Agenda: Kill the Scotland Bill because it will never last anyway

For a start, the details are too arcane: only a handful of people really understand how the finances will work, which is hardly a recipe for good governance. Secondly, the posturing of politicians on both sides (these are substantial new powers or they don’t go far enough) are tiresomely predictable given that the proposals themselves represent the policy of neither side.

So compromise is a good thing, isn’t it? Well, not in this case since, in some very important aspects, the Scotland Bill offers us the worst of both worlds and a bit of each – neither fish nor fowl but some hybrid creature crafted without thought as to the long term consequences for the people of Scotland. There is a strong case to kill the bill and start again.

A parliament that can tax and spend sounds like a worthy objective. We want our politicians to be accountable for raising the money they invest in public services. But a government without levers over the economy or fiscal policy leaves us with some very narrow options. Sure, we can raise taxes for the better off to, perhaps, 50 per cent but that would only raise £20 million, or about 0.06 per cent of the present budget. I’m not looking forward to lots of sterile political debates around the margins of what little might be possible.

The last recession, as we know, drove a coach and horses through public finances and the next one when it comes will doubtless do the same. Unfortunately, under the proposed new powers, Scottish ministers will not be able to do much more about it without control over corporation tax, VAT, monetary policy and the rest. Cynics might argue that we’ve only been given the bits where it is not possible to make much of a difference.

The welfare problem is a bit like that, only worse. A few more welfare powers are proposed for transfer but the big stuff, particularly Universal Credit, remains reserved to Westminster. For people in need of support this creates the nightmare of having to navigate two systems with irreconcilable objectives and all the bureaucracy that is bound to come into play. But the Scotland Bill isn’t about such people and we should all be ashamed of that.

To add insult to these injuries, it has just been announced to great fanfare that the Scottish Parliament is going to be “allowed” the power to create new benefits or top-up existing UK benefits from its own resources. So we can abolish the bedroom tax but only by cutting something else. This nil-sum-game should tell us all we need to know.

Which brings us full circle to the limitations of the whole project; (income) tax and spend without the power to grow and tax the economy or borrow to invest in infrastructure is a very limited form of devolution. It doesn’t take us much further down the road and certainly conforms to type (the illusion of power but not control over the things that matter) that has characterised the story so far.

The problem is that neither party has a vested interest in making this work. Devo max with full tax and spending power save for defence and foreign affairs was and is a political orphan despite being the strongly preferred option of most people. The fundamentalists keep finding new ways to prevent this being put on the table.

There seems to be a widespread belief that both parliaments will sign up to the deal with the dubious claim that it was the best that could be achieved in the circumstances. It’s just hard luck if some of our most vulnerable citizens have to sustain collateral damage in the process. But this Scotland Bill, like the ill-fated Calman Commission stuff of a few years ago, was never about good governance or how best to improve the citizen experience of key public services. It is no more than a short-term political fix. There’s only scant consolation in the thought that it will never last.

Martin Sime is chief executive of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations.