Whither the Scotland bill?

The SNP’s election victory throws the future of the Scotland bill into quite some doubt.  Alex Salmond and John Swinney have called for the bill to be ‘improved’ with a variety of extra powers devolved, including corporation tax and borrowing powers.   This will be trickier than it looks, though.  It also forms part of an elaborate poker game that will form the prelude to the referendum about independence planned for later in the term of the Parliament.  The bill is still awaiting report stage and third reading in the Commons, before moving to the Lords.  Report stage has been put on hold since the start of the Scottish election campaign, and appears to have been further postponed until after the Whit bank holiday.

The key issue is the need for any bill to comply with the Sewel convention, and secure the consent of the Scottish Parliament.  While the bill secured such consent at the end of the last Parliament, that was conditional on a number of changes being made to it, and provided for the Parliament to reconsider the bill before Royal assent, and after these elections.  (What, exactly, it sought then was set out in the Scotland Bill Committee’s report, available here and

‘Scotsman’ piece on a Scottish independence referendum

I’ve a short piece in today’s Scotsman about the legal basis on which an independence referendum can be held, and what a referendum called by Holyrood can and can’t do.  It’s available here.  They’ve edited my copy a bit, though, and the whole of what I wrote appears below, and have added a few links for ease of reference.

Calling a referendum: who, what, how?  

Who can call a referendum on Scottish independence depends on what question is to be put to the voters.  The powers of the Scottish Parliament are limited, and it may not pass legislation that ‘relates to’ reserved matters including the Union of Scotland and England.  Key provisions of the Treaty of Union also cannot be amended by Holyrood.

This doesn’t prohibit a consultative referendum, about whether there should be negotiations between the Scottish and UK Governments about independence.  Such a referendum is pretty clearly within the Scottish Parliament’s powers, as Michael Moore has now acknowledged.  But that is as far as it can go.  A referendum bill that purported to create a legal basis for independence directly would be beyond the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish election results: an SNP stunner

By now, the Scottish election results are widely known, and pretty stunning they are too.  Contrary to all expectations, the SNP secured an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament, as the Lib Dem vote collapsed and Labour and Conservative ones took quite a hit too.  The upshot is as follows:

SNP                                             69 (+23 on 2007)

Labour                                         37 (-7)

Conservatives                             15 (-5)

Liberal Democrats                       5 (-12)

Others                                        3 (+1)

The others are two Greens, and Margo Macdonald.

Full details are available on the BBC website here.  (The numbers about changes since 2007 are theirs, and I think relate to their calculations of what results in 2007 would have been, given boundary changes since  then.  They clearly don’t relate to the actual number of seats each party held in the last Parliament.)

Welsh election results: Labour just short of a majority

For those who haven’t been following the results obsessively, we now have a final set of results for the National Assembly elections.  They are:

Labour                              30 seats (+4 from 2007)

Conservative                     14 seats (+2)

Plaid Cymru                       11 seats (-4)

Liberal Democrats               5 seats (-1)

The expected Lib Dem meltdown didn’t happen; nor did break-throughs for UKIP or the Greens.  Labour’s gains include Trish Law’s seat in Blaenau Gwent, but otherwise appear to have come more at Plaid’s expense than anyone else’s.  Plaid failed to reap any electoral benefit from being the junior partner in government (but junior partners seldom do).  In the end, it was some small shifts largely in favour of Labour and against Plaid, and on nothing like the scale of the upheavals in Scotland.

There is full coverage of the results on the BBC website, here.

One story is the wide range of talent lost to the Assembly, because of the way the ban on dual candidacy forces candidates to make all-or-nothing choices.  Plaid have lost Helen Mary

The last Scottish opinion polling

Weber Shandwick deserve credit for two things in the election campaign, through their ‘Scotland Votes’ website.  One is doing a ‘poll of polls’ analysis of opinion polls, and the other is developing software that enables sensible predictions of those results in the number of Parliamentary seats.  Their last poll is available here, and suggests a strong plurality of seats for the SNP: 59 , compared to 42 for Labour, 12 Conservatives and just seven Lib Dems.  There would also be eight Greens and one independent (Margo Macdonald).  There are problems with this approach, including the fact it includes historic polls, so reflects shifts in public opinion from some time ago, but it still gives an overview of public opinion.  How accurate that is will be clear by Friday afternoon!

