Extensive New Powers

A guest post by Mike McCreadie

The Scottish Parliament will have extensive new powers. Fact. Extensive new powers. EXTENSIVE NEW POWERS. There, that's that then, I can get back to Downton.

It's an interesting coin of phrase, extensive new powers. It keeps being dangled around in front of us from all angles. The press love it, the parties love it, and Fluffy totally bums off it. It sounds great - it has the word “extensive” in it. And it also sounds great because it has the word “new” in it. Even better than that, though, it sounds great because it has the word “powers” in it, like Superman. It is thrice great, and can probably see through ladies' undergarments. No wonder they keep saying it. It's just that, well, it’s not something the Scotland Bill can be measured against.

"Extensive new powers", catchy though it is, is open to interpretation. For example, my wife feels that I was given "extensive new powers" when we got a telly in the bedroom. I, on the other hand, was dismayed to find that she had retained a power of veto over the plunger, especially when she wants to catch up with EastEnders at bedtime (just to be clear - that's a veto in the channel-changing sense, not the biblical sense, although there's one of them'n'all which I won't go into here). I can’t complain, though - I love EastEnders - I love it almost as much as I love running my nipples through a mangle. Which brings me neatly back to the Scotland Bill.

Objectively, the Scotland Bill will be measured against two things. Firstly, politically, it'll be measured against the Smith Commission proposals. It’ll be held up to Smith like tracing paper, and depending on which side of the fence you sit, the traced likeness will be either heralded or derided, but mostly derided, because it'll be like tracing over a picture of David Cameron's face and coming away with a caricature of Ming T Merciless, although I imagine he'd be quite happy with such a likeness, proud even. DC, I mean, not Ming - Ming would be ****ing furious, I should imagine. Like, zappy-furious.

Secondly, and way more importantly, the Scotland Bill will be measured by the people of Scotland - the ordinary man in the street, so to speak - against “The Vow”. The Vow was nice and simple - Devo Max - devolution of everything bar defence and foreign policy. Or if you believe George Galloway, even more than that, DevoMaximusDecimusMeridious, if you will, Husband to a murdered Vow, Father to a butchered Bill, and I will have my vengeance. I wouldn’t hold my breath for George to speak up about it, though. He’ll be busy spooning Putin now that Saddam’s gone cold.

But of course, we know that Devo Max has not and will never be delivered. William Hill won't even give odds on it, for a start, and in fact will eventually have you escorted from the premises, and barred, should you insist on being offered even the most outside of odds on the subject. Believe me, it's a dead duck. I probably shouldn’t have gone in swinging my claymore to be honest, though. Have you ever been tasered? Hindsight.

So why then do certain interested parties insist on insulting our intelligence and continue to proclaim that The Vow is being delivered, has been delivered already, and will be delivered later, in a bit? Well, it beats the **** outta me. Maybe it was left at the neighbours and they just haven’t let on. It seems stupid. When less than 10% of Scotland believes it, I just can't see a rationale for even pretending anymore.

The Scotland Bill, no more than a bill-of-attrition, as it is, is a bit like getting into the driving seat of a car blindfolded, and then being told, nay, goaded, into driving off, only to find that the steering wheel only turns left and the throttle has an unpredictable tendency to stick to the carpets. And then they blame you when you crash. It is the most cynical and destructive type of politics. Apart from a nuclear strike, of course. That can be pretty destructive, if I’m being honest. Look it up on YouTube if you don’t believe me.

The only possible explanation is that Labour and the Conservatives both want the SNP to fail (no surprise there, I hear you say). They want a party - a party that’s in government - to fail, and they want it so badly that they’ll happily cripple a whole country to achieve it, and they’ll laugh and sneer while it happens. And then, while those who are left tend the wounded, and make do and mend to get by, they’ll sneer again and say: we told you so.

And they’ll be right, partly. They did tell us so. They were unequivocal about it. To be fair to them, I do the same thing myself - when I’m bored of an evening I’ll often head down to the lower estates where I can look down upon the little people and say “You’ll never make it out of here, sonny!”, and do you know what, after I’ve driven over a few of ‘em, they won’t! It makes me feel all...Tory inside. And then I can go back home and snuggle up to the wife and EastEnders, happy that I’ve just identified a future workforce, all hopeless and broken and ready to comply because what other option do they have?

