SCOTTISH Government ministers sometimes felt they were placed on the “naughty step” by Whitehall, which only informed them about policy decisions when they needed to.
This is one of the views expressed in a new report about the relationship with the UK Government as seen from the administrations in Edinburgh and Cardiff 20 years on from the start of devolution.
The Institute for Government, which published the paper - Ministers Reflect on Devolution: Lessons from 20 years of Scottish and Welsh devolution – said those in Edinburgh and Cardiff believed they were “still ignored” by Whitehall two decades on with the feeling heightened in the wake of the Brexit decision.
“Ministers Reflect” is a unique archive of interviews with former ministers, including the most senior Cabinet members of the last decade, including former Chancellors, Foreign Secretaries and Secretaries of State across all departments.
Read more: Theresa May's premiership teetering on the brink as she confronts Cabinet plotters
The latest report from the think-tank is based on a revealing set of interviews with 14 ministers from the devolved administrations expressing their views candidly.
None more so than Andy Kerr, Labour’s Scottish Health Minister from 2004 to 2007, who said: “Tony Blair came to a conference and essentially slagged me off on the rostrum about not having reformed the health service...I was on television live and watching this speech and I’m like: “What the f*** is this about?”
He also noted: “I’d been Health Minister for about three hours and it [the headline] was ‘New Health Minister in Crisis’. I’m like: ‘What f***ing crisis?’ Health was just like a box of fireworks.”
Commenting on Whitehall’s relationship with the devolved administration in Edinburgh, the former MSP for East Kilbride noted: “I don’t think they [the Treasury] treated us with any respect whatsoever. I don’t think I had a meaningful conversation with Gordon Brown about money in all the time I was there.”
Shona Robison, Scotland’s Health Secretary from 2014 until 2018, said: “There was a relationship now that was very much about ‘you only tell them what you need to tell them’ from the UK Government to Scotland. You felt sometimes you were sitting on the naughty step because we were seen as to only be talked to and informed when need had it. You could feel that frostiness.”
Carwyn Jones, the former Wales First Minister, said about Theresa May: “You couldn’t get much out of her. I found her very distant.” While with David Cameron, he said: "You could sit and talk to him but you didn’t get the impression he was listening. He was actually devolution-neutral.”
The SNP’s Alex Neil, who Scottish Health Secretary from 2012 until 2014, said of his time in Government: “We had a very good relationship with nearly every UK minister except Jeremy Hunt…I found him distinctly unhelpful.” He also described Philip Hammond when he was Transport Secretary as an “arrogant sod, quite frankly…I don't think he had any interest in anything north of Watford”.
Mr Neil also made an observation about the difference between the SNP Government run by Alex Salmond and the one by Nicola Sturgeon.
He said: “With Alex Salmond he let you get on with the job. Nicola interfered much more and policy-making was centralised in her office. Sometimes they weren’t even involving the responsible minister. She’s created a Policy Unit that's only civil servants and that's been a huge mistake.”
Lord McConnell, who was Labour FM from 2001 to 2007, commented on the, at times, fraught relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. “We found the occasionally dysfunctional relationship between No 10 and No 11 hard to work with because things would be agreed with one and then took ages to be implemented by the other.”
Describing Edinburgh’s relationship with London as “mixed” during his time in office, the Labour peer said: “We did have the odd humdinger of an argument with Margaret Beckett or John Prescott but again they were part of that older generation that found the devolution of power and autonomy harder to accept.”
Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary from 2007 to 2014, claimed former UK Justice Secretaries Ken Clarke was “very co-operative” and Jack Straw was “very much bonhomie” but he added: “What you forget is, frankly, nobody in the Home Office cares about Scotland.”
Closer to the present day, some former ministers gave an insight into the intergovernmental relationship on Brexit.
Mr Jones said: “It was becoming obvious to me that we needed to have a constitutional convention...It fell on deaf ears, honestly, in Whitehall; they couldn’t see what the problem was. That problem has been magnified by Brexit.”
Liberal Democrat peer Lord Wallace, who was Deputy FM at the start of the devolution process from 1999 until 2005, argued that UK ministers were “not living up to…proper and full engagement with Scotland and Wales.
“If you go back and look at what they said way at the beginning [of the Brexit process] about involvement, I don’t think any of that’s happened, or very little of it has happened,” he added.
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