It is worth remembering that the UK State has only had its present territorial form since 1921. Earlier adjustments took place in 1800 and 1707. Scotland has a distinctive political tradition and a clear separate sense of nationhood. Northern Ireland has a separate identity and is itself a deeply divided society with a substantial minority feeling an allegiance to a different and neighbouring state. Wales, as the remaining non-English part of the UK, has become over the centuries the part most closely integrated with England, though a significant cultural nationalism has found expression within Wales especially in the last half-century.
The constitutional arrangements linking these separate nations within the UK state have always been fluid. The Acts of Union negotiated between the English and Scottish parliaments allowed the Scots to retain distinctive institutions in areas of civil life that were then of greatest significance, notably the Church, the Law and education. What has become a UK tradition of centralised government was not fully extended to Scotland until the 20th century, when it was fortified by the development of the modern interventionist state (with greatly expanded competence for welfare, publicly owned industries and economic management). Despite various strategies for accommodation (for example, encouragement rather than active discouragement of the Welsh language; devolved administration in Scotland), political pressure for some decisive constitutional adjustment grew.
These found partial fulfilment in 1998 with the creation of devolved bodies in Edinburgh and Cardiff. The Scottish Parliament has legislative power whereas the Welsh Assembly does not. New Labour gave a high priority to introducing these arrangements, but proceeded as is customary with British constitutional development in an ad hoc and pragmatic manner. Britain has thus moved from being a centralised unitary state to being something else. What that ‘something else’ is remains unclear. It is certainly not (yet) federalism, but neither is it the old style unitary state with which we were familiar. The proposals, emanating from the EU, and now pending and somewhat uncertain, to introduce regional assemblies in parts of England, will add further complexity to the devolutionary mosaic.
In England devolution has not been envisaged as altering the nature of the UK State. Adjustments at Westminster /Whitehall have been minimal. This gives rise to certain anomalies from an English perspective - not least the so-called ‘West Lothian question’ (the fact that MPs for Scottish constituencies may vote at Westminster on matters which directly affect England only). It is quite possible that an English backlash will develop. The Conservative Opposition, while committed to the continuation of devolution, has proposed that Scottish MPs should not be allowed to vote on exclusively English matters. If a UK government came to power which depended for its parliamentary majority on MPs from Scotland and/or Wales, this could lead to severe difficulties. The recently elected Labour government could well find itself in such a position sooner rather than later.
While devolution has so far been seen as a reasonable success with few serious teething problems, this probably has much to do with the ‘governments’ in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff where the Labour Party has tended to dominate, albeit in Scotland in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The robustness of devolution arrangements will be seriously tested when different parties are in control at different centres.
The Churches in Scotland are generally supportive of devolution. The advent of a national parliament has created opportunities for contributing to the development of policies that otherwise would not have been implemented. In Wales, the National Assembly (NAW) has yet to win the degree of support accorded to the Scottish Parliament. Wales was less prepared for devolution (no preceding constitutional convention, as in Scotland), and of course the NAW has less power than the Scottish Parliament. Proposals to enlarge the powers of the NAW are being held in abeyance because the proponents of such a change fear that a referendum would not give the necessary support for change.
We believe Christians should generally be supportive of the devolution arrangements that have been made. One reason for this is that democratically accountable devolution, as well as strong local democratic arrangements, can help to arrest and even reverse the centralisation and concentration of power, which seems to occur so readily in modern society. If decision-making power is genuinely returned to national and sub-national centres, this can and should energise communities to contribute to public life and political debate. Of course, there is also value in the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in terms of national security and economic and financial well-being for all. Efforts should be made to refine and develop the soundness of the devolution models so far introduced. This should include greater adjustment at Westminster. It is right to see devolution as a ‘process, not an event’.
The same general principles apply to the introduction of regional assemblies for England, but the process by which this takes place requires careful scrutiny. The case for devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is quite different from any case that may be made out for devolution in any region of England. The effect of the introduction of any regional assemblies on existing local government needs careful assessment. It would be wrong to introduce assemblies merely to try and balance the arrangements made for Scotland and Wales, or to create a drift to federalism without exploring the implications much more thoroughly. Initial attempts to introduce an assembly in the north east were decisively rejected by plebiscite and have more widely been regarded by the public as unpopular, associated with creeping EU control, and adding layers of unwanted costly bureaucracy.
Devolution to Northern Ireland is a different matter. The constitutional difficulty here is finding an appropriate formula for devolved government that provides sufficient satisfaction to two separately perceived communities. The majority (Unionist) community ran Northern Ireland for fifty years as the most devolved part of the UK. But the substantial Republican minority never became integrated within the system, and continued to feel a primary allegiance to the South. Political, social and economic effort has been made in the last thirty five years to develop the communities in such a way that an acceptable basis for devolved government can be found. So far this has had limited success.
