Socialists in Wales and Scotland Should Defend Devolution
Some Background
Brexit will mean that powers reserved to the devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but currently subject to EU jurisdiction will return from Brussels. Theresa May wants the most important of these to be repatriated to the UK Parliament instead, and has included this in the EU Withdrawal Bill.  Effectively this would mean that for the first time Westminster could make laws affecting devolved matters like Agriculture, Fishing, food standards and public procurement without the need for consent from Holyrood or the Senedd. A series of talks between the Westminster government and the devolved administrations has taken place aimed at reaching agreement on which powers should be returned to which level of government. The UK government claims this is all largely a technical issue about replacing EU policies like the CAP with UK “frameworks”.
However the Scottish government sees Westminster’s intentions as a “power-grab” and the Scottish Parliament has recently voted to refuse consent to the Tories’ EU Withdrawal Bill. All parties except the Scottish Tories supported the decision.  Such a refusal of consent has not happened before. According to one Scottish political commentator it has created a “full blown constitutional crisis – a question of who rules” (Iain Macwhirter, Herald May 16). SNP MP, Ian Blackford, called May’s subsequent decision to proceed with legislation restricting devolved powers, “a democratic outrage”.
Needless to say  the Westminster and Scottish Tories have denounced Holyrood’s decision as a pro-independence stunt by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP; manufacturing discontent and stirring up anti-union sentiment over what are little more than minor administrative details. A position that has received a boost from the Welsh Labour Government’s decision to come to agreement with May on the transfer of powers to Westminster. At the same time, most of the mainstream media including the BBC has largely ignored the whole issue or parroted the Westminster line that it is a purely administrative matter of limited public interest.
The Left and the “Westminster Power-grab”
Is this really just an arcane tussle over obscure constitutional detail? Should the left be at all concerned with this wrangle over powers?
Labour appears to be split over how to deal with the issue, with Welsh Labour accepting what it claims is an improved offer from May that will allow it to support her EU Withdrawal Bill, while Scottish Labour supports the SNP, Greens and LibDems in rejecting it.  This may reflect fundamental differences within Corbyn’s party regarding the significance of devolution itself.  More likely it is electoral opportunism from the Scottish party.  Given its track record of broken “vows” during the independence referendum, it’s hard to see how Scottish Labour could ever get Corbyn’s recent pledge of enhanced “federalism” taken seriously in Scotland unless it was seen to join the SNP led fight to preserve the existing devolution settlement. Richard Leonard, the Scottish Labour leader, knows he must win a substantial increase in Labour’s Scottish vote to ensure a Corbyn victory in 2022.
On the radical left (including the pro-indy Scottish Left) there has so far been a deafening silence on devolution.  Presumably most of the left groups see it as a distraction from “genuine” class struggle politics.  Fighting austerity, privatisation and deregulation, rebuilding trade union strength, resisting the Brexit driven rise of racism and xenophobia are certainly enough to be going on with.  And then there’s Trump, illegal wars and the rise of the far right across Europe!
Neverthelss socialists must defend the existing devolution settlement. To understand why, it is important to realise that the Tories are using the question of repatriating powers to rewrite the whole devolution settlement. Lost in all the turgid debate is the fact that the EU Withdrawal Bill (original clause 11, now clause 15 for the pedantic!) alters the meaning of “consent” in the various Scotland and Wales Acts that govern devolution. The Scottish and Welsh Parliaments will be deemed to have consented to allow Westminster to legislate on devolved matters so long as they have debated a “consent motion” or chosen not to. The outcome of the vote is irrelevant. If a parliament refuses to consent it will be taken as acceptance so long as there was a debate. If it refuses debate a Westminster proposal at all, it will also be taken as acceptance. One Scottish constitutional expert has characterised this as a “rape clause” – “no” is taken to mean “yes”! It gives the Westminster government wide powers to intervene in existing devolved areas not just those currently returning from Brussels.
Scottish journalist Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp recently pointed out how significant this extension of central government power will be post Brexit.  It would give Westminster the power, “to offer ultra free-market trade deals, for example to the US, without fear of a Scottish parliamentary veto”. (The National, May 17 2018).  Post Brexit trade deals will require opening up the whole of the UK to intense free market competition and empowering unaccountable legal tribunals to challenge progressive reforms that threaten corporate profitability. The proposed Westminster powers to legislate in the devolved nations will make it far easier for an increasingly authoritarian Tory government to secure such deals by scraping offending reforms without consent from devolved parliaments.  Free HE tuition, free prescription charges, government promotion of the living wage, procurement policies aimed at developing sustainability, social enterprise and decent employment rights, along with a host of other limited but progressive reforms within the devolved nations would come under threat.
The changed devolution settlement will also make it easier for the UK government to expose key public services in Scotland and Wales to international competition.  In Scotland, successive governments have retained a fully nationalised and integrated NHS. This would be a serious “obstacle” to a US/UK trade deal that would almost certainly require the whole UK health service to be open to America’s giant health corporations.  The implications for jobs, pay and service delivery in Scotland and Wales where the public sector is the main employer would be enormous.
In short the squabble between Westminster and the Scottish Parliament has direct implications for the Left in the devolved countries.  Tory proposals to restrict devolved powers would seriously damage our ability to resist neoliberalism and the onslaught on workers’ living standards that is likely to follow any conceivable version of Brexit.  Devolution, for all its limitations, has opened up spaces for progressive politics and the articulation of dissent. It has enabled more opportunities for engagement in democratic processes and it has led to some important reforms which, while limited, have made a serious difference to the lives of working class people. Defending these are reasons enough for the radical left to oppose the Tory “power grab”.