It is perhaps remarkable how little discussion there has been in England of the real differences in public policy between England, Scotland and Wales that have arisen since devolution. This is I think partly because the London based news media are focussed on the metropolitan centre, and so are the dominant forces in British and English politics.
Michael Keating, Professor of Scottish Politics at the University of Aberdeen, explains: “The Labour Party may be the dominant political force in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. But Scotland and Wales have stuck more to the traditional social democratic model of public service delivery. This has led them to stress non-selectivity, professionalism and uniformity, while rejecting foundation hospitals, star-rated hospitals, school league tables, beacon councils, elite universities and selective schools. Scotland also scrapped up-front university tuition fees and rejected top-up fees. At the same time, free care for the elderly has been introduced north of the border.”
He goes on to say: “Labour in England, however, has moved furthest away from the ideal of uniform, public provided services towards differentiation, internal markets and mixed models of service delivery. This was apparent in the health service from an early stage. Scotland has not reintroduced internal market elements as in England, and there are no plans for foundation hospitals.”
There are some important things to say about this.
One of which is that perhaps unexpectedly the main force for policy variation since devolution has been the UK government implementing policies in England, which Scotland and Wales have not followed. With Plaid in coalition in Cardiff and a SNP government in Edinburgh, we may see an accelerating dynamic of the national governments of Wales and Scotland positively introducing more policy, rather than resisting.
So far there has been great timidity in Cardiff and Edinburgh in using their powers. A couple of years ago I interviewed Ron Davies, the architect of Welsh devolution, and he explained this. “There is space for making things a lot better. Unfortunately there are New Labour attitudes in the Labour Party in Wales. There are gains, but the timidity of New Labour is preventing us from making even more gains. Timidity in not just philosophical terms but in policy terms as well. … … Because they believed and argued very strongly in 1979, and still do, that the solutions to the problems of Wales are to be found in exactly the same mechanism as the problems of the North of England or wherever. The answer is a strong labour government in Westminster who will legislate all these problems away. It doesn’t understand that there are issues about patriotism, of identity, of wanting to do things differently in Wales, of nation building if you like. To free up the initiatives we have in Wales, because our scale is different, because we do have different values, there is a greater sense of community, we do have distinctive policy issues of our own we do have issues about language and so on. And there is a large part of the Labour Party that is entirely uncomfortable with that agenda, and didn’t want to go down that track.”
Secondly, the policies voted through for England have been won by the votes in parliament of MPs with Scottish constituencies, which are unaffected by those same policies. This is the so-called West Lothian question, which is simply undemocratic.
Thirdly, the lack of debate has meant there has been little discussion of the big inequalities in public spending.
The headline figures show a difference between expenditure between the nations. For example education and training expenditure in 2004/2005 stood at:
England - £1,086 per head
Wales - £1,107 per head
Northern Ireland - £1,435 per head
Scotland - £1,179 per head
Health expenditure in 2004/2005 stood at:
England - £1,350 per head
Scotland - £1,563 per head
Northern Ireland - £1,476 per head
Wales - £1,421 per head
The danger is that this will become the focus of the political debate, being fuelled by characters like Garry Bushell, and opportunistically exploited by Cameron’s conservatives.
The English left MUST have a very different agenda.
We need to endorse and support the more progressive direction from Cardiff and Edinburgh, and argue that those policies need to be extended to England. The trade unions may be able to play a role here in publicising the success achieved in Scotland and Wales.
For example, the extra expenditure per head in education, smaller class sizes, and greater emphasis on teaching rather than testing has led to pupils in Scotland being 50 per cent more likely to progress to higher education. (More than 37 per cent go to to college or university compared with just 25 per cent of English students.) And Scottish schoolchildren are also up to a third more likely to get good grades at age 16. Scotland is also abolishing tuition fees for universities from 2009, while students south of the border must pay up to £3,000-a-year for their studies.
However, the main argument from the English left must be that the differences between the nations is masking the fundamental regional inequality within England, and the effect this has of exacerbating class inequalities. A ‘competitiveness index’ published in 2001 for the UK shows that the three best performing English regions – London, South East and Eastern – widened their economic lead over the three worst by over 30% since 1997, and the gap between London and the North East has grown by more than 35%
As I have written before “the UK economy is geared to maintaining London as a major financial centre, even though, according to a recent report by Goldman Sachs, this has led to the pound being overvalued by 12% in recent years – a consequence of which is 100000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Scotland since 1999. (This has also affected the English regions, Wales and Northern Ireland). 91000 Scots live in desperate poverty. Cambridge university economist, Gordon Adamson, explains in Scottish left Review how relative economic underdevelopment in Scotland is because England’s economy crowds out Scotland’s. More specifically, the policies of New Labour have been to overheat the economy in the South East, based upon house price inflation. The consequent equity withdrawal and private debt has driven the economy, rather than strategic investment in infrastructure and manufacturing capability. Today, one third of the EU’s entire consumer debt in the UK: nearly all of it in England. This has further policy implication as New Labour’s failure to provide adequate social housing is designed to prop up these exaggerated house prices.”
