Britain Will Devolve Power Once Everyone Agrees Who Gets To Release It

Andy Burnham met Scotland’s John Swinney and Wales’s Rhun ap Iorwerth in Glasgow on Friday to discuss giving communities more power over employment and reindustrialization. According to the Guardian, the first ministers made clear that decisions about further devolution within their countries belong to their own parliaments.

Downing Street called the talks constructive.

Of course they were constructive. Everyone brought a different set of instructions for moving the same cabinet.

Before the summit, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting criticized the Scottish government for acquiring powers from Westminster without passing enough onward to local government. Burnham wants the four UK nations moving together on devolution, following budget proposals for new powers for English mayors.

Swinney and ap Iorwerth, meanwhile, are quite interested in more powers arriving at their level. Decisions about the next stage of the journey, they say, belong there too.

Power, it turns out, is a parcel everyone urgently wants delivered and nobody wants the courier to leave with a neighbor.

There is a real constitutional point here. Scotland and Wales have their own democratic institutions. Westminster cannot reasonably celebrate local decision-making by treating those institutions as inconvenient packing material. Swinney said Burnham assured him that Holyrood would not be bypassed.

Good. Excellent. That would seem a fairly essential feature of a plan about respecting who gets to decide things.

But listen to the machinery. London wants power closer to people. Edinburgh and Cardiff want London to recognize that power is already closer to people when it is in Edinburgh and Cardiff. London would like to discuss whether it could be closer still. Everybody has a perfectly serious argument, and somehow the meeting sounds like three removal firms disputing which staircase qualifies as downstairs.

Where is the actual person in this? The one who needs a job or a functioning local economy? Are they in the room, or are they the imaginary point on the map toward which all the officials claim to be moving?

Former Welsh minister Lee Waters adds another complication: an English mayoral region and a Welsh region are not interchangeable. Population density differs, and the Welsh government already performs many of the functions Burnham champions for metro mayors.

Which means the man who used to run Greater Manchester may need a plan that is not simply Greater Manchester, but over there.

You cannot photocopy an administrative arrangement, write Wales across the top and expect the fucking mountains to cooperate.

I’m going to sit quietly with a map. It contains several places. Distressingly, they are not all the same place.

And then Northern Ireland’s first minister did not attend after a Sinn Féin–DUP row, so the aspiration for all four nations to move at the same pace began with one of them missing from the discussion.

Nobody promised this would be easy. But if the aim is useful local power, the test cannot just be whether every level of government leaves clutching a reassuring account of its own importance.

Give people decisions they can actually make. Explain who answers for the results.

And stop telling the parcel it has arrived while the couriers are still fighting over the fucking van.