Devolution

I was never persuaded of the merits of devolved government. I recall that, such was the dismal and obstructive record of Ken Livingston’s Greater London Council, that Mrs Thatcher went to some trouble to have it abolished. The same was true of the Inner London Education Authority.
I campaigned in four referendums to oppose, first assemblies and then parliaments in Edinburgh and Cardiff.
We are a small Island and Government from London, for the most part, worked reasonably well.
The danger is that when you have a general election involving the whole of our kingdoms and a new government is elected with an ambitious manifesto, it finds that there are insufficient levers to pull, because critical powers have been devolved elsewhere beyond its control.
Three things have reinforced my prejudice recently. First, the absurdity and confusion of different lock-down policies pursued by the governments in England, Wales and Scotland during the pandemic. We now know from the leaked Hancock WhatsApp messages that restrictions were imposed on England, not based on any evidential effectiveness, but purely to keep up with zealous officialdom in Scotland.
Second, we’ve recently seen the UK Government intervene to veto absurd legislation in Scotland, which allowed people to redesignate their gender, because they could not be restricted, in the rest of our islands, to facilities consistent with their actual sex.
Even worse still, as the UK Government of the has wrestled with the hideous complications of halting the traffic of migrants in small boats across the Channel, the Welsh government sought, on the contrary, to increase the ‘pull factor’ by paying the asylum claimants £1,600 per month and funding legal costs to resist deportation.
It is our good fortune that the UK Government still had the powers to thwart these daft intentions:
We need to ensure that devolution proceeds no further to rob us of them.