Ed Bridges discusses how Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda could face a major test if it expands powers within England while resisting greater devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
As the UK acclimatises to its seventh Prime Minister in ten years, we face bleak questions about whether the nation has now become ungovernable, and whether we are falling into a trap of believing that there are simple answers to complex questions. It increasingly feels as though our political class wants to sell the message that the country’s multilayered social, economic and governance problems are like a troublesome laptop that can just be switched off and on again, if only the incumbent (whoever he/she is) could just be bothered to do it.
Into these choppy waters steps Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his promise that devolution will be the game-changing policy to chart a new political course for the nation. His pitch has put at its heart the need for the UK’s wealth to be more evenly shared across the country, and for regions to be given greater power. By doing so, he argues that England’s regions will be better prepared to build on their economic, industrial, cultural and social strengths. He also envisages greater support from central government and investment into infrastructures to make this happen.
There is no doubting his personal and ideological commitment to this agenda. From principles (the Makerfield Test) to theory (Manchesterism) to tangible policy (a Number 10 North), it is clear that Burnham’s devolution lodestar goes beyond soundbites and seeks to operationalise a lot of the policy ideas that authors have explored at length in the Campaign for Social Science devolution hub.
And yet, there is one supreme contradiction at the heart of Burnham’s vision that has garnered little attention, particularly within the London-based media.
Fundamentally, Prime Minister Andy Burnham derives his power from leading a party in the Westminster Parliament that is vehemently unionist in its principles and policies. Problematically, this comes at a time when voters in three of the UK’s nations are increasingly looking to nationalist parties to represent their interests. Can the Burnham administration walk the tightrope of granting further powers to English regions while refusing to do the same for the devolved nations?
The scale of the conundrum is best exemplified in Wales, where the Welsh Labour party was given an ignominious kicking at the recent elections, in part because, as Nye Davies put it, “Plaid Cymru has increasingly occupied the political space Welsh Labour once helped define”. Pre-election polling indicated that of people switching from Welsh Labour to Plaid Cymru, 40.3 per cent cited Plaid as being the party most able to ‘stand up for Wales’, presumably because having Labour-led governments at both ends of the M4 had not resulted in a material improvement in their lives. Take, for example, Westminster Labour’s reluctance to heed the arguments of Welsh Labour on issues such as devolution of criminal justice, devolution of air passenger duty, or ensuring that Wales receives its fair share of funding from England-only major infrastructure projects such as HS2 or the Oxford–Cambridge rail link.
Pretty consistently, where Labour politicians in the Senedd have called for further powers and funding, Labour in Westminster has often been unwilling to deliver it.
Will the Burnham government change that direction? His winning pitch so far has been to promise more devolution, but this has been heavily based (implicitly or explicitly) on devolving more within England specifically. His position on greater devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is much more nuanced. If his government delivers more and bigger devolution within England, it is hard to see how he can justify resisting the ideological and practical arguments for further devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
If he seeks inspiration from the 2024 Labour manifesto, to try and deliver on the promises for which his party has an electoral mandate, he may not find the path any easier. In its manifesto, Labour promised to ‘restore decision-making over the allocation of structural funds to the representatives of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland’ – but there was constructive ambiguity about who exactly were seen to be these ‘representatives’. So far, it seems to have been interpreted as meaning not the devolved governments and First Ministers, but the devolved nations’ secretaries of state at Westminster. Last year, the politically toxic nature of this issue was laid bare when Labour members of the Senedd openly criticised Keir Starmer for saying that the UK government and the Secretary of State for Wales would be in charge of delivering the Pride of Place town centre improvement programme, even though all the things it covers (fixing bus shelters and providing new bins) are policy areas that would usually be devolved.
Elsewhere in the manifesto, there was a vague mention of additional funding for the devolved governments. That’s no doubt very welcome, but it was conspicuous that there was no commitment to replace poor old Joel Barnett’s formula, 48 years after it was introduced as a temporary measure.
The coming months will reveal how ideologically committed Burnham and his administration are to further devolution, and the acid test will be what happens when the interests of the three nationalist First Ministers and the Prime Minister don’t align.
Ed Bridges is Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the Academy of Social Sciences. He has a strong interest in devolution and social policy, and has spent the majority of his professional career working in Wales and Northern Ireland, including a sustained period in local government. As well as his role with the Academy, he also teaches about devolution on an apprenticeship course for policy officers.