The Void in Labour’s Commission On The UK’s Future

Gordon Brown’s take on the constitution is volcanic: destruction, devastation, a lost decade, red skies, lava and ash clouds. Yet his solution is Pompeian too: a hollow man, ash hardened around a void.

Traces of the Internal Market Act mean a Brexit happened, probably. The UK has some sort of Northern Ireland but no trace of an internal EU customs border with it. A voluntary union is declared but not defined. The aim is to preserve Parliamentary Sovereignty. The power that the Lords could never wield is to be stripped from its legitimate, democratic replacement. The overmighty PM armed with an unreformed Commons must rule.

The new Assembly of the Regions and Nations is the kingpin of this document, and it cannot bind the Commons and is to have no role in binding Holyrood, the Senedd or Stormont. What does it transform? And what happens to the whole edifice if the Shadow Cabinet gives it the long finger?

If Scotland is a powerful substate Government, then the pre-devolution government was more so. A minister and 4 juniors with little parliamentary scrutiny ran an administratively devolved state the same size as now.

Scotland went from the UK’s near poorest to near richest under devolution because Government was weakened and constrained, not strengthened.

Inadequate government-within-a-government at Westminster pushed devolution, nationalism didn’t pull it. English politics is just Scottish politics for slow learners.

PR transformed Scotland – at Holyrood, in councils. If FPTP came back the SNP would have 120 MSPs vs 9 opposition. PR at Westminster and in English councils would be truly transformative.

Politics is “do better things” and state capabilities are “do things better”. English devolution of power will mean more of both. But while greatly welcome, is not even a restoration to before Thatcher’s gutting of local government. Andy Burnham will not be as David Blunkett or Ken Livingston were.

But the third part is “do less stupid things” – a UK without abolition of the Metropolitan County Councils, the Poll Tax, Iraq and the Brexit Referendum, would have been a UK with PR.

Labour’s approach is the old one: “give us the mandate and we will do better things” – the mandate being 40% of votes and 60% of seats.

The UK went into the EEC in the pre-regulatory age: smoke in the air and waste in rivers. We implemented European regulations and never learned to define them: and 6 years after Brexit we have no standards authority, or chemical regulatory body or functioning customs border with the EU, or, or.

The regulatory age makes simplicity from complexity. Your phone works for calls, apps and payments in every country in the world. If fits in your pocket but you would need a skip if you printed the regulations, laws and standards it complies with.

In 1972 we replaced the Stormont Parliament with a shadow-NI-Parlie-by-decree in Westminster so we didn’t have to reform it. After Brexit, learning nothing, we added a shadow-EU-Parlie-by-decree.

These too are in the void, as are the voters. A constitution is a contract between the people and the state – without a referendum or an elected constitutional convention or both these are just more laws, teflon and reversible.

Politics is about difference and enmity, constitutionalism about consent and consensus: the game vs the rules of the game.

Gordon Brown knows the collapse in trust is caused by the rules of the games and wants to fix it by playing the game harder.

In our topsy-world the unwritten constitution is written. What else could it be? free jazz? What unwritten means is unread and Brown threatens that.

The indicative Cabinet Manual is be become statutory and constitutional. “The Cabinet is the executive committee of the Privy Council”, hmm. “The roles of Prime Minister and Cabinet are governed largely by convention” – that won’t survive contact with the voters as it didn’t survive contact with our recent habitual and purposefully, unconventional Prime Ministers.

The Vizier controlled the Ottoman Sultan, the Shogun the Japanese Emperor as our crown-in-parliament does our gilded-cage monarchy.

Constrain the PM and Westminster and let the UK flourish, uncrown the king-in-parliament and enthrone the people, this is the true shape of the void in Labour’s Commission On The UK’s Future.