The figure of 100000 manufacturing jobs lost in Scotland can be scaled up to a million in England.
As Kevin Morgan from Cardiff university has noted: “As the UK’s most over-developed region, the south east is the chief source of inflationary pressures, hence UK monetary policy tends to be calibrated to the over-heated conditions in this core region rather than the ‘under-heated’ conditions in the less developed regions of the north and the west. In a celebrated public relations gaffe the Governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, actually conceded this point when, asked if job loss in the north was an acceptable price to pay for the control of inflation in the south, he was reported to have said ‘yes, I suppose in a sense I am’. ”
Of course, the over-heated South East economy also leads to extreme wealth differentials in that region. The housing crisis is most acute there, as workers on ordinary wages are excluded from buying, and social housing has not been expanded to meet demand. Immigration has also exacerbated the overloading of social infrastructure, as the government has failed to expand resources for communities already struggling to cope. This is not an argument against immigration, but a recognition that immigration is not cost free, and working class communities need to be resourced to cope, and the trade unions need to be further empowered to resist immigration being used to depress wages and conditions.
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It has become less fashionable to talk of the North South divide, but it still exists. Its disappearance has partly been a government conjuring trick, through reclassifying the unemployed as “economically inactive” instead. According to Morgan: “In 1997, for example, the number of men in the 25-64 age group who were classified as inactive was more than double the number classified as unemployed. The contrasts between north and south as regards inactivity are enormous in this age range, with some 30% without a formal job in the northern regions compared to less than 12% in the south”
A quarter of the population in the South East of England has private medical insurance, and eleven per cent of South East pupils go to private schools.
What is more, economic growth in the south east has been fuelled rather than frustrated by New Labour. They have refused to recognise the overwhelming of the social infrastructure and the social inequality which challenges the sustainability of growth in the south nor do they care about higher levels of deprivation in the north. Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, is Moses and the prophets for New Labour.
What does this mean?
Most of the discussion of the break up of the UK has looked at the question from the perspective of Wales and Scotland.
The imperial British identity has been conflated with Englishness for most English people. However the widening policy and cultural differences between the nations on this Island, and the probability of eventual Scottish (and perhaps Welsh) independence will make us decide whether we wish to be England or Little Britain.
It is inevitable that there will be a debate about our English identity, and the values that we wish to embrace in our culture. The left needs to participate in that debate, and fight against the Little Englanders.
However, we will be greatly aided in this if we recognise that the British state, and the imperial project it entails, greatly disadvantages our people. Why does Britain now have the world’s second largest armaments expenditure? Standing at 5% of the global total in 2006 ($59,200 million at 2005 prices). Above Israel, China and Russia! Why does Britain need Trident at the cost of £85 billion? Why does Britain need a seat on the UN security council? This is paid for by taxation, and given Britains regressive tax regime, the tax burden falls disproportionately on working people.
But the economic policies of the British state, in promoting London as a major financial centre whatever the cost to the underlying economy, and encouraging economic growth in the South East at the expense of the rest of the country must also be challenged. This is further exaggerated by the fact that London is the only English region with its own government, able to set its own agenda – under Ken Livingston this has been broadly more progressive than the UK’s agenda, but that may not always be the case.
If Scotland becomes independent then the English regional question, must be pushed to the foreground, and perhaps we will aided by the Welsh if they decide to stay a sister nation. Once the paralysis of what Tom Nairn calls the decrepit state of Ukania is over, a federal English state may address the imbalance, and this itself would require a break up of the two great electoral behemoths, an inevitable consequence of PR in regional elections. The English parliament was subsumed into the British one in 1707, when it is restored might we see a second chamber to replace the House of Lords that represents the regional assemblies, and prevents a London- centric policy agenda?
Two human rights organisations, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Amnesty International have expressed concern over the move by former Thai Prime Minster, Thaksin Shinawatra, to become owner of Manchester City.
