Referendums express disagreements - they don't create them

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The UK’s PM has seemingly managed both to acknowledge that the UK Government has a duty under international law to call an Irish unity referendum under certain circumstances as part of the Good Friday Agreement, and at the same time to rule it out. Maybe he’s practicing political contortionism in readiness for his upcoming meeting with Trump, but as a way of trying to please everyone whilst actually pleasing no-one, it’s almost a master class.

The circumstances under which a referendum becomes unavoidable are vague, of course: the duty on the Secretary of State to hold a border poll if it appears likely a majority would vote for Irish unification is hardly clear cut, and what ‘appears likely’ to one person can appear very unlikely to another, particularly if (s)he chooses to ape Nelson and hold the telescope to a closed eye. Given the history and complexities of Irish politics, perhaps the circumstances could never be other than vague, and the dangers implicit in a narrow majority either way are obvious.

But it was the rationale for taking the option off the table which caught my eye. Referendums, according to Burnham, are inherently divisive, and he uses those on Brexit and Scottish independence as evidence to support the argument. It is a simplistic analysis, though. A referendum might crystalise and put arithmetical numbers to a divergence of opinion, but they don’t make that divergence appear in the first place. After all, if there’s no pre-existing difference of opinion, there’s nothing on which to vote. As a corollary, avoiding holding a vote doesn’t make the difference of opinion go away. Whether the issue is Brexit, Scottish independence, or Irish unity, there are strong and deeply-held opinions on both sides. Whether a referendum is the best way of determining a majority view or establishing the ‘settled will’ of a population is a valid issue for debate, as are the timing and circumstances of any vote. But denying a population any democratic means of deciding between two views, and insisting instead on adherence to the status quo (which is what Burnham’s appeal to concentrate on cost of living issues amounts to) carries its own dangers.

On constitutional matters (much like on economic matters), Burnham – despite all his rhetoric about change – seems deeply committed to a belief that the status quo is the natural and inevitable order of things. It’s a fantasy; in the real world, the long reach of history shows how human-made boundaries and institutions are constantly changing and evolving. Those who attempt to stand against the tide of history eventually get swept away by it.

What is the UK for?

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The PM returned this week to an issue which he has raised previously, namely the need for the UK to have a written constitution. In principle, he’s right: the current approach is an antiquated patchwork of law, precedent, custom and practice, leaving the UK as an outlier in the world. The motivation for his latest statement appears to be based around the need to entrench and codify the relationship between the Westminster government and the regional mayors to whom he wishes to devolve more power. I’ve long supported the idea of a formal written constitution for the UK, and even more so for the independent Wales that I still hope to see one day. But the reasons for that support are precisely why I don’t think it can or will happen, at least until it’s time to write separate constitutions for England, Wales, and Scotland. There is a whole shop’s worth of cans of worms waiting to be opened once the suggestion gets serious debate.

Firstly, as the SNP have already pointed out, a constitution which defines and codifies the relationship between Westminster and English regional mayors will also need to define and codify the relationship between the constituent nations of the union. There are basically only two options as to how the UK can define itself – it is either a single unitary state, or else it is a voluntary union of nations. The former is likely to inflame Scotland in particular, whilst the latter must, by definition, specify the terms of that voluntary union, including how it can be ended. The opposition of devout unionists to formally documenting the nature of the relationship is based on more than tradition and inertia.

Then there is the question of sovereignty and who owns it. There are monarchies in the world which have written constitutions, of course, so it’s not impossible. But would it really be politically acceptable, in the twenty-first century, to write a formal document declaring that all power stems from god via the monarch, and parliament and the courts merely act as the monarch’s agent? The alternative view – that power belongs to the citizens and is delegated by them to parliament – would be a complete undermining of centuries of precedent and custom, to say nothing of a serious constraint on the royal prerogative on which much of the government’s activity depends.

