Devolution is Dead

Every time the Scottish Government is defeated in court there are wild celebrations from their opponents. The ruling that Downing Street’s unprecedented s35 veto of Holyrood’s gender recognition reform bill was lawful, is no exception. Graham Grant, Home Affairs Editor of the Scottish Daily Mail, Michael Blackley, the papers Political Editor, columnist Stephen Daisley were joined by Euan McColm and Mandy Rhodes and Iain Macwhirter – in fact the newspapers, editors and columnists are completely uniform in their opinion. Dissent is absent. But Unionists were also joined by a raft of Scottish nationalists celebrating with great glee a bill passed in the Scottish Parliament by a two-thirds majority with MSPs from every political party being overturned by Alister Jack.

Graham Grant wrote; “Humza the master tactician: shackling himself to hated, shambolic legislation – then wasting money on trying (and failing) to salvage it. A humiliating political misjudgment. He should quit, along with the Green zealots who helped to create this toxic mess.”

The tone and target is repeated throughout the commentariat, here is Iain Macwhirter: “Now either Yousaf perseveres with this profoundly unpopular legislation on Self-ID for trans people, or he abandons his coalition arrangement with the Scottish Green party.”

Some of this explicitly political. The attacks on the Bute House Agreement and the Scottish Green Party are the join that unites reactionary forces of British Unionism and Scottish Nationalism. But other elements of it is less focused, it’s just part of a desultory narrative that everything in Scotland – almost by definition – is awful.

The mood of miserabilism and self-hatred is everywhere. The Times Scotland (ish) edition published a wonderful piece a few weeks back declaring that ‘Scotland is going downhill in most areas’ . It’s unintentionally hilarious, the Times polled its own readers to confirm that, indeed, Scotland is awful in almost every regard.

The Herald tweeted this out earlier … which seems to be just descending into hysteria:

Some of these platforms have descended into parody.

These are some strange alliances but they’ve been merging and morphing for some time. Now the most reactionary elements of the nationalist bloggersphere are in complete unison with the most reactionary elements of the British press and some of the far-right political figures. Figures that would previously be implacably opposed are now joined at the hip. This is not new but it is now complete.

Some of the level of debate is so toxic as to be immobilising. Some of the AltNats, bloggers and heads of think-tanks have a relationship with Nicola Sturgeon that can only be described as para-social. But the question of the Lady Haldane judgement is not what does this mean for trans people, nor what next for that legislation – the arguments are so entrenched and tired its hardly worth repeating them. The question is what does this mean for devolution and democracy?

Humza Yousaf said: “Today’s judgment confirms beyond doubt that devolution is fundamentally flawed. The Court has confirmed that legislation passed by a majority in Holyrood can be struck down by Westminster.The only way to guarantee we get true self-government is through independence.”

Yousaf is right, we are in completely new territory. The limits of devolution are clear, their outer parameters delineated. No-one had used Section 35 before, and Jack, part of the most extreme government of the modern era, will be happy to do so again and again. The message is this: any policy that deviates from British outlooks and vision will be shut down. If there is the risk of the threat of a good example, or any notion that there will be consequences for any other part of the United Kingdom, any law can be arbitrarily shut down. In simple terms we can do whatever we like as long as its of no consequence at all. What’s new here is that such repression or undermining of devolution will be cheered to the rafters by people who (allegedly) seek independence.

Devolution is dead. It has a Do Not Resuscitate note pinned to its bed, after Labour’s much talked about constitutional reforms were quietly dropped. The Liberals are not even worth mentioning, the Conservatives always opposed devolution until they had no option but to reluctantly take part. They are about to be obliterated. The SNP are in deep trouble and heavily infected with incumbency and failure. Devolution is dead. But this makes us feel trapped, stuck in a sort of constitutional Upside Down, where we are severely hampered by what can be done within Devolution, yet judged by those inadequacies and failings as a test of what independence would look like. Instead we are trapped within a British State that is busy conjuring ever more dystopian solutions to its fever dream about ‘small boats’. Devolution is dead. It was killed by Alister Jack and by the fact that the Unionist parties began to see it as the domain of their opponents and therefore something to be destroyed. Hatred of the SNP has become a defining feature of Scottish politics and the driving force for many politicians. The Bain Principle is writ large. This would be fine if it was shared with an alternative vision of the future, but it’s not. The Unionist message is basically: ‘Don’t’. The backdrop is ‘this is fine’ and the enduring fallacy of ‘UK:OK’. In place of the mythical positive case for the Union you have politicians just defaulting to the courts.

At the start of devolution there was a lot of optimism, much of it misplaced but still very real. After many years of defeat and setback it seemed like a victory. ‘Upturned boats are a watershed’ we thought. This death could be a moment when the prospect of independence becomes more attractive but it seems the old model, that devolution could be used as a prefigurative ‘stepping stone’ to independence by good practice and good governance, trialling more progressive policy and building lasting institutional frameworks now seems like a broken model.