Engraved on the threshold of the Donald Dewar room in the Scottish parliament is a quote from the Labour party intellectual and MP John Pitcairn Mackintosh: “People in Scotland want a degree of government for themselves. It is not beyond the wit of man to devise institutions to meet those demands.” Few are fortunate enough to be cited so prominently within a gigantic vindication of their argument, but Mackintosh’s early support (he was first elected to parliament in 1966) for political devolution made him a rather isolated figure, especially among his Scottish colleagues in Labour. Where they saw devolution as a form of pandering to territorial grievances, Mackintosh saw an opportunity to relegitimise British politics by handing down power from the centre. The contemporary relevance of his ideas was asserted this week by Keir Starmer, who used the annual JP Mackintosh memorial lecture as a launchpad for his proposals to “win power, and then push as much power as possible away from Westminster”.
Mackintosh died in 1978, aged just 48, as a new generation of Labour MPs in Scotland – people such as Gordon Brown and Donald Dewar – were stepping into the constitutional breach created by the explosive arrival of the SNP to the political mainstream. Labour’s “New Scots” saw devolution as an essential way of steadying the tortured state they hoped to inherit. In 1980, Brown argued that “devolution must be taken out of the relatively restricting confines of Scotland and Wales and seen as part of the attempt to make British government more acceptable to the British people”. The former prime minister is now Starmer’s choice to lead a new, UK-wide “constitutional commission”, tasked with working out all the details of Labour’s new constitutional horizon.
If Mackintosh, lonesome in 1968, cleared a path for such men, then Starmer’s speech was a tourist’s adventure – with Brown as expert guide – along the Mackintosh memorial trail. Ideas that were once novel now sound quaintly old-school. In 1969, Harold Wilson set up a royal commission on the constitution, responding to the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism; he could do so because the Labour party was in government, helped by a gigantic majority in Scotland. Labour’s commission, on the other hand, will have to be an internally driven affair, precisely because it is not in national government anywhere except Wales. “In the absence of leadership from the prime minister,” Starmer declared, “Labour will do what is necessary in opposition.”
This relies on rather more faith and identification with the Labour party than the Scottish public have displayed in recent years. Identical promises about a “constitutional convention” were made in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 Labour manifestos, with little impact. When Starmer insists that he really means it this time, it only goes to show that the more Scots support independence and the SNP, the more likely Labour is to actually get its act together with an alternative. Why not keep up the pressure? After all, a minority Labour government reliant on the SNP is more likely to deliver maximum power to Scotland than one that can declare the SNP – and with it, the constitutional threat – a minority concern once more.
When it comes to Starmer’s ambitions for the UK, the commission model holds a little more promise. The pandemic has illuminated England’s multiple forms of local and regional representation – and growing demands for more – which are still to be properly tied together behind a decentralising political agenda. Starmer has sought to stitch these demands into his own Scottish solution: his speech was presaged by a joint statement from 40 local leaders and former politicians across the UK demanding a nationwide programme of decentralisation. Yet Starmer should also be careful what he wishes for. England might get so carried away with its own devolutionary needs that Scotland – accustomed to receiving far more attention than, say, the north-east of England – begins to feel left out again. What happens if the Barnett formula for regional and national funding, which has served Scotland far better than Wales and several English regions for decades, comes under the microscope?
The main reason Starmer may be able to avoid such risks is that his plan is more of an electoral manoeuvre than a genuinely new agenda and, as a result, is likely to be carefully stage-managed to avoid potential disruption. Thanks to Labour’s unionist paranoia about letting Scots decide on independence themselves, it will struggle to win round the mass of voters it lost to the SNP between 2007 and 2015 – but that is not the point. The Labour Together review of the party’s 2019 defeat featured a short Scottish appendix, in which the most promising targets were identified as those lost to the Scottish Tories in 2017. Independence supporters who had gone over to the SNP in 2015 were largely written off in favour of competition with the Scottish Tories for second place, and it is for these voters that Starmer is now reasserting Labour’s blanket opposition to a second referendum.
There is a second strand of this strategy, too, and it is this which may prove most important for Starmer. For all the attention it generated, you would think he was speaking to the whole country, but in reality his speech was laser-targeted at the sizeable cohort of Scots who voted “no” to independence in 2014, “remain” in 2016, and are now shifting towards independence. These people are now the “squeezed middle” of Scottish constitutional politics: ageing, relatively affluent, cosmopolitan and liberal enough to be appalled by Brexit, aspiring to a douce professional respectability that Boris Johnson defies every day, who for the first time in their lives can’t see any future for their kind in British politics. These people like Nicola Sturgeon and hated Jeremy Corbyn, but they are also fairly impressed by Keir Starmer. They are yearning for someone they respect to try to get everything back under control.
Labour may still be able to persuade them that Sir Keir Starmer QC is more likely to manage this than “separatism”. Starmer’s third way on the constitution is an effort to bring enough of these undecideds back to Labour’s camp to deprive independence-supporting parties of a majority at Holyrood next year, or at least shunt Labour back to second place. But the odds are not good. “Scottish nationalism has done a service in calling attention to a series of important defects and problems,” wrote Mackintosh in 1968. This time it is Brexit and Boris Johnson’s newly assertive Englishness that has done a service for the SNP, demonstrating to Scots just how dangerously lopsided the union has always been. Starmer’s “commission” is just Labour’s latest way of avoiding an impossible task: persuading England – a country of 56 million people – to accept true parity of status with a country of just 5.5 million.
Rory Scothorne is currently completing a PhD on the radical left and Scottish nationalism between 1968 and 1992
