Devolution is (sort of) working in a (sort of) social democratic country, pace prophets of doom since Nye Bevan. But it could and should work better if we thought more clearly about how devolution and social democracy can live together. The failure of the London government to anticipate the effects of January’s higher education white paper outside England is a clear sign of this. A recent Lords report has also pointed out that the secretaryship of state for Scotland is an unfair anomaly.
Let’s start with Bevan. He detested the idea of devolution to Wales. In the 1970s his follower Neil Kinnock warned that a Welsh assembly could be an “obituary notice” for Labour. Why? Because they were both socialists and centralists. My colleague Vernon Bogdanor has argued (Prospect, February 2001) that they are right: that devolution is fundamentally incompatible with social democracy. Social democracy requires redistribution from richer regions to poorer ones and uniform standards in everything that the state provides. Some kinds of devolution make both of those things harder. Bevan insisted, for example, not only that the NHS should be funded out of centralised tax income but that it must be truly national in organisation?the minister must hear a bedpan dropped in Tredegar. (What would Nye have done? Gone to pick it up?)
But those, like Bevan, who still fear that national redistribution is undermined by devolution, forget that it is the tax and benefit system which does social democracy’s heavy lifting?and that remains centralised in Britain. Today’s devolved administrations have, basically, no power to tax. For a given pre-tax income and family situation, one’s financial position after tax and benefits is identical throughout Britain.
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