Excellent thread from @pmdfoster. We’re definitely heading for a constitutional crisis. For me the roots don’t lie in #Brexit, but this is brutally exposing just how badly the devolution settlement has been managed politically and administratively.
At the heart of the tension between govt. & the devolved admins is a failure by Westminster & Whitehall to recognize that devolution doesn’t just mean giving power to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, it also means sharing power in London.
I suspect Labour didn’t think twice about this in ’98, believing that they wld be in power in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff (if not Belfast) for yrs to come. Managing the devolution settlement was to them an internal party issue.
But those first 12 yrs were an aberration. The new (& I suspect enduring) rule is 4 nations, with 4 governments lead by multiple different parties from right across the political spectrum. For the UK to operate as one, this has to be managed, politically & administratively.
From a political perspective, the UK govt. has two choices. Impose its decisions & create conflict (what we are seeing now), or bring the devolved govts. in & give them some ownership of national decisions, even where these relate to reserved matters.
If govt. chooses the big tent approach, it also needs to create administrative structures that support it. Whitehall’s cooperation with the devolved admins shld be part of the DNA of the civil service, but this has never happened.
From experience, Whitehall operated after 1998 as though nothing had changed. Apart from being required to consider impacts on the devolved admins as part of impact assessments (a tick box exercise), officials barely gave a second thought to Scotland, Wales or NI…
…and they certainly weren’t required to visit Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast, or develop the type of deep network of relationships with their counterparts that would facilitate effective cooperation across the four nations.
The consequence is that the devolved nations feel excluded from decision making in Westminster, and this has been the source of ever growing resentment.
Each throw away email from an official in London late on a Friday flagging a decision already made is a mircro-insult that serves as a reminder to the devolved admins of their lack of agency.
If the Union is actually valued, govt. must find a way to bring Sco, Wales and NI into the tent as it implements #Brexit.
It would be folly to believe that an English cabinet (it includes only 2 MPs representing constituencies in the devolved admins) can impose major constitutional change on the 4 nations without there being serious political blow-back. The future of the Union is in the balance.
@threadreaderapp Unroll
