Devolution needs a refresh to give it a chance to succeed

The UK was an incredibly centralised country; no Parliaments or Assemblies, no mayors and impotent local authorities. In other English-speaking jurisdictions, which we helped to create, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA, decision-making authority is heavily decentralised, yet we remained an outlier. The same was true of our European neighbours.

So, the creation of the Scottish Parliament was, for this observer at least, an unmitigated good. In theory, at least.

Donald Dewar is sworn in as the Scottish Parliament is reconvened (Image: free)

Devolution is now a quarter of a century old. It is old enough to be assessed for its performance, but young enough to be forgiven for it. Critically, is it an adequate time frame after which to tinker with the institution to make sure that it works as well in practice as three-quarters of Scots thought it would in theory.

All of this will be up for debate next week, at the first large event marking the 25-year milestone. Run by Holyrood Sources, the podcast of which I am one-third, the event at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms will both look back and look forward.

Helped by three former First Ministers and a Deputy First Minister, some of the leading MSPs of the era (including Wendy Alexander and Kate Forbes), the legendary duo of Brian Taylor and Bernard Ponsonby and a live audience of 400 people, we will reminisce and celebrate, but also ask some awkward and important questions about the way forward.

We are generally very poor at constructive introspection, and if there is one thing that would encourage more open debate it would be to understand and accept that one can be both enthusiastically in favour of the concept of devolution, whilst also being deeply sceptical about the performance of the Scottish Parliament.

It is not a treasonous thought. And it is where I am.

I would like to see Holyrood given power over VAT, Corporation Tax, and more, but simultaneously I cannot make a credible argument that the tax powers we already have have been well used. They have demonstrably not, and our economy is in a choke hold as a result.

I would like to see a second parliamentary ‘upper chamber’ to better scrutinise legislation, but simultaneously I cannot make a credible argument that the quality of lawmaker in that chamber will be any better than it is in our existing unicameral Parliament.

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I would like to redraw local government boundaries to create strategic regions with mayors, tax powers and control over health, transport, housing, policing and education, but I cannot simultaneously pretend that those policy areas have benefited from the devolution we have; it is distressingly clear that they have not.

As I write, polling is being conducted for Holyrood Sources by the Diffley Partnership, and will be released ahead of next week’s event. It will ask questions which we rarely ask; has the Parliament been a success? Has it changed your life for the better? What powers should it have? Should it exist at all? We will have the Scottish people’s answers to these questions next week.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant and we will expose devolution to extreme temperatures at the Assembly Rooms. We should see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. And the timing is good. The first quarter century of devolution can broadly be split in two. The first half, until 2011, was stable, with coalitions or minority governments focussed largely on policy rather than the constitutional settlement, running the economy competently.

The second half, though, from 2011 to today, has been light on sensible and meaningful policy, heavy on constitutional virtue signalling as part of the ongoing binary battle between independence and the status quo, and largely absent on economic management.

There is a reasonable chance of us now entering a third, more productive era, with the electorate likely to take the heat out of the independence debate at the next couple of elections. Should, as polling suggests it will, the Scottish Parliament have a pro-UK majority after the next elections in 2026, it may have the breathing space to reinvent itself.

We should start to prepare now, by thinking previously unthinkable thoughts about the location of power, the structure of Parliament and the identity of political parties.

Holyrood 'needs breathing space to reinvent itself' (Image: Getty)

On the location of power, if we accept the settled will in favour of a devolved parliament within the UK, we need to ask which powers Holyrood should take from Westminster, which powers it should give back, and which it should devolve to a regional or local level.

On the structure of Parliament and the legislative process, if we accept that the Committee system and structure has largely failed as a scrutiniser of legislation, we should fix it. And if the MSPs occupying Holyrood are of insufficient quality to make our lives better, or at the very least to not make them worse, then we should ask how we can replace them, encouraged perhaps by a better selection process including open primaries, and by a significantly higher salary.

And on the identity of political parties, politicians should ask themselves whether the overlaying of Westminster’s First-Past-The-Post political parties onto Holyrood’s Additional Member System parliament has worked. Can the parties credibility claim to be Scotland-first, Holyrood-first operators when they are in effect off-shoots of UK-wide parties? Our closest peer in this respect is Canada, which has long repelled such an anti-decentralisation system.

Robert Kennedy said “Some men see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’. I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’”.

Those of us who believe in devolution, as it passes its quarter-century, need to dream of the devolution that has yet to fully materialise and ask ‘why not?’.

Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters and Zero Matters