Bigger than either of those, however, is the question of purpose. Defining what the state is for is no easy matter. The US Declaration of Independence talks about the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s a reasonable starting point, especially the bit about the pursuit of happiness, but it’s a bit wishy-washy: fine words which can be interpreted in different ways. A more comprehensive statement of purpose for a modern constitution might be something along the lines of ‘enabling all citizens to achieve their potential and lead fulfilling lives’. It is, though, the sort of aim which would have neoliberals (such as Andy Burnham) choking on their cornflakes.

I don’t seriously believe that a written constitution will happen under Andy Burnham or any currently conceivable successor. But we can perhaps hope that he will at least spark a discussion during which alternatives to the status quo can be seriously debated.

Burnham is making the problems worse by his adherence to self-imposed rules

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One of Andy Burnham’s ‘qualifications’ for the job of PM was that he was used to running a major public sector operation in the form of the mayoralty of Greater Manchester. It’s certainly a big job, and he will certainly have learned a lot from doing it, even if the degree to which he was successful is always going to be arguable, depending on one’s political perspective. There is a difference of scale, of course; but even more important is the difference in the constraints acting upon the incumbent. Manchester (like the Senedd here in Wales) has its powers and budgets circumscribed elsewhere. Westminster sets both, and the mayor (or First Minister) has no choice but to follow the statutory requirements laid down for him or her.

When it comes to running the UK from Downing Street, however, the situation is completely different. The Westminster parliament insists that it has absolute power – delegated to it by God and the Monarch – to do whatever it wants. Financially, the only real constraint is the capacity of the economy – the available resources, in short. Any other constraint is self-imposed: the so-called ‘fiscal rules’ are the invention of the government of the day which can change them at any time it wants to (and history shows that governments tinker with the rules regularly). There was no such thing before Gordon Brown invented them in 1997, and they were invented largely to ensure that the incoming Labour government followed broadly the same policies as the outgoing Tory government, in the belief that that was what ‘the markets’ wanted.

To date, Burnham has given no indication that he understands the difference – that he has moved from a situation where he has to obey rules laid down by others to one where he can make the rules. And all the neoliberal foundations and lobbyists – to say nothing of the financial ‘experts’ in the mainstream media – are only too keen to ensure that he doesn’t realise the extent to which he is imposing unnecessary constraints upon himself. There was a report today, for example, claiming that the PM “will have to raise taxes or cut spending” to meet his pledges and that “There's clearly no scope for increasing borrowing”. What they like to call ‘borrowing’, some of us prefer to call ‘accepting deposits from people looking for a safe home for their money’ – and the only limit on that is whether people have money for which they are seeking a safe home. Given the lack of worthwhile investment opportunities (which is a much bigger problem in itself), there’s no sign of any lack of deposits; and the choice posited by the first quote is solely a result of the fiscal rules.

One of the big issues which Burnham has highlighted this week is the question of social care. It’s usually presented as a shortage of money, but even if money was unlimited, there would still be a lack of qualified and willing carers, and lack of capacity is a much more important constraint than lack of money. But that lack of capacity is another self-imposed constraint – this time it’s arbitrary rules over numbers of migrants.

One point of similarity between the governments in Wales and Scotland, the mayoralty in Manchester, and the UK government is that they are all facing major issues. But only one of them is compounding the problems by using its unique position to be able to set its own rules in a way that exacerbates rather than alleviates.

Hard hats and graduate caps

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According to the PM, “From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”. It’s a nice soundbite, but what does it actually mean? He’s not the first politician – or even the first UK Prime Minister – to talk about what has often been called ‘parity of esteem’: the idea that people with key technical skills should be as highly regarded as those with a degree. Few would disagree with the sentiment. And it’s certainly true that an academic degree, and the learning involved in gaining one, is not something which suits everyone, although we need to guard against the idea that making learning less academic also strips away the remaining vestiges of the notion that a well-educated populace is a good thing in itself.

