Labour’s disturbing devotion to devolution

One of the defining themes of the new government will be devolution. Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner’s plan, according to the Labour manifesto, is to ‘transfer power out of Westminster, and into our communities.’ It’s a signal of the priority they place on these reforms that the Prime Minister and his deputy hosted English regional mayors at Number 10 this morning to discuss how this power transfer will take place. 

The manifesto pledged to ‘deepen’ devolution settlements for combined authorities while ‘encouraging’ councils to merge and assume additional powers. Among the areas identified for further devolution are transport, adult education and skills, housing, planning and employment support. The trade-off will be a legal requirement to produce ‘local growth plans’, while consulting employers, educational institutions and industry bodies on municipal policy and infrastructure. 

Growth plans will have to ‘align’ with the government’s UK-wide industrial strategy, hinting that their purpose is more cosmetic than substantive. Labour also promised multi-year funding settlements to end uncertainty and allow local authorities to take strategic decisions as well as an end to competitive bidding, a costly practice that saw councils go up against each another to secure funds. 

This morning’s roundtable set out how the government will put its plans into action, with an emphasis on ‘public service, respect and collaboration’. The rhetoric is not mere kumbaya; under the Tories, and particularly while Boris Johnson was in Downing Street, regional mayors and local authorities complained of disregard and disrespect from central government. Rayner tasked mayors with establishing ‘local specialisms’ and feeding them into both growth plans and the national industrial strategy. 

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The meeting should be viewed in the context of Labour’s plans for the nations, which will see yet more powers drained from Westminster and transferred to Holyrood and Cardiff Bay. Devolution has become religion in the Labour party, rivalling even its commitment to equality. It makes sense that a party of progressive managerialism would conclude that the answer to Britain’s political, economic and constitutional woes is redrawing the organisational chart. Devolution to Scotland has been a disaster, handing power and an international platform to separatists while producing grim outcomes in health, education and drug deaths. While heaping more powers onto local government doesn’t come with the same secessionist threat, there are two risks which Labour-minded devolutionists consistently overlook. 

The first is that subsidiarity is really a conservative idea, emerging from Catholic social teaching and developed by Luigi Taparelli, a 19th century Jesuit aristo nicknamed ‘the hammer of liberal ideas’. He advocated leaving to ‘each lower level society the being and activity that are proper to it’ not out of any great enthusiasm for democracy but because he saw what he termed ‘tyrannical centralism’ as a tool of revolution. Modern UK progressives regard subsidiarity as benign because it a) underpinned campaigns for Scottish and Welsh devolution, b) seemed to be embodied by the Greater London Council’s resistance to Thatcherism, and c) became a key principle of the European Union. The idea that policy decisions are best taken at the level closest to those affected by them is therefore coded progressive. 

There is some truth to this as an observation but hardening it into a doctrine is where problems begin, at least for those on the centre-left. The promise of a Labour government is the opportunity to make social change but devolution dilutes central government’s monopoly on power, dispersing decision-making across rival levels of administration which then must be consulted, coaxed and compromised with in order to achieve the government’s political aims. Central government has coercive power of course, and local growth plans might prove to be an example of that, but having gone to the trouble of handing mayors and councils more authority it could become a political controversy if ministers then try to pressure local government to use its new powers in the ‘correct’ way. 

Bob Conquest said that everyone is a conservative about what they know the best, and what people know most intimately is their lives and their communities. Devolve more power to the local level and you strengthen the ability of mayors and councils to improve their areas but you also concentrate opposition to change. Mounting resistance to local policy initiatives is much easier than doing so with measures introduced at the national level. To some degree, Labour understands this, which is why the Chancellor has announced the reintroduction of mandatory housing targets. 

The second risk is more nebulous but no less important. Labour’s ideological affinity for local devolution leads it to traduce national decision-making and the institutions involved in it. Listen to some of the government’s rhetoric from this morning. The Prime Minister said that ‘those with skin in the game are the ones who know best what they need’. The deputy prime minister said: ‘for too long a Westminster government has tightly gripped control and held back opportunities and potential for towns, cities and villages across the UK. That’s meant misguided decisions devastating the lives of working people, while our elected local leaders are forced to beg for scraps at the whim of Whitehall.’ Rayner even used the phrase ‘take back control’ to describe local government assuming powers currently held by Westminster.

A common mistake in politics is to absorb the lessons of your last defeat so fully that when you eventually win you are unable to adapt to the circumstances you now face. The lesson of 2019 – other than don’t put Jeremy ‘our friends from Hezbollah’ Corbyn up for prime minister – was that Labour had lost touch with some of its traditional voters outside of London, the cities and the university towns. Talk of taking back control from an out-of-touch Westminster is evidently intended to address these voters and their feeling of being left behind. But in addition to making Rayner sound like a grim hybrid of Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage, it is backwards looking towards the old battles. The new battles for this government are ones that call for national effort and initiative to rescue Britain from long-term decline, revive economic growth, return the opportunities lost under the Tories (not least home ownership), and carve out a fresh place on the world stage. These challenges require unity and a populace that thinks of itself as British rather than belonging to various sectional and regional groupings. Instead of pouring scorn on Westminster and encouraging us-versus-them grievance narratives, the new government should be holding out central government as the mechanism for delivering the changes it has promised the country. 

Central government doesn’t have all the answers and empowering local government isn’t always a bad idea, but Labour’s doctrinal attachment to devolution risks getting in the way of its national ambitions. Seek government to govern, not to hand powers to others.