The real questions now do not centre around how the Scottish government can use these “extensive new powers” to benefit Scotland. That would be a stupid ****ing question, and one that won’t get any cleverererer the more times it’s asked. The real questions now gravitate towards the next referendum and when it will be. It’s inevitable. For one thing, we now know that Scotland’s last hope for fairness within the union - Labour - can’t be trusted. When a progressive like Jeremy Corbyn shoots his bolt as soon as the starter pistol goes off, and you just know that there’s no one else waiting to pick up the baton for the next leg, well, that’s it. Kiss the opposition goodbye. Noble though the efforts of the SNP 55/56 may be on the opposition benches, they just don’t have the numbers to make a difference. Factor in the pervasively obstinate and abstinate intransigence of Labour to anything even remotely SNP, and you can rest easy, safe in the knowledge that nursing the massive chip on their shoulder is way more important than doing right by the people. As a side note, I think that the SNP 55/56 should buy Labour chips every Friday lunchtime, until they get the message. No fish, no smoked sausage, no DFMB (let’s not be silly), just chips. Lots and lots of chips. I wouldn’t even bother with salt and sauce/vinegar, because they don’t deserve it. Just chips. Spit in them first, obviously, but you get my point.

The Scotland Bill/Vow, call it what you will, is the end. I went from being a bit disinterested in the Indyref at the beginning to becoming a fairly strong supporter of independence at the end, but I’ve always held out hope that *something* might happen within the Union to bring about the balance and the fairness that would make it work for all of the nations within it, and thus negate the need to separate. Let’s be honest about this, a Union of nations should be stronger than the sum of its parts. It should be. It bloody should be. It just should. I’m afraid that, for me at least, hope of that is gone.

PS. Don’t spit in their chips. I was only joking about that.

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How the Scottish general election result was once again overturned by English MPs

I'm not sure whether anyone has done this yet, so I thought I'd put together a breakdown of how Scottish and non-Scottish MPs voted on some of the crucial amendments to the Scotland Bill on Monday.

Vote on whether the power to call an independence referendum should be unambiguously transferred to the Scottish Parliament -

Scottish MPs :

Yes 53
No 1

English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs :

Yes 3
No 288

Scottish result overturned, with an overall result of Yes 56, No 289.  The only non-Scottish MPs to vote in favour were the Greens' Caroline Lucas, and the SDLP's Margaret Ritchie and Mark Durkan.  Plaid Cymru's Hywel Williams and Jonathan Edwards acted as the two non-voting tellers for the 'Aye' side to allow all SNP members present to vote.

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Vote on whether to devolve working tax credits and child tax credits to the Scottish Parliament -

Scottish MPs :

Yes 53
No 2

English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs :

Yes 3
No 475

Scottish result overturned, with an overall result of Yes 56, No 477.  The only non-Scottish MPs to vote in favour were the Greens' Caroline Lucas, and the SDLP's Margaret Ritchie and Mark Durkan.  Plaid Cymru's Hywel Williams and Jonathan Edwards acted as the two non-voting tellers for the 'Aye' side to allow all SNP members present to vote.

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Vote on whether equal opportunities should be fully devolved to the Scottish Parliament -

Scottish MPs :

Yes 53
No 1

English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs :

Yes 8
No 287

Scottish result overturned, with an overall result of Yes 61, No 288.  The only non-Scottish MPs to vote in favour were the Greens' Caroline Lucas, the SDLP's Margaret Ritchie and Mark Durkan, the DUP's Gregory Campbell, Gavin Robinson and Jim Shannon, the independent Northern Ireland unionist Lady Sylvia Hermon, and the Liberal Democrats' Greg Mulholland.  Plaid Cymru's Hywel Williams and Jonathan Edwards acted as the two non-voting tellers for the 'Aye' side to allow all SNP members present to vote.

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The Scottish result was also overturned on the vote to decide whether the Sewel Convention, which prevents the Westminster parliament legislating on devolved matters without the express permission of the Scottish Parliament, should be made legally binding.  (That was an integral part of the Smith recommendations, incidentally, so by voting it down the Tory government have demonstrably failed to deliver the Smith package in full.)  Because Labour voted with the SNP, it was a more complicated result than some of the others, and it would take much longer to work out the breakdown for sure.  But as the SNP's turnout (including Michelle Thomson) seemed fairly steady throughout the day at 53, I'm fairly confident in saying that Scottish MPs voted Yes 54, No 1, and non-Scottish MPs voted Yes 191, No 286, with an overall result of Yes 245, No 287.

Labour also went into the "Aye" lobby with the SNP on a vote to partially devolve equal opportunities to the Scottish Parliament.  On that division, Scottish MPs seem to have voted Yes 54, No 1, and non-Scottish MPs seem to have voted Yes 188, No 286.  The Scottish result was overturned with an overall outcome of Yes 242, No 287.