But one of the other things that those who want fewer people to seek a degree are concerned about is the lack of what they call ‘graduate jobs’, which generally seems to be a euphemism for jobs which pay a higher salary, or graduate premium. There is an obvious conflict here: it is simply not rational to support the idea of there being a graduate premium whilst also demanding that other types of qualifications and learning should carry equal value. Having done a certain amount of graduate recruitment in the past myself for two different organisations, I’m not convinced that the requirement for a degree is, in many cases, much more than a filter mechanism enabling lazy employers to discard large numbers of otherwise suitable employees. There is, though, no real question that employers seeking only graduate recruits do find themselves obliged to reinforce the pretence by offering higher salaries.

Achieving real equality of value requires more than identifying which young people are more suited to a so-called ‘vocational’ route, providing the necessary places, and making airy statements about parity or equality. If I thought that Burnham was wanting to start a serious conversation about how we value and reward different occupations, his statement today would be very welcome. How do we determine the relative value of lawyers and nurses for example? Does the current difference in reward reflect that relative valuation or reverse it? I’m pretty certain, however, that that isn’t a can he proposes to open, and that what he’s talking about is more about persuading people to accept their station in life – and the level of reward which goes with that. His fine words are, in short, more spin than substance. Being better with words doesn’t change the underlying message.

When Labour's self-image clashes with reality

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Last week, the new PM instructed his cabinet to “stop assuming that decisions belong in Whitehall by default”, according to a Downing Street source quoted in the Times (paywall). The source went on to add, “Departments will now have to justify why a power should stay at the centre rather than being transferred to a local area”. Perhaps the new Secretary of State for Wales was asleep during that part of the meeting, but his statement that he is not yet "entirely convinced" of the case for giving more powers to the Welsh government, although he remains "open to the conversation" sounds an awful lot like an assumption that powers should remain where they are unless a convincing case is made otherwise – almost the exact opposite of his boss’s instruction.

It’s possible, of course, that Burnham never intended that his new policy should apply to the national governments in Wales and Scotland – for him devolution is all about the powers of local mayors; and his record to date of understanding the difference between those national parliaments on the one hand and regional mayors on the other is not good. It’s more likely, though, that we’re just seeing two different versions of the Labour Party. There is the image that they want us to believe: a party committed to localism, empowering communities and their representatives to take the best decisions for their areas, and then there’s the traditional version with which we are all too familiar in Wales: a centralised and centralising party which wants to keep all power in its own hands. Kinnock is simply presenting the well-established reality; those who fall for the Burnham rhetoric will inevitably end up disappointed.

The power has been retained at the centre all along

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The problem at the heart of devolution is, and always has been, that ‘power devolved is power retained’. It might be politically difficult for Westminster to deliberately and blatantly remove powers from the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, but it would be entirely legal under a constitution which assumes that absolute power is vested in the monarch by god and exercised by parliament through the gracious consent of the monarch. Devolved administrations are allowed to exercise such powers as the central authority decides in the manner, and for so long as, that central authority determines. The conceptual difference between that and a republican system under which power belongs to the people and is exercised by governments on their behalf and at their discretion – even if, in practice, the differences are not so great as they are in theory – is huge. The underlying difference of principle – whose power is it anyway – is fundamental.

Andy Burnham presents himself as a committed devolutionist, which might look like a big plus for Wales and Scotland compared to what has gone before. But, like all devolutionists, his starting point is that power is owned by the centre and may be shared at the centre’s discretion. It means that he can decide what is devolved and to whom, setting up a potential conflict with the administrations in Cardiff and Edinburgh as he probably seeks to devolve power to more local mayors. And it isn’t just powers currently held at Westminster that he might be seeking to devolve – it is also those currently exercised in Cardiff and Edinburgh that he is likely to want to devolve.

As a matter of pure principle, I would actually agree that devolution shouldn’t stop at the national parliaments of Wales and Scotland; it is a disappointment to me that Plaid’s long history of supporting decentralising power within Wales seems to have gone into reverse somewhat since the establishment of the Assembly/Senedd, as politicians came up against the harsh reality that seriously devolving power necessarily means that different areas will set different priorities. Leaving that issue to one side, the question is: ‘who decides?’. Many – perhaps most – in Wales, and certainly in Scotland, would argue that further devolution within those countries should be a matter for the national parliaments but, for devolutionists, the issue of which powers should reside where is a matter for central determination. Whilst we in Wales might think that we have a Senedd in recognition of nationhood, to a devolutionist, it doesn’t necessarily look that way at all.

