Memo to Westminster: no more fix-it ducks
WHEN my children were younger, my favourite bedtime read was a story called “Fix-It-Duck” by the writer Jez Alborough. It told the story of the eponymous duck, a headstrong little bird who believes himself to be a useful handyman, but whose reckless enthusiasm and total lack of understanding of the situation around him leads to a series of disasters, usually to the cost of his long-suffering friends, Sheep and Goat. The running gag in the story is the duck’s failure to notice how his previous efforts led to calamity. So, when he exclaims repeatedly, “This is a job for Fix-It Duck!”, the reader knows exactly what’s coming next. My children and I loved it.
Around that time, I also worked for the Scottish Conservative party. Sometimes my job was to pick up the phone to officials from the party or government south of the border so they could let me know that a senior Minister had scheduled in time to visit Scotland and was keen to help us fight the good fight against the nation’s wish for more control and autonomy.
“Uh-oh”, I thought to myself, often ungraciously. “Here comes Fix-It-Duck”.
In fairness, I should qualify this a little. In my time working for the party, there were innumerable Ministers and officials in the UK Government who, despite not needing to, spent huge amounts of time and energy trying to get to grips with the impenetrable grievances of Scottish politics (the Treasury under former Chancellor Phillip Hammond comes to mind, for example). Many of these heroes are still there now, carefully treading around land mines, and thank Heavens for that. But in my time, and particularly after Brexit, when every week the smell of sulphur wafted its way up from London to Edinburgh, the offer of help from down south often felt like being offered marriage advice by an axe-murderer. They may well have an interesting take on your relationship but, get too close, and your right arm might get hacked off in the process.
Other Ministers just decided that given Scotland seemed to be so angry with everybody all the time, and in particular with Conservative Ministers, it was best for all concerned that they just butted out and left us to our own devices. It wasn’t a very healthy situation.
In this context, the decision by Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross to call for Boris Johnson to quit last week — and the remarkable backing he has received from his MSPs — felt to me a little like a volcanic eruption that emerges from many years of simmering frustration and resentment. Of course, Mr Ross’s patience snapped over the specifics of Mr Johnson’s actions. But I think it goes deeper than the question of Mr Johnson’s foibles. I suspect MSPs and party members in Scotland have just had enough. For a decade the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party has been on the front line of the most important issue of all facing the UK: the question of its very existence. Mr Ross is trying to lead the opposition to the SNP as best he can, at close quarters. If there is a cause around which the entire UK wide party might agree is top of the list of priorities, you’d think this might be it. Yet too often over the last 5 to 6 years, when the Scottish party has turned to London looking for thoughtful and intelligent support, it has instead walked in on a scene of chaos and mayhem. When senior party figures in London then emerge from the rubble they have created to ask “how can we help?”, you can imagine the response. Mr Johnson may be the most egregious offender but the mess over his parties are only the latest embarrassment to emerge from London over recent years. The chaos, the inattention, the panic, usually followed by long periods of complacency — little of it has not been easy to defend from these parts.
So whether Mr Johnson stays or goes in the coming days or weeks, or whether Liz Truss, or Rishi Sunak, or Jeremy Hunt takes over as Prime Minister — or indeed whether Sir Keir Starmer leads Labour to victory in a couple of years — what is really required here is what the Conservative party chairman Oliver Dowden described as a change to the “underlying culture” at the UK’s centre of power. By this I don’t just mean that standards of probity need to be re-established in government. I mean that the entire UK Government apparatus should have a re-think about how it relates to the rest of us. Of course, it’s always important for Scotland to acknowledge that there are other things out there in the world apart from Scotland. But this isn’t just about Scotland: Wales, Northern Ireland and the regions of England also often feel the same frustration with our “Fix-It-Duck” government. It requires some urgent attention.
The irony here is that, in recent months, Mr Johnson has shown signs of getting this. Last week, amid the craziness, he signed off a new Intergovernmental Relations Review which will put structure to the way in which the UK Government deals with the devolved governments around the country. Importantly, it agrees that the Prime Minister will chair a new council to examine areas of shared responsibility. This will look at how London and the nations of the UK can work together on issues like employment and the environment. It is a good start and long overdue. One day, I suspect, we will look back at the haphazard ad hoc governing arrangements in Britain that have existed for the last twenty years and wonder how on earth the country survived.
But more needs to be done. As Philip Rycroft, a former civil servant who was head of the Brexit department between 2017–19 has put it, we need to reach a situation where “the voice of each part of the Union is heard with respect and can be seen to influence outcomes at all levels.” For those worried about such matters, this need not lead to a federal UK. Nor is it about appeasing the SNP government in Scotland as some seem to see it, or about handing the devolved governments more power. Quite the opposite: these are the reforms that are required to make the Union a more functional and useful space. Ultimately, they are also the way to show pro-independence voters in Scotland than the Union adds something to their lives, and that cooperation not competition with London, is in their and Scotland’s interests. Of course, the SNP may push the offer of cooperation away, but there will be a political price to pay for that if it does so.
Mr Johnson’s time may be up. But to assume that his going will magically restore confidence in the Union is a superficial reading of events. To all the runners and riders now hungrily eyeing up power, I only ask that before you head north, spanner in hand, with a plan to fix everything in sight, you first undertake to listen, and then learn a little about the country you want to run. Because in Scotland, as elsewhere in the UK, we’d like something better this time than another lame duck