The Baltic News: 4
Gordon Brown's plan to reform the UK offers a moral and intellectual argument for the union; the lesser Brown.
A Moral Mission
GORDON Brown has a principle about political and public life: whatever it is you set out to do, it must have a moral and an intellectual foundation.
Of course, there are many other matters to consider: from polling, to presentation, and to implementation. But if you don’t underpin everything you do with a moral and intellectual bottom, argues Brown, it’ll all just fall apart.
This week, a Commission led by the former Prime Minister published its long-awaited report into the future of the UK. There has been plenty of commentary on the back of it, both positive and negative which I’ll come to. But the central point for me is that contained within the report’s 155 pages and weaving through its 40 recommendations is a fresh moral and intellectual argument for the UK. It discards nostalgic tropes about two World Wars, the creation of the Welfare State, and our “precious” kinship. It goes beyond transactional offers of “more powers” for the devolved nations. Instead, it tries to answer a question that perhaps we on the pro-UK side don’t ask enough: what exactly is the Union for? What’s the point of this thing?
The report seeks to provide an answer relevant to our times. Over the last fractious decade, Britain has been torn by two conflicting impulses: between the offer of control and autonomy as promised by Brexit and Scottish independence, and our need of cooperation as symbolised by the membership of wider Unions. The Commission is an attempt to find a resolution to this conflict, envisaging a Union where our wish for power, control and autonomy and our need for solidarity, reciprocity and cooperation are balanced together. Unlike the SNP’s recent flimsy prospectus for independence, it sets out a clear plan and a path for how to get it. To those of us who want to see the country move on from a dead-end debate over the Union, it offers a way ahead.
It begins by setting out unsparingly the moral failure we see today in our country. Half the UK population, it notes, are living in areas no better off than poorer parts of the former East Germany. We are the most unequal nation in Europe.
And polling carried out for reports reveals the crisis of trust in the country. Only around one in five people in Britain agree we get the “right people” in charge; more than 50% of us think it doesn’t matter who you vote for because nothing is going to change; trust in government in the UK is the lowest of any developed nation in the world. These are grim, grim figures.
The obvious thing here for a Labour party document would be to blame the Tories (and it’s true the Tories do come in for quite a lot of stick). But the report makes it clear that this moral failure in Britain is not just down to the policies of any one party but to our system of government itself. For the report makes a direct link between our unacceptable levels of inequality and poverty to the over-centralisation of political power in London. We are most centralised nation in Europe, the report finds; England, the report believes, is essentially a subservient client state of its capital. This, it argues, is the core problem Britain faces - it is the hoarding of power at the centre, and the consequent sense of powerlessness elsewhere, that is the cause of Britain’s economic stagnation and political despair.
Having set out this stark thesis of Britain, the Commission sets out its intellectual response.
The first point it makes is that the answer to the over-centralisation of political and economic power within Whitehall can’t be another Whitehall plan to try and sort things out. Instead, and in a manner more radical than Michael Gove’s admirable Levelling Up agenda, it concludes that the answer is to rip economic and political power out of the Whitehall mainframe and install it directly into cities, towns and communities across the country. The report has a lengthy section on economic clusters, identifying around 300 potential hubs of innovation across the UK. It argues that by handing the regions powers of initiative over the ingredients of growth, and by connecting them to the financial hub of London, the country outside the M25 can once again become engines of tomorrow’s growth sectors. The key point is that this needs to become a partnership: not ordered from on high but directed from below: a bottom-up Britain, not a trickle-down nation.
But it is not just the devolution of power across England that forms a key ingredient in the report, so too is reform of the centre of power. A second insight in the report – which is highly relevant to Scotland – is that the devolution programme which began in the late 90s has been only a half-finished job. Writing in the Daily Record on Tuesday, Mr Brown put it as follows:
“The process of devolution since 1999 has focussed on just half the solution – delivering more powers to the different geographies of the UK. But it is clear there has been a missing half. For while we created new institutions across the UK’s nations and regions, we left an unreformed centre of government virtually untouched. In the rebuilding of our country, it is as if we put the second floor in without considering the need to reconstruct the ground floor from scratch.”