As a result of the very justifiable outrage over these events, there have been some wild calls on social media for the Scottish Parliament to use its (unofficial) Sewel Convention powers to block the Scotland Bill altogether.  Although I think the SNP are entirely right to play hardball over this in the hope of improving the Bill, I hope they would only actually use the nuclear option as a genuine last resort, ie. if the alternative would be catastrophic for Scotland.  As pathetic as this transfer of powers is, it's basically what we've got to show for the success of the Yes campaign, and I wouldn't want to see it thrown away lightly.

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Are we fast reaching the point where it will be untenable for the SNP not to put radical constitutional proposals in their Holyrood manifesto?

You might remember that in the early days after September 18th, some people on the moderate wing of the SNP were shooting down anyone who even dared to raise the topic of a second independence referendum.  Although I didn't agree with Yes supporters being told what they should and shouldn't say out loud, there was a big part of me that did feel the SNP were just going to have to "take their medicine" for a prolonged spell.  It seems quite strange in retrospect, but I even suggested in an International Business Times article that the party should categorically rule out pushing for independence for two full Holyrood terms, unless something drastic happened, such as Britain leaving the European Union.

So what has changed since then?  Just about everything, actually...

1) The SNP membership has increased several-fold to 115,000.  Most of those new members have not joined with a view to seeing the constitutional question neglected for the next decade.

2) The Smith Agreement has been reneged upon by the UK government in several key respects.  That's not something that can simply be allowed to pass, given that the No option in the referendum was so explicitly tied to the Smith process.

3) The SNP's performance at the general election was in itself a game-changer.  Nobody thought in late September or early October that anything even remotely close to 50% of the vote or 56 seats was a possibility.  Sometimes you have to press forward when history beckons so obviously, regardless of the timetable you originally had in mind.

4) The UK government are going out of their way to act as if the general election changed nothing, and have rejected out of hand each and every amendment to the Scotland Bill that has been tabled by the SNP.  Such utter contempt for the verdict of the Scottish electorate requires a firm response.

5) Brexit may still look unlikely, but it no longer seems quite as fanciful as it did last autumn, and there is now a clear route-map which might just take us there.

6) It seems that EVEL is about to be introduced, and in a manner which shows total disregard for the democratic and parliamentary process.  This by definition will constitute a "material change" in circumstances, because it will alter the basic "deal" of the United Kingdom - henceforth Scottish voters will be second-class citizens.  Remember that Westminster retains absolute sovereignty over Scotland, and can abolish the Scottish Parliament on a whim at any time - so the oft-heard line about English MPs having no say on domestic Scottish matters is absurdly inaccurate.  But in future, Scottish MPs will no longer have a say on matters that have a direct financial impact on public services in their own constituencies.  This new inequality is utterly intolerable, especially when an English parliamentary majority has just been used to veto Scotland's democratic will for Full Fiscal Autonomy.

Now, I'm not saying that any of these material changes are necessarily sufficient to warrant an unconditional manifesto pledge for a second independence referendum, but they do warrant something substantial.  It already seems very likely that there will be a conditional commitment to a referendum in the event of Brexit, but I wonder if we might also see a move towards a referendum on FFA itself.  Another possibility might be to use the Holyrood election to seek a mandate to negotiate FFA with the UK government - with an explicit indication of what the consequences will be if Cameron ignores that mandate.

The "United" Kingdom, in numbers : how MPs from Scotland and the rest of the UK voted last night on Full Fiscal Autonomy

I did the SDLP a severe disservice last night, but I was also far too kind to the Green Party of England and Wales.  I had assumed that, as a sister party to the Labour party, the SDLP might have voted against Full Fiscal Autonomy for Scotland, but they most certainly didn't - both Mark Durkan and Margaret Ritchie were in the 'Aye' lobby alongside the SNP.  They were the only non-Scottish MPs to vote in favour of Home Rule, because two of the three Plaid Cymru MPs acted as tellers to allow a full showing for the SNP (I presume the other one wasn't able to attend), and remarkably, the sole Green MP voted against.  That means not even a single MP representing an English constituency - not Caroline Lucas, not Dennis Skinner, not Edward Leigh, not Jeremy Corbyn, nobody - voted to respect the result of the general election in Scotland, and the overwhelming mandate given by voters to Full Fiscal Autonomy.

Here are the full, and rather stark figures...

Vote on a new clause to deliver Full Fiscal Autonomy for Scotland

Scottish MPs :

Yes 56
No 3
Abstentions 0

Non-Scottish MPs :

Yes 2
No 501
Abstentions 80

(The numbers add up to 642 rather than 650, because the Speaker, Deputy Speakers and tellers are unable to vote.)

