UK Constitutional Future: Need To Adopt A Federal Structure
Published Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 01:24
If we are to preserve the Union, it is high time we have a serious debate on creating a federal structure and devolving power to the appropriate level, argues Graham Allen MP.
In 1997 there was an unrivalled opportunity in the euphoria of a new landslide Labour government for a new start to be made, a far-reaching democratic settlement to take the United Kingdom through the next century. Effective devolution of power away from the massively over centralised Whitehall state could have taken place for all the nations and regions of the United Kingdom.
By now small English regional executives and Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolved institutions could have been up and running, and comfortably bedded in with 15 years of experience. This could have been underpinned by the sort of effective independent local government that virtually every Western democracy other than the UK already takes for granted.
Instead, the lack of vision and failure to seize the opportunity meant that only a half hearted homage was made to the memory of John Smith. We are now paying the economic and political costs for that timidity. The chance was missed for a federal structure in the UK based upon a Westminster government with reduced but clearer responsibilities supported by a stronger but smaller Parliament working with devolved national and regional institutions and in partnership with constitutionally independent local government.
Where power has been appropriately devolved it is working well, indeed much better than the sclerotic, cumbersome, risk averse centralised state in Whitehall. Little wonder that there is pressure from all the devolved institutions and the people they represent for varying degrees of more authority to be prised out of the Whitehall/No10/media club.
The best chance for the union is not to resist our people taking as much responsibility in their local and that devolved settlements but to go with the flow of modern Western democracies and define- openly and honestly- what powers are best exercised at which levels.
Subsidiarity is an ugly word to describe a beautiful concept. If we can bring ourselves to shape our democratic future from the basis of this principle rather than personalised political dogfights and ever more desperate attempts by Whitehall to run the last country in the Empire, then we could, even now, create a more effective, widely understood and more democratic way of not only keeping the union together but of governing ourselves more effectively