One interesting piece of arithmetic: that would give the SNP and Greens together a majority, enough to carry a referendum bill through Holyrood.

Canada’s federal general election

The UK isn’t the only place going to the polls this week.  There was a federal general election in Canada on Monday, with the results emerging early on Tuesday morning.

The election was called after the minority Conservative government lost a confidence vote, in which it was held to be in contempt of Parliament.  The opposition parties (and particularly the Liberals) triggered it – not the government.  As opinion polls at the time hadn’t markedly moved since the 2008 election, this seemed a pretty rash step for Michael Ignatieff – it was unlikely he’d enable the Liberals to return to government, and quite possible he’d enable the Conservatives to secure their long-dreamt-of Parliamentary majority.  In fact, it has turned out worse than that for him.

The results are remarkable.  The Conservatives won a clear majority; 167 of the 308 seats.  The previous official opposition, the Liberals, collapsed to 34 seats, from 77.  The sovereigntist Bloc Québecois did likewise (from 51 seats to four).  The New Democratic Party,

Elections and after: looking forward

This blog has been pretty silent for some weeks, largely because of the devolved elections.  That may seem odd for a political blog, but since I try not to get engaged in party-political battles I don’t have a lot to say about the campaigns in Scotland or Wales.  As the UK Government has been in purdah on devolution-related issues (with the Scotland bill on hold), not been much has been happening on that front either.  As the election campaigns enter the final straight, though, there are a couple of things worth saying looking to the future.

The first is that there’s been almost as much an air of unreality about what I’ve observed of the Scottish and Welsh campaigns as there was in last year’s UK election.  The extent to which public spending will be constrained in the next few years, and how that will affect devolved governments, has simply not come across in much of the campaigns (of all parties). The Scottish parties appear to have acknowledged it, to an extent, in the last leaders’ debate; the Labour Party in Wales has put financial fairness at the forefront of its campaign

Radio 4’s ‘Beyond Westminster’ discusses devolution

When the UK Parliament is in recess, the Saturday morning slot on BBC Radio 4 usually given over to ‘The Week in Westminster’ gets taken over by ‘Beyond Westminster’.  This week’s was devoted to an appraisal  of devolution in Scotland and Wales, and included a studio discussion featuring me, Robert Hazell from the Constitution Unit at UCL and Richard Wyn Jones from the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University (after discussions of a couple of policy areas – higher education in Wales and health in Scotland).  Details of the programme are here.  Those in the UK can ‘listen again’ to it using the iPlayer for the next seven days, and a podcast can be downloaded here for the next 30 days.

Back in Brazil

Apologies to those who’ve been looking for responses on the host of recent developments in the UK, including the Commons’ detailed consideration of the Scotland bill and the report of the Commons Scottish Affairs Committee on it, the UK Government’s announcement regarding a ‘UK bill of rights‘, the UK Budget and the consultation paper on ‘Rebalancing the Northern Ireland Economy’.

I’m presently back in Brazil for a seminar in connection with the ESRC-funded ‘Pathfinder’ project, and haven’t had the chance to keep up properly with UK developments.  I’ll do so after I get back next week.

