Time for Brown to wake up to constitutional reality

July 9th, 2007

Satellite image courtesy of Nasa Visible Earth

The political map of the UK is shifting rapidly at the moment, with nationalist governments in power in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – where the nationalist Sinn Fein is sharing power with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party.

But our new prime minister Gordon Brown, alongside parties such as the Liberal Democrats, are in denial about the reshaping of Britain’s constitutional physiognomy that has occurred since May 3rd. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to reinvent British politics, Brown has chosen to see it as a threat to Labour’s hegemony.

There has been a mass sticking of heads in the sand by our elected representatives from the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. Such behaviour is easier to understand from Labour – which is clearly smarting at having lost of control of the Celtic fringe. The changes that have occurred since early May are not exactly what Tony Blair had in mind when he committed himself to devolving more power to the UK’s “peripheral nations” in 1997. However the response of the Lib Dems – who in Scotland have been behaving like petulant schoolboys ever since the Holyrood elections – seems more like ill-considered huffiness.

Iain MacWhirter was typically perceptive about what’s going on in his column in this morning’s Herald.

As Iain says:

If Gordon Brown is having trouble coming to terms with devolution 2.0, the Liberal Democrats have been all but destroyed by it.

Politics in this country is changing incredibly fast. As the Liberal Democrats collapse in disarray, the Scottish Tories are back in business, showing that by making tactical alliances with the SNP they can get back into the political game ….

The next leader of the Scottish Labour Party is likely to be Wendy Alexander, a former member of Scottish Labour Action. She has seen how Jack McConnell was destroyed by having to toe the London line on everything from nuclear power to the Scottish deficit.

It is hard to imagine her actually sitting in a cabinet with Salmond, but it is equally difficult to see Labour winning the next election. The Scottish Labour Party might well decide that its best hope in Scotland is to get back into the home-rule process, perhaps by supporting a new constitutional convention and even a referendum on powers.

If Labour want to have a future in Scottish politics, then they’re really going to have to get over their pathetic chippiness towards the SNP. Their current best hope is that Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond will somehow trip himself up with a grave political blunder ending the current “honeymoon” period and allowing them to come riding back into power in Holyrood. However, given how sure-footed Salmond has been so far, this may be naive.

As Iain suggests, wouldn’t Labour in Scotland be better advised to accept that politics has changed irrevocably, break with “London” Labour, and work towards the improved constitutional settlement that the Scottish population so clearly wants?

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Posted by Ian Fraser on Jul 9 2007. Filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry