THE FOLLY OF FEDERALISM

This piece is a response to Jim Gallagher’s reflections on These Islands’ February conference in Newcastle, where Henry appeared on the same panel.

Insanity, as Albert Einstein apparently didn’t say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Perhaps it would be going too far to describe the stubborn supremacy of devolution as the go-to strategy for defending the Union as insanity. But on the basis of experience, not by much.

As the prospect of a second referendum grows more real by the day, more than one group is trying to persuade unionists to fight it on the promise of further diminishing the United Kingdom. Just this month Ben Thomson, the founder of the think-tank Reform Scotland, set out a proposal which would see the role of the Union wither to just foreign affairs and defence.^{1We can stand on our own two feet and show our economic canniness, The Times, 12th September 2020}

Meanwhile in February I was invited up to These Islands’ inaugural conference in Newcastle to serve as advocatus diaboli on a panel sponsored by the Constitution Reform Group, who were making the case for their own vision of a ‘federal’ UK. (Professor Jim Gallagher, a fellow panellist, has already offered his perspective and thinks there’s some life left in concessionary unionism.)

My case – that the time when devolution deserved the benefit of the doubt is long since past – rested on two broad points. First, would federalism (or a similar package of concessions) save the Union? Second, what exactly do we mean by ‘save the Union’, anyway?

The latter is a serious and chronically-neglected question for unionists. But even setting it to one side, the idea that one more constitutional heave will somehow neutralise Scottish nationalism seems extremely implausible. If pro-UK campaigners are to have any hope of winning not just the next referendum, but the overall struggle, they need to have an urgent reckoning with the fact that their one big idea of the past twenty years has failed.

Devoscepticism 101

Devolution isn’t working. On that, both federalists and integrationists like myself are agreed. Far from assuaging or even containing the nationalist movements trying to break up the UK, 2020 sees pretty much all of them more powerful than ever before.

Where we part ways is on why this is. For devolutionaries, the answer is usually some variation on “we were more right than we thought”. The problem is that constitutional reformers have been ‘chasing the market’, always responding to nationalist demands rather than getting ahead of them with a more coherent vision. A tidy, rationally-ordered federal settlement, in this view, will balance the national equation and sort the question out.

Many also insist that no matter how bad things are now, they’d have been even worse if devolution hadn’t happened. This has the great virtue of being impossible to disprove. For devosceptics, the explanation for devolution’s disastrous failure as a unionist strategy lies in its practical operation. The question is not why ceding vast constitutional arsenals, treasuries, and pulpits to politicians who want to break up the Union – and meeting any success by those movements with even more concessions – has weakened the UK, but how anybody believed it would not.

We can draw parallels with the dynamics which eventually saw Britain vote to leave the EU. Just as British politicians poisoned public attitudes towards Brussels by blaming ‘Europe’ for this or that, so too do devolved politicians constantly try to shift political blame onto ‘Westminster’ – and claim the solution is the passage of yet more powers to themselves.

As more powers accrue to Holyrood and Cardiff Bay, the scope of British politics – and thus of the British national conversation – diminishes and so too, inevitably, does British identity, the decline of which should trouble even the most mercenary of ‘utilitarian unionists’. Without a sense of shared Britishness, political consent for fiscal transfers is on borrowed time.

This process is further fuelled by the ‘devocracy’: the ecosystem of legislators, political staffers, journalists, academics, and others who derive some sort of rent (whether it be in power, pay, or prestige) from the devolved institutions and thus profit from their further aggrandisement.

All of this was perfectly foreseeable. Indeed, Adam Smith described the dynamic perfectly in The Wealth of Nations, when discussing the American revolutionaries:

“They feel, or imagine, that if their assemblies, which they are fond of calling parliaments, and of considering as equal in authority to the Parliament of Great Britain, should be so far degraded as to become the humble ministers and executive officers of that Parliament, the greater part of their own importance would be at end. They have rejected, therefore, the proposal of being taxed by Parliamentary requisition, and like other ambitious and high-spirited men, have rather chosen to draw the sword in defence of their own importance.”

Nor are devosceptics the only people to recognise this dynamic. For example, here’s a Welsh nationalist explaining to his comrades how the Welsh right-wing have been ‘re-Britished’ by Labour and Plaid Cymru’s decision to exclude the Conservatives from power in Cardiff Bay, cutting off the spoils pipeline.

Federalism’s false promises

So, change is needed. But is federalism the change we need? If you subscribe to the devosceptic reasoning set out above, obviously not.

