. Why? Because, although they like
localism, they feel loyalty to England rather than any artificial
entity called the northeast. The inhabitants of Sunderland or
Berwick or Stockton have less than no desire to be governed from
Newcastle. In 2004 they knew a bureaucratic white elephant when
they saw one.

The Labour party and the European Commission (and the Liberal
Democrats for that matter) just do not get this. Any plan to
imitate feckless Scottish or Welsh semi-detachment with gleaming
new buildings to house self-important “assemblies” in Newcastle,
Birmingham, Norwich, Bristol and Liverpool will go against the
grain of England. The one in Cardiff, cut off from much of Wales by
miles of sheep and gorse, was put there by just one in four Welsh
voters. It has developed a reputation for incompetence where it is
relevant at all.

For the Conservatives, the penny has now dropped that English
devolution means English votes on English laws inside the Palace of
Westminster. I’ve never understood why people find the West Lothian
question so hard. We solve it every day in practice: British
ministers and civil servants already have no powers over Scottish
education, Scottish agricultural subsidies, Scottish health service
priorities, Scottish sentencing policy. It works fine.

It’s perfectly possible to exclude Scottish MPs from voting and
speaking on these and many other matters, too. There will be the
odd moment of confusion when an inebriated Glaswegian MP wanders
into the wrong committee debate, but so what? No need to build an
over-budget, ugly building in Sheffield and fill it with jobsworth
“EMPs”.

Sure, there would be a constitutional crisis if a Labour prime
minister were elected with a British but not an English majority,
and found himself regularly outvoted, but we have a well-tried
solution to such crises — a temporary coalition with another party
or a vote of confidence and another general election.

One big advantage of more democratic decision making at the
level of the four nations would be to encourage competition between
them in tax policy and in the provision of services. We are already
seeing glimmers of this in the effect of Wales’s poor and declining
results in international school league tables as well as its
underperforming health service.

Northern Ireland offers an illuminating example of how
devolution should work. Whereas the Scots have refused to use the
tax-varying powers they already have, Stormont may be on the brink
of leading the way.

Seeing how the Irish Republic’s dramatic cut in corporation tax
to 12.5 per cent attracted businesses, Owen Paterson, when Northern
Ireland secretary, argued for a similar cut in Northern Ireland. He
persuaded all parties there to back the idea and got the Treasury
on board by suggesting that it knock the corporation tax income off
the province’s central government block grant, making the change
revenue-neutral as far as Whitehall was concerned.

The change should happen soon. That is a key lesson for how to
do real devolution as opposed to the spend-and-whine version
favoured by the Scottish nationalists. Mr Paterson argues that
devolution must restore the link between tax, services and votes.
England’s antipathy to regionalism need not preclude more
localism.

Proper financial accountability at the level of the county,
rural or metropolitan, would transform local democracy and attract
better councillors. Single-tier counties (many of which are bigger
than some American states) would start to compete on price or on
quality of service instead of competing, as they do now, on their
ability to extract largesse from central government. We should
emulate the way America uses state government as a laboratory to
test policy.

Of course, there is a heck of a lot that counties (and nations)
would not be allowed to do by Brussels: compete on VAT, abolish
agricultural subsidies and so forth. But at least we would flush
this out. At the moment nobody realises just how many of the
decisions that politicians pretend to take are in fact handed down
by unelected Eurocrats to unelected Sir Humphreys with a token nod
through parliament. Genuine English home rule would soon clash with
the technocratic version offered by Brussels. Another reason to
like it.