“The people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster.”
In a speech largely focused on English devolution, this was all Andy Burnham really had to say about how he might bring his ideas about “power balancing” to the other nations of the UK.
What Burnham exactly intends to do, of course, remains vague. Indeed, the Scottish government’s public service reform secretary Ivan McKee told the BBC: “I have no idea what he means and I don’t think he knows what he means.”
But combine these comments with others he has made in the past—such as that the current devolved arrangement with Scotland and Wales is “unfair” to the English regions—and we might be forgiven for making some reasonable assumptions about how he might do it. Burnham does not seem to consider Holyrood to be a foundation for further devolution, rather, viewing it as its obstacle—and in this the King of the North is perhaps less exceptional from his Westminster colleagues than he may like to admit.
On some level, what Burnham is proposing is not all that new. “Beyond Holyrood” has been a thinktank buzz-phrase for some time. In government, this has largely manifested in the form of cash injections, like the City Deals programme or the Shared Prosperity Fund (an initiative to plug an EU funding gap left by Brexit, lately rebranded and defunded considerably under Keir Starmer as the “Local Growth” and “Local Regeneration” funds). What Burnham is really doing is promising to add a more overtly political dimension to a policy platform that hitherto has been mostly financial, at least when it comes to Scotland.
But let us give credit where it’s due: Burnham is right in saying that local government is broken. Within Scotland, the model of blanket unitary authorities introduced in 1994 has been disempowering for everyone, particularly the Highlands, which is home to the largest council area in the UK. Appetite for reform is likely, too: one poll from 2022 commissioned by Gordon Brown’s Our Scottish Future showed 45 per cent of Scots surveyed would back directly elected provosts, Scotland’s equivalent of mayors. Holyrood’s seeming intransigence to enact radical change in this area remains one of its most obvious and sustained disappointments.
But all this should only emphasise the importance of working through the devolved administrations, rather than in defiance of them in typical Westminster adversarial style. Especially when those institutions have earned their status as the vehicle for Scotland’s democratic expression.
Here is one not entirely inconceivable scenario: Burnham wishes to bring combined authorities with directly elected mayors to Scotland’s cities. Local government is a devolved issue. But rather than getting Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar to see a bill of reforms through Holyrood, Burnham simply breaks the Sewel convention—the informal memorandum under which the British parliament avoids legislating on issues devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—and goes over Holyrood’s head, enacting his new settlement via Westminster.
This would be problematic for several reasons. First, it would mean Burnham imposing devolution through the very undevolved means of top-down central government. Second, and more importantly, it would mean making the current devolved settlement appear essentially arbitrary and provisional, or worse, superfluous. Within a system of government like ours that relies so heavily on the strength of precedents, who’s to say that a less municipally minded future PM wouldn’t feel free to dismiss Burnham’s own devolved arrangements in a like manner?
If Burnham really wants to enact genuine, respected and lasting devolution in every postcode of the UK, he will need to work with people, parties and institutions he does not agree with. This would in turn require him to cede total ownership of an idea he has spent so much political capital on branding as his own, what with his references to “Manchesterism”, “the Greater Manchester way” and his pitch for a “Number 10 in the north” (which, of course, would still be located in southern Britain).
Despite Burnham’s argument that Scottish government decision-making feels remote to many Scots, the findings from last year’s Scottish Social Attitudes Survey—the most authoritative we have on shifting attitudes to devolution since 1999—underscore the central importance of Holyrood in legislating reform. Scots now hold the lowest esteem for the incumbent Scottish government since the survey began, with 53 per cent of respondents saying they trusted the SNP administration to work in Scotland’s best interests “only some of the time” or “almost never”. However, 67 per cent said that they believed the Scottish government ought to have the most influence over how Scotland is run, compared to just 16 per cent who said the same of Westminster. This a clear increase from when this question was asked in 2023.
At a glance this seems odd. Why would folks want to give the most influence to a body they do not believe is acting in their best interests? But the answer is quite simple. Scotland’s parliament did not appear out of thin air. It is the fruit of decades of tireless grassroots campaigning—a century, if you bundle it in with the modern independence movement. Devolution does not belong to the SNP, to Labour or to any political party. It belongs to the ordinary people who fought for its existence, and it is for this reason its legitimacy endures.
Herein are probable hints of why Westminster has grown increasingly antagonistic towards Holyrood. If devolution is to mean anything at all, then surely it means accepting it might give power to people who do things with it you might not want them to do. And not only must you accept this, you must also continue to work with those very same people when it matters.
Burnham has suggested this is what he will do, in theory—but the jury is out on whether or not, in practice, he will be more concerned about securing his legacy as father of the “Greater Manchester Way”. He isn’t even prime minister yet; he has time enough to get it right. For all our sakes, we must hope he succeeds.