The report sets out how that “ground floor” needs repair to take into account the new devolved state which has grown up outside Whitehall over the last two decades. It proposes ideas such as a new Council of the UK, a new Council of the Nations and Regions, and a new second chamber of the nations and regions to replace the House of Lords. The aim here is essentially to build new institutions of cooperation with the aim of familiarising Whitehall with the country that’s been evolving around it all this time; to reposition the centre of power not as the director of the country’ affairs, but as enabler and partner. In other words, the report is as much about relationships as about power. It is about how we “do” Britain: how power is shared and mediated.
And – because Brown believes politics should have a moral as well as an intellectual underpinning – the report ambitiously decides it is going to underpin this new UK operating system with what it describes as a “national mission”. A series of constitutional ‘statutes’ will be agreed: setting down the basic rights of citizens in stone. They include the principle of devolution and devolved power. The report’s big flourish is to declare that the new Second Chamber – the same House of Lords currently in the gutter thanks to the exploits of the egregious Lady Mone – will be rebranded as the democratically elected “guardian” of these rights. And the moral repurposing of the nation is extended to the Britain’s system of patronage and politics: it recommends an end to second jobs for MPs and an end to foreign money in politics, for example. A more focussed report might well have decided to leave these matters alone. But the Commission argues that both a “clear out” and a “clean up” of Westminster is required if trust in politics is to be restored.
There are, I think, reasonable and unreasonable criticisms of these measures. Let me take them in turn.
First in the unreasonable column are the many Scottish nationalists and also those commentators in Scotland who have written off the report as a damp squib because it doesn’t have more to say about powers for the Scottish Parliament. They are right on one level: there aren’t a huge number of new powers to Holyrood mentioned in the report. But I hope I’ve just explained above how they are completely missing the point. The Commission is trying to have a much bigger debate about what the Union is for, and how it should be run. Many haven’t noticed. This says less about Brown’s agenda than it does about the incredibly myopic nature of Scotland’s political debate.
Also unreasonable (to my mind anyway) is the critique that the report is somehow irrelevant to the real priorities of the country. Why, it is asked, is Brown spending his time setting out constitutional reforms when across Britain, everybody is terrified about the cost of living? A cursory reading of the report would set out why: it’s because the Commission believes constitutional reform and economic growth hang together. The report tries to make the point that if Britain wants to tackle poverty, low productivity, low economic growth rates, and all the other things that are making the cost-of-living crisis bite so deeply, then big change at the centre of power is going to be needed. Disagree with that if you wish, but at least recognise that there is relevance here.
Next up are the Westminster fetishists who see any plan to reform or rewire Britain as a threat to the supposed stability of the Union and the unitary state. Devolution was always a terrible mistake, they believe - and now Gordon Brown comes along, threatening to double-down by adding even more devolution on top. This too is a superficial reading: as Brown puts it, the report is about “shared government” - about how we cooperate across the UK to deliver on the ground. On a side note, I find it richly ironic that many of the people who are opposed to this kind of decentralisation in Britain were also enthusiastic supporters of Brexit. Only a few years ago, they were demanding that Britain had to take back control from the EU. Now they fail to comprehend why some of us outside London might want to take back control from them.
And, then related to this last group, are those who just don’t like Mr Brown and can’t forgive him for selling the gold/ supporting devolution/ opposing independence/ continuing to care about the future of the UK. I grant them these are all opinions, but they don’t really amount to arguments.
But of reasonable critiques, I think there are two.
The first, made mostly by moderate Conservatives, is whether, in pursuit of the correct strategic objectives that Mr Brown has identified, we need to change quite so much of Britain’s institutional architecture. Governments sources were briefing over the last week that they were already getting on with upending Britain’s power imbalances through the Levelling Up agenda. Personally, I am with the Commission in believing this kind of incremental change will not be enough to do so but there is a fair Conservative point to be made that it is through cultural change, not just structural reform, that Britain will be rewired.
