Policy Research Media Morhamburn

According to the Scotsman, Labour MPs in London are seeking to ‘audit’ devolution and to assess whether or not it has been a success. Potentially incendiary stuff, and perhaps not too surprising that the story has ‘broken’ after Holyrood has gone into recess.

When a government, politician or any other body takes a position, makes a statement or enacts a policy, one of the key questions that should be asked is why? What is behind it, what are they trying to achieve?

According to The Scotsman, some ‘devolution sceptic’ MPs from the Labour party are behind the move. So the question is, why?

Well of course the motives could be totally innocent, Labour are after all the party that brought about devolution and it could be that given the general consensus for some sort of further devolution to Holyrood, they feel that now is the time to take stock and work out what could be being done better.

Or there could be some more partisan motives behind it – we are after all now entering the run-up to Holyrood elections where Labour look favourites to regain power.

Whatever the motives are, it is clear that devolution has put real pressure on Scottish MPs to justify their existence, their salaries and their expenses.

A crude estimation of the Holyrood/Westminster power balance is that Holyrood is responsible for around 75% of issues that affect the average Scot on a day to day basis. Given that these types of issues are likely to have accounted for most MP casework, it is fair to say that their workload must have diminished significantly.

And so, in our austerity age and with a Tory-led government at Westminster, there must be the potential for them to have salaries cut (after all they now have much less responsibility than their English counterparts), or be reduced in number – neither of which will be palatable for the embattled Scots MPs.

Such issues and problems are in many ways devolution’s rough edges, loose ends that will be tidied-up as time passes and English resentment grows. But there is another issue at stake here and one which in my opinion has the potential to be far more controversial.

Who is Holyrood accountable to? The Scottish people would be the popular answer, but as Holyrood was created by an Act of Westminster, it could be revoked or amended by the MPs who sit there. In crude terms, Holyrood exists as a gift of Westminster, and they could take it away if they so wished.

Now of course the idea that Holyrood would be dissolved or even have its powers diminished is outlandish in the extreme (which could in itself be an indication of how successful devolution has been), and any party who tried to do it would be taking an enormous gamble.

But at a time when constitutional reform has become an accepted reality for all the parties at Holyrood, the question of who Holyrood is answerable to has the potential to open a can of worms for all involved.

And as for judging how well devolution has worked, it is highly subjective and problematic – can you really judge a process by how well (or badly) it is used by individual governments? Would any perceived failures of devolution be failures of a system or of the individuals working within that system particular time? And how will the MSPs take to being ‘judged’ by a group of people that they have largely replaced but who still seem to view them as inferior?

And surely the Scottish MPs behind this move have their chance to judge how well Holyrood is working – the same as the rest of us do when they cast their vote for their MSP every four years.

[The views expressed by Morhamburn people in their blogs are theirs and theirs alone. they do not represent the thoughts of the company as a whole or our clients. If you have a comment to make on any blog, please email info@morhamburn.com and we’ll put the printable ones up on the website]