Still, we're a "glorious United Kingdom", aren't we?  Oodles of mutual respect and all that.  English Labour and Tory MPs would never, ever dream of exploiting Scotland's smaller representation in parliament by voting down our democratically-expressed will, and then loudly cheering what they had just done.  Would they?

Deafening cheers as Westminster celebrates using English votes to block Scottish Home Rule

Something extraordinary happened a few minutes ago in the House of Commons chamber.  It wasn't the fact that MPs voted against the addition of a new clause to the Scotland Bill that would have paved the way for Full Fiscal Autonomy.  It wasn't even the fact that they did so by 504 votes to 58 - that was expected, because we knew that Labour and the Tories would both vote against.  No, it was the fact that the result was greeted by deafening cheers - which, by definition, came almost exclusively from non-Scottish MPs.

We don't yet know the exact breakdown of the figures, but it's near-enough certain that the result among elected Scottish MPs was well over 50 in favour of Full Fiscal Autonomy, and only 3 against.  Among non-Scottish MPs, there must have been almost 500 votes against Full Fiscal Automony, and probably less than 10 in favour (the only likely possibilities are the 3 Plaid Cymru MPs and Caroline Lucas, and maybe the odd Tory like Edward Leigh).  In a nutshell, then, this was a straightforward battle between Scotland and the rest of the UK - and Scotland lost.  We lost simply because there are far more of 'them' than there are of 'us'.  The fact that this happened on an exclusively Scottish piece of legislation, at a time when we're constantly told that Scotland has no business having any influence at all on English laws, is nothing short of breathtaking.

What the hell did English Tory and Labour MPs think they were cheering about?  Did they persuade the Scottish electorate of the case against Full Fiscal Autonomy?  No.  Did they persuade Scotland's elected representatives?  No.  Scotland said Yes, but the London parties said No, and they presume to decide on our behalf.  If I'd been in their shoes, I wouldn't have been whooping in those circumstances, I'd have been sheepishly looking at the floor and hoping that someone would change the subject as a matter of some urgency.  By logical deduction, it can only be that they were consciously cheering the fact that they'd just overruled a democratic election result and got away with it.

Or rather, they think they've got away with it.  Over the last few weeks, they've been demonstrating the case for independence more eloquently and effectively than the SNP ever could, but they don't even seem to have noticed.  Hell mend them.

Do the SNP have a strategy for the Lords stage of the Scotland Bill?

Westminster has been at its disgraceful worst today, as the Tory government dismissed out of hand each and every amendment to the Scotland Bill put forward by the party that Scotland gave such an overwhelming electoral mandate to only last month. It seems that "this goes beyond the Smith Commission" is considered a perfectly sufficient excuse for rejecting absolutely any amendment, even though "this falls short of the Smith Commission" apparently isn't a good enough reason for beefing up the Bill. You really couldn't make this stuff up.

There was one minor chink of light, though. The SNP's amendment that would have made the Scottish Parliament a permanent institution - in line with the solemn "Vow" that David Cameron supposedly made to the people of Scotland - was only rejected by 302 votes to 271. That means Labour must have breached the so-called Bain Principle and actually voted in favour of an SNP amendment, and it seems likely that the Lib Dems followed suit. If so, the government should be heading for a defeat on this issue in the Lords, where Labour and the Lib Dems in combination easily outnumber the Tories.

But that depends on the amendment actually being tabled in the Lords, which harks back to the problem I raised last month - the SNP can't do it themselves, because they don't have any representation in the Lords. OK, maybe Labour or the Lib Dems will table some sort of amendment along the same lines - but will it take exactly the form that we would wish? Whatever our principled objections to the Lords as an unelected chamber, it would be extremely helpful for tactical reasons if the SNP had some kind of limited presence there, so that they can at least table amendments and occasionally shame Labour and the Lib Dems into going slightly further than would otherwise be the case.

I hope the SNP have a strategy for dealing with the Lords stage of the Scotland Bill. The good news is that Plaid Cymru's brilliant former leader Dafydd Wigley is a member of the upper chamber, so in theory he could help out, but I'm not sure whether it's fair or practical to put all the responsibility on him alone. I've no idea whether there are one or two crossbench peers who have some sympathy with the SNP, but if by any chance there are, the party should be getting hold of their phone numbers as a matter of some urgency.

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They say that even a broken clock is accurate twice a day, which terrifyingly means that Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson is almost certainly less accurate than a broken clock. But to give him his due, he did have one of his rare moments of profound insight earlier this evening -

"Smith was the Whitehall response to the indyref. So what is the Whitehall response to Scottish general election result? There isn't one."