The second is what you might call the Dominic Cummings argument. This makes cynical point that there are only a few smart capable people in Britain. It notes that large numbers of them like living in London. It warns non-too-subtly that decentralising Britain will only put power in the hands of local authorities and agencies which don’t know what to do with it. I take the point, but this is chicken and egg territory. How are we going to persuade ambitious entrepreneurs and public servants to strike a career outside London if not by offering them the prospect of real power and equity with London? The whole point of the Commission’s optimistic reforms is to encourage people to see Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Leeds not as branch office Britain but as where it’s really happening (at half the rent).
I hope the debate triggered by the report continues. It needs to. Two days after it was published, a new Ipsos Mori poll found a rise in support for independence in Scotland. These polls come and go but the SNP is not wrong to feel confident that, over the medium to long term, the union is weakening. Just relying on the status quo as a riposte to this seems risky and short-sighted to me. If Britain is to have a future, it must answer the question: what, in the modern world, is it for? Brown’s moral and intellectual framework set out this week has at least tried to provide an answer.
Disagree with it all you wish, but let’s be clear – we need one.
A lesser Brown
Keith Brown - no relation of Gordon - is currently Scotland’s Justice Secretary. In 2015, he was Scotland’s Infrastructure Minister. That August, Mr Brown was asked to approve an agreement to award “preferred bidder” status to the Fergusons shipyard in Port Glasgow to construct two new ferries for Caledonian MacBrayne’s island service.
In recent months, the Scottish Parliament’s Audit Committee has been forced to write back twice to Mr Brown to get a proper answer from him about what he knew at the time about the disastrous contract. Behind the scenes that August, there were already concerns being raised about Ferguson’s ability to do the job. Last week Mr Brown refused a request by the Committee to provide more material, prompting its convenor, Richard Leonard, to accuse him of “unsatisfactory and evasive” answers.
Why is Mr Brown being evasive? Around the time Mr Brown was being asked to sign off on the deal, Nicola Sturgeon’s PR team were busily planning a photo opportunity for the First Minister so she could proclaim Fergusons as the likely recipient of the ferry contract. This was against the wishes of CMAL, the owner of the CalMac fleet, which feared that a high profile First Ministerial visit would “materially reduce their negotiating hand at a time when negotiations were far from concluded”. But Mrs Sturgeon went ahead anyway on August 31st. That just so happened to be the same day that the then Chancellor George Osborne was down river at Faslane making his own funding announcement. As Ferguson’s former owner Jim McColl has noted:
“She [Sturgeon] turned up at the yard with the whole camera crew and everything, grandstanding, to announce that we were the preferred bidder… you would normally announce us as preferred bidder but in a less dramatic way. But that happened to be the same morning that George Osborne was coming up to Scotland to announce a £500million investment in the Naval Yard… so this kind of upstaged the British Government.”
So, did Mr Brown ignore the warnings about the yard because his boss was demanding a nice photo op on the Clyde? I’m sure a simpler explanation is available, Mr Brown could provide it by explaining his reasons and publishing documents. Instead, he has decided to duck and dive. Take from that what you want.
ENDS
I'll leave comment on Gordon's plans for just now since I am still digesting them. Can I endorse what you said about Keith Brown and perhaps amplify it a bit?
Mr Brown was the responsible Cabinet Secretary when the ferries order went to Ferguson's despite the clear warning that they yard could not build the ships. That warning, of course, turned out to be disastrously true.
He appears to have taken no interest in the decision. In my view it was an error of judgement to leave a clearly tricky matter to a junior minister. If Mr Brown had been prepared to admit that and say that he learned from his mistake the matter could perhaps have been left there. Instead of that he has arrogantly refused to accept any responsibility and has been supported in this by the First Minister.
That raises very serious questions about his fitness to continue as Justice Secretary but it also demands a much clearer statement from the FM on how she expects Cabinet Secretaries to perform their duties in relation to their junior ministers. There appears to be no effort whatsoever to learn from the mistakes that have so expensively been made and to improve procedures. This is a dereliction of the FM's obligation to Parliament to ensure her government works effectively.