Reform or retrenchment? Wendy Alexander on the constitution
Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander made a bold bid to take back the Scottish constitutional agenda on Sunday with the launch of her policy document, Change is What We Do:
We know that when Labour is the party of ideas on the constitution, it typically commands support. We know also that there is unfinished business from the 1998 Scotland Act and it is Scottish Labour’s job – in partnership with other parties and with our Labour colleagues in the rest of the United Kingdom – to fix it. Scottish Labour needs to rediscover its distinctive voice on the future of the United Kingdom.
The document is an important pointer to Labour’s strategy for the forthcoming Scottish Constitutional Commission. If Alexander has embraced the language of constitutional reform, she does not see it as exclusively a matter of devolving further powers from Westminster to Holyrood:
By implication the Commission should also consider any reasoned arguments for the boundary moving in the opposite direction, for example in national security related matters such as counter terrorism and contingency planning.
Alexander denounces as ‘woolly thinking’ Nicol Stephens insistence that “the Liberal Democrats will have nothing to do with stripping powers away from the Scottish Parliament.”
This difference of opinion is potentially a significant problem for the Commission, which is meant to produce a consensus between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories. The SNP were quick to seize on the signs of disagreement:
The Commission started off seeking more powers for Scotland but has now been downgraded by Brown to a working party which would take powers back to London.
By parroting Gordon Brown on taking powers away from Scotland [Alexander] has only confirmed that she is not leading Labour in Scotland but being led by Labour in London.
It is certainly true that it was Gordon Brown who first broached the subject of returning powers to Westminster, in an in an interview with the BBC’s Brian Taylor:
I think on terrorism and security there are some issues that have been raised by recent events. If you also take the outbreak of foot and mouth in the last year, and the responsibilities we all have in relation to that, perhaps both the Scottish Executive and Mr Salmond and the UK Government would want to say we could probably look at how these arrangements could be potentially different in the future for the benefit of everybody.
The powers mentioned by Brown are the same ones identified in the Alexander document. This suggests that Labour is serious about strengthening Westminster’s control over security and contingency planning. Almost certainly this is designed to include the issuing of British ID cards and the construction of a single British information registry
Labour has long seen the SNP as vulnerable on these issues. In 2006, then Home Secretary John Reid warned that: “In the face of the environment, international crime and terrorism, and mass migration, the narrow Nationalists stand helpless. Because these challenges cannot be tackled by putting border guards at Gretna Green.”
The June 2007 attack on Glasgow Airport has since shown the potential for terrorism in Scotland, but also produced an assured response from the Scottish Government, which allowed Alex Salmond to push for greater powers in the area.
On foot and mouth too, there have been calls for further devolution, notably from the National Farmers Union.
In the face of such developments, it is difficult to see how an attempt to return powers to Westminster can achieve the kind of popular support that animated previous Labour constitutional reforms. Without that consensus, Alexander’s worthy attempt to reclaim the spirit of 1998 is in danger of being reduced to an exercise in Westminster control freakery.
Filed under: Britain, Constitution, Constitutional convention, Devolution, Gordon Brown, Labour Party, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Scotland, Wendy Alexander
And Wendy went on: “I do not believe that people have lost faith in Scottish Labour’s values. But they have questioned our ability to deliver the practical policies that match those values, and to make the changes that turn those values into reality”.
The only way forward for the Labour party in Scotland is to declare independence from London. Only by doing this will people believe that it is acting on behalf of Scotland.
The SNP are demonstrably working for Scotland only and take no orders from London, as a result they are riding higher and higher in the polls as the people know that they have only the people of Scotland to account to.
Go on, be brave, break free!
The present debate is far too narrow. It appears to be restricted to wrangling over a different apportionment of ‘powers’ between Westminster and Holyrood.
The Constitutional Commission ought to be looking at what a constitution is supposed to be: an agreement among the people on the ‘rules of the game’ i.e. on the kind of political system they want to see in place to regulate certain aspects of their lives - not a collection of rules imposed on them by their unrepresentative representatives which does not fundamentally revision the overall system.
The interest of the major political parties lies predominantly in preserving the status quo i.e. in an undemocratic distribution of power between ‘government/parliament’ and ‘the people’. The principle of accountability of both the executive and parliament to the people - the second of the four ‘key principles’ outlined by the CSG and fully endorsed by both executive and parliament - has been consistently ignored.
What is needed is not some tinkering with the current set-up, but an acceptance of the need to start from basic principles - including the most fundamental one of popular sovereignty implied by the second of the CSG’s key principles.
This would require a constitutional commission which is open to large-scale input from the public and which starts from the question: “What kind of political system do we, the people, wish to put in place in a 21st-century Scotland?”
An excellent model for deriving a new constitution - and for the constitution itself - is that of the Swiss canton of Zurich, which gave itself a new constitution in 2006. I contributed a comment in an 11th May 2007 OK thread entitled “No crisis today, thank you ..”
I am currently translating the new Zurich constitution, which I would urge all those genuinely interested in a forward-looking constitutional settlement for Scotland to take to heart.
Sincerely,
Paul Carline
“By implication the Commission should also consider any reasoned arguments for the boundary moving in the opposite direction, for example in national security related matters such as counter terrorism and contingency planning.”
Civil contingency and counter terrorism planning are not the main focus of the Labour party in their drive to return powers to Westminster. The particular elephant in this room which nobody in the Labour party wants to mention is planning power.
The Scottish Parliament has the last word on planning issues and can stop the building of nuclear power stations or nuclear waste dumps by using its planning powers and has said it will do so even though Westminster controls the UK’s energy policy.
It is likely that this whole “commission” charade is simply Gordon Brown scheming to take back planning powers from the Scottish Parliament so that nuclear power plants and waste dumps can be imposed on Scotland whether the Scottish Parliament likes it or not.
In the light of the French nuclear accord which was featured in the news tonight it is almost a certainty that Gordon wants to clear the way to build nuclear plants or waste dumps in Scotland.
Since the Lib-Dems have said they want no powers to return to Westminster the wrangling to decide the remit and scope of this Commission is going to be fun, especially for those of us who support the SNP and suspect the whole thing is going to end in recrimination and tears as the Lib-Dems face being tarred as a party who brought new nuclear plants and waste dumps to Scotland if they stay on in the “Wendy” Commission.
The most significant news in Scotland this week is that in the wake of the above news, Alex Salmond has been attending a physiotherapist to try to remove the smile from his face. There was also a rumour that he had died of mirth but he laughed that one off!