Devolution in Scotland has changed relatively little in economic terms over the past three decades. It has, however, done the core job it was designed for: namely keeping Scotland in the United Kingdom. The depressing median view of the next phase of devolution, after this week’s election to the Holyrood parliament, is that it continues to chug along much the same.
Wales also votes this week for its devolved parliament, which was set up in 1999, the same year as Scotland’s. In the Welsh case it is also hard to point to any concrete gain from devolution beyond a modest promotion of Welsh language and culture. Here, again, devolution looks set to deliver more of the same.
During the Blair government of 1999, the optimistic view was that devolution would give Scotland and Wales a big, much-needed economic boost. The two devolved nations would now have high-profile political leaders able to bang the drum for jobs, investment and skilled immigrants. And they could reform their economies and public services to suit their own needs rather than operate at the diktat of a distant, ignorant, unconcerned Whitehall and Westminster.
In both cases, the decades before devolution had been fairly grim, which fuelled the campaign for constitutional change. Scotland’s population had been in decline since the mid-1970s, with average living standards lower than England’s and little economic dynamism beyond the windfall of North Sea oil in the 1970s and 1980s. And that was a boon to Aberdeen, but otherwise mainly accrued to Treasury coffers in London.
Wales was even worse placed, with the wholesale closure of the South Wales coal fields in full swing and few decent jobs to replace them. Average incomes were more than a quarter lower than in England. English cities, particularly London, were the magnet for most ambitious Welsh youngsters.
Nearly 30 years on, the best that can said for the economies of Scotland and Wales vis-a-vis England is that they haven’t notably worsened. But nor have they notably improved. Scotland remains below England in average incomes, while Wales languishes far lower still.
The telltale sign of stagnation is that neither Scotland nor Wales have been particularly attractive to immigrants in an era of high immigration. And they still struggle to hold on to their young, particularly graduates. England’s population has grown more than twice as fast as that of both of its neighbours (by roughly 20 per cent against 10 per cent), with London alone growing nearly four times as fast.
The Celtic tiger of the last generation is emphatically Ireland, not Scotland or Wales. Ireland’s population is nearly a staggering 45 per cent higher than in 1999. And its national income per head, which a generation ago was far lower than the UK’s, is on some measures now twice as high. Dublin has been growing as fast as London, and far faster than Edinburgh or Cardiff.
Maybe Britain can take some credit for Ireland’s success. Without the successful Northern Ireland peace process since the 1990s, all those multinationals and start-ups wouldn’t have flooded into Dublin. Nonetheless, Ireland’s independence inside the EU has proved a massively better prescription for success than devolution within a Brexit-ing UK.
The governments of Edinburgh and Cardiff spend much of their time complaining that London isn’t giving them more money, or, in the case of the long SNP regime in Scotland, overtly campaigning for independence. Neither government has pioneered economic or public service reforms to make Scotland or Wales significantly more economically attractive. They haven’t even kept up with the best of England’s reforms since Blair, such as the creation of metro mayors and academy schools.
A comfortably re-elected SNP government in Holyrood, under the affable but unimaginative John Swinney, means more of the same for Scotland. Hopefully he won’t waste too much time campaigning for another independence referendum, but the political pressure to do so may be unstoppable if Nigel Farage surges in England.
However, at least Swinney will be clearly in charge. In Wales, by contrast, Labour’s hegemony is set to be eviscerated, replaced by a baleful polarisation between Plaid Cymru in the more rural west and Reform UK in the impoverished valleys. The most likely result is a weak Plaid government. But Reform could possibly be the largest party in the Welsh Senedd; and even if it isn’t, an assembly dominated by Welsh nationalists and anti-Welsh culture warriors is a recipe for protracted culture war, not good government.