Why not? Because federalism changes nothing important about the dynamic breaking the Union apart. Whilst it is a ‘fundamentally different concept’ to devolution, as Nick Timothy puts it, those fundamental differences are largely confined to the conceptual level.

In practical terms, most federalist proposals that I have seen will do nothing to arrest the destructive forces assailing the Union. Indeed, quite the opposite. Almost all of them involve giving separatist politicians even more opportunities not just to grandstand, but to actively foul up the mechanisms by which ‘pooling and sharing’ occurs. Any move towards replacing British governance over reserved issues with intra-Home Nations horse trading invites gridlock – if you didn’t enjoy the absurd stand-off over the COP26 conference, you won’t enjoy ‘shared rule’.

(And that’s notwithstanding the huge concession to separatist principles we would make by agreeing that being governed as the British, through British institutions, is improper, which relates to my second question above.)

Support for the Union rests on two axes: economic, and emotional. Federalism threatens both. By handing the SNP et al the levers with which to impede the operation of things such as the British common market, the utility of the United Kingdom will diminish. And by reducing common government to horse-trading between politicians representing the devolved nations, it will erode further the shared identity and solidarity upon which things like fiscal transfers ultimately rely.

Advocates of ‘shared rule’ need to explain how it will work when one or more of the devolved administrations is run by an administration actively hostile to the existence and proper functioning of the United Kingdom. Gordon Brown, when he touched on COP26 during his own speech in Newcastle, said simply that “we have got to make this work”. That isn’t an answer.

Settlement or process, but not both

The CRG’s own proposals for a federal UK perfectly illustrate the essential continuity between devolution and federalism. Despite their initial discussion paper promising a sort-of zero-based approached to the constitution, the final draft bill inevitably concludes that all powers currently devolved to Edinburgh and Cardiff will remain where they are.

Any federal proposal that refuses to critically re-assess the powers and performance of the devolved governments should be recognised for what it is: simply a new name for the old ‘more powers’ orthodoxy. It is understandable that devolutionaries should wish to escape their project’s unenviable record, but unionists should not be taken in. If there is a cure to what ails Britain, it won’t be an even stronger dose of a medicine which is by all appearances killing the patient.

The CRG’s climbdown also highlights another way in which the basic framing of the constitutional debate hamstrings unionists: the fact that devolution is peddled as being at once a static ‘settlement’ and, in Ron Davies’ immortal words, an ongoing ‘process’.

On the face of it this is contradictory, but in practice it is merely iniquitous. Any concession made by unionists to nationalists becomes part of the immutable ‘settlement’, whilst any territory still held by unionists is subject to the endless ‘process’. By accepting this logic, unionism has for two decades committed to fighting only defensive battles, and freed up nationalist resources to wage exclusively offensive ones, with incredibly obvious consequences.

It has also led to a hugely warped Overton Window, with unionists obliged to abandon any conceded territory and pretend, with Stepford smiles affixed, that the emerging ‘new United Kingdom’ is what they wanted all along. The nationalist star remains fixed, the unionist one moves towards it, and efforts to triangulate towards a solution get closer to independence with every attempt. That’s how you end up with people like Kenny Farquharson defending the Thomson plan by saying that “at some point one half of Scotland is going to have to compromise with the other half” – as if unionists, who have given Scotland the most powerful non-sovereign legislature on Earth, have not compromised already!

It is absurd that unionists have bought into this framing for so long. It sets the terms of the debate such that ‘more Union’ is not and can never be the answer. We should not be surprised that, after two decades of playing a game in which ‘backwards’ is the only permitted move, the pro-UK side of the argument is demoralised, disorganised, and feels a long way from a winning position.

Some form of federalism could, if based on a properly zero-based approach to the constitution followed by entrenchment of the results, offer a coherent response to this: for so long as devolution is a ‘process’ it will be a two-way process; there will only be a ‘settlement’ once the issue is actually settled. But to date federalist proposals have not come from that direction. They are simply the latest manifestation of the traditional retreat reflex.

Ultimately, federalism is where you end up if you need to acknowledge that devolution has failed without admitting that devolution was wrong. For those unwilling to repudiate the “more powers” orthodoxy, increasingly esoteric explanations for its results are required. Is it that Holyrood isn’t technically sovereign? Or that Northern Ireland didn’t get to veto Brexit? Or perhaps that England is ‘too British’? Who knows! But it has to be one of them, because we know what it can’t be…

There is always the claim that things would be much worse if we hadn’t passed devolution. But since we can’t prove (or disprove) this, it is impervious to evidence or experience and thus serves the same end that Roger Scruton accused Michel Foucault of seeking: “to disguise unexamined premises as hard-won conclusions”.