The Scotland bill: debated at Westminster and provisionally approved at Holyrood

The Scotland Bill has continued its progress toward the statute book.  On Monday 7 March, it had the first of its three days of consideration at Committee stage in the House of Commons. The part I watched was dominated by a rather tedious and introverted discussion of how regrettable MPs thought it would be to lose the ‘drama’ of holding a count on election night.  This is scarcely the most important issue raised by the bill, and may not even happen – the bill devolves electoral administration to Holyrood, and the choices the Scottish Parliament makes about that aren’t at issue here.  The attention given to such a comparatively minor aspect of the bill is hardly an advertisement for Westminster.  The debate did move on to discuss other constitutional provision of the bill, including the devolution of control of airguns, speed limits, and the ‘undevolution’ of insolvency provisions, as well as clauses relating to the courts.  All of these were recommendations made by the Calman Commission, rather than the changes that were added by the Scotland Office.  Four of the amendments proposed (all opposition amendments – none were introduced by the government) were pursued to a division – all of those supported by the SNP if not by the other parties.  The Hansard report of the debate starts here.

More important was Thursday’s debate at Holyrood.  Given the support of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, it’s no surprise that the legislative consent motion for the bill was approved.  It’s more of a surprise that the motion attracted the support not just of the unionist parties, but the SNP as well (only the Greens and one Labour MSP objected; Margo MacDonald abstained).  This was despite the failure of the SNP’s amendment to the LCM, in favour of one more critical of both the principle of the bill and some of the constitutional clauses in it.  The LCM as approved is here (and the text of the SNP’s defeated amendment is here).

The debate was evidently a somewhat scratchy affair, but perhaps could have been worse.  The record of it from the Parliament’s Official Report is here.

Pauline McNeill (leading for Labour) seemed to think that the reports of the Calman Commission and the Scotland Bill Committee were endorsements of the constitutional status quo, fiscal issues excepted.  That’s certainly not the case for the Committee’s report, and the fact that acknowledges the current bill is the start of a continuing process of constitutional development is one of its more encouraging features.  She also seemed quite happy with the current division of powers between Scottish and UK tiers of government, overlooking the problems caused for her own party by such UK actions as the refusal to pass to the Scottish Government the amount of attendance allowance foregone by potential Scottish claimants thanks to the policy of long-term care for the elderly.

Murdo Fraser, for the Conservatives, rather gracelessly seemed to think that the row about the Drew Scott/Andrew Hughes-Hallett evidence was about a dislike of rigorous questioning, rather than whether it’s appropriate to ambush expert witnesses.  Margaret Mitchell, a Conservative back-bencher, tried to introduce an amendment requiring a referendum on the tax-varying powers – at decision time, this attracted support from the SNP but not her own colleagues (or Labour or the Lib Dems) and so was defeated.  Robert Brown, for the Liberal Democrats, suggested that the bill will create a similar framework to that of Spain, Switzerland or Germany (not really – Swiss cantons raise about 75 per cent of their own spending, while Germany practises a highly redistributive system of horizontal equalisation, and the Spanish arrangements are far from trouble-free).  Tricia Marwick suggested that the claim that the Parliament will be responsible for 35 per cent of devolved spending is wrong as it includes local government funding (a claim which I’d say is wrong in principle but right in practice).  While there were general thanks to Wendy Alexander for her role in chairing the Scotland Bill Committee (and other contributions to the Parliament she’s about to leave), Ms Alexander herself was a notable absentee from the debate.  So were the Labour leader, the First Minister and the Finance Secretary – Fiona Hyslop, Minister for Culture and External Affairs, led for the Scottish Government.

What was crucial for the SNP’s support was the fact that the LCM finally approved endorses the Scotland Bill Committee’s report.  It therefore calls for extensive if not very clearly specified amendment of the bill at Westminster, and for a further vote by Holyrood to consider the bill after it has been considered by both Houses there.  Tactically this is rather a clever move by the SNP; it increases the pressure for those amendments to be made at Westminster, gives the new Parliament a further chance to vote on the matter, after the Scottish elections, while maximising the SNP’s room for manoeuvre between now and then.  Equally, it puts a great deal of pressure on the advocates for the bill if the amendments sought are not made.  This also offers advantages for the unionist parties, as it enables them to show how their approach differs from that of the UK Government.

The way is now clear for Westminster to proceed to consider the bill, though how much progress it will make before the Scottish elections is an open question.