Power devolved must be power used, not hoarded
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4 min read
There’s a familiar criticism about devolution, that power devolved is actually power retained, because Westminster can always claw back what it hands down.
Next year marks 30 years since Scotland proved that criticism wrong, when we backed a parliament of our own.
I was out campaigning for that vote before I was even elected to the Commons, and the lesson from it matters well beyond Holyrood.
Over recent years, Britain has wrestled with weak growth, a lopsided economy, and one of the most centralised states in the democratic world. Central government still collects nearly 92 per cent of UK public revenue, against an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of just over half, and seven of the 20 least productive big cities in the G7 are British.
Andy Burnham’s answer to this challenge, ‘good growth in every postcode’ – built first in Greater Manchester and now the driving idea of his premiership – is the right one. Its central instinct is that growth and fairness come from giving places power, funding and the confidence to back themselves, not from Whitehall alone. Greater Manchester’s economy has grown more than twice as fast as the UK average since 2015 and capped bus fares cut travel costs by around 15 per cent. That’s not just a regional curiosity; it can be a starting point for the rest of the country.
Meanwhile, Scotland’s own experience should be a warning as much as a blueprint. Devolution delivered real gains but too much power that reached Holyrood has stayed there rather than travelling on to Glasgow, Dundee or Inverness. That’s why this month’s £52m released to Scotland’s regional leaders, the first tranche of a £140m Local Growth Fund, matters. It starts pushing power further out, not just further north.
The SNP has had almost two decades in government in Scotland, and the record tells its own story. Successive SNP governments have frozen council tax and squeezed local authority funding, then pointed the finger at Westminster when services strain. A habit of blaming others for choices made in Bute House not Downing Street.
Nowhere is that clearer than in Glasgow, the city of my birth, but one that has too often been left to drift rather than driven forward. It’s the gap between the positivity and hope of Manchesterism and the decline and poor ambition of the SNP’s own Glasgowism: power held tight in Edinburgh, with too little sense of what it’s actually for.
Too much power that reached Holyrood has stayed there
The Reform Party offers a similar politics dressed differently. Plenty of grievance, no record in office, and no plan for how power would reach a town hall.
Both parties trade in identity over delivery. The rebuttal to both isn’t better rhetoric. It’s a bus that runs on time, a good apprenticeship, and a high street with the lights back on.
Devolution isn’t an end itself, as the Prime Minister knows; it’s an argument for using power properly. City deals and devolution deals began under a different government, and the best version of this agenda keeps that cross-party thread alive. That means real fiscal devolution, an end to pitting towns against each other for one-off funding pots in favour of the long-term settlements those deals were meant to provide in the first place.
Scotland’s devolution story hasn’t been perfect, and Holyrood’s failure to push power out elsewhere is proof of that. But that’s not an argument against devolution, it’s proof of the opposite. Devolution is necessary, but it was never going to be sufficient on its own. What you do with the power once you have it matters, and that’s precisely the insight and experience Andy is building into the next phase for England.
Get that right, and the answer to decline, not just for Scotland but the rest of the UK, is within reach.
Douglas Alexander is Labour (Co-op) MP for Lothian East and Secretary of State for Scotland