Paradoxically, it could well be that it is a pro ‘devolution’ PM who poses the greatest challenge to what ‘devolution’ means for Wales. The power has indeed been retained from the outset.

Out with the old, in with the old

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So far, the Burnham rhetoric has been better than the Starmer rhetoric, but that isn’t exactly a high bar. The substance – to the extent that there is anything other than a superficial paint job – will emerge in the coming days and weeks. Later this year, there will be (we are told) a 10-year plan. In the light of the recent rate of turnover in leaders of the UK government, the degree of confidence that Burnham will still be around to see the plan published (it will, inevitably, be later than proposed), let alone to see it through to implementation, cannot be high.

Some of the signs are not good, already. Putting a man who resigned from government because the Treasury wouldn’t divert enough funding away from protecting people against poverty and ill-health into deterring imaginary Russian threats in charge of the Treasury doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that the ‘change’ being demanded by Burnham will be quite the change that we need. Rhetoric about moving away from the neoliberal approach of the past few decades is utterly undermined by the statement that the arbitrary fiscal rules – only ever invented in order to entrench neoliberalism into the UK government’s economic philosophy – will be adhered to.

Scrapping the mad scheme for digital ID is a welcome step, but the mathematics behind diverting the uncommitted funding from that into a reduction in VAT on electricity costs are a little dodgy to say the least. Those paying the fuel bills – and especially those living in fuel poverty – will welcome any reduction, but when reduced to the level of ordinary household bills, the saving doesn’t look that large. £45 a year off the energy price cap equates to around 86p a week, strangely reminiscent of Gordon Brown's derisory 75p per week pension increase in 1999 - and worth rather less when inflation is accounted for.

We need more than a sharper rhetoric, a more developed sense of humour, and a bit of tinkering at the edges, but there are no signs as yet that Burnham is any more capable of envisioning a different approach than his predecessor. Being better at selling the same basic approach might buy him some time, but it will do little more than that.

By-election significance isn't about competing brands of vanilla ice cream

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With the votes counted and the dust settling, Andy Burnham won yesterday’s Makerfield by-election by a large majority. To what extent this was a personal vote for the man rather than the party (‘vote Labour to get the Labour PM out’ is an unusual campaign strategy, to say the least) is not clear. I’ve always tended to the view that personalities don’t have a huge impact on election results at parliamentary level, but all rules have their exceptions and the circumstances and extent of coverage in this case may have enhanced the impact of the individual. If individuals really do make a difference, then it certainly helped that Reform Ltd chose a walking car-crash as their candidate, a man whose past comments made him an easy target. A cynic might even suggest that Farage would prefer Labour to stick with Starmer. Whatever, the fact is that Burnham is now in Westminster, and expectations are high that the starting gun will soon be fired on either a Labour leadership contest or else a coronation for the man from Manchester. Whatever gloss attaches to the Burnham name now may well be tarnished by the forthcoming mayoral by-election, which Reform Ltd have a reasonable chance of winning based on the local council elections, even if the bookies currently narrowly favour Labour; but maybe he’ll have staged his coup before that can happen.

The media are painting the Burnham bandwagon as a virtually unstoppable force, ushering in a new government and a new era. I’m not so sure. Burnham is undoubtedly a better communicator than the incumbent, although that isn’t exactly a high bar. The question is about how different he will be in practice. On that score, the omens are not good. He has already committed to maintaining the arbitrary fiscal rules drawn up by Rachel Reeves, and the appointment of a set of deeply conservative financial advisers to support him augurs badly. It looks as though the neoliberal agenda of continued wealth concentration is likely to continue unabated, and he is tying his own hands to do little more than tinker at the edges. Those sunlit uplands aren’t getting any closer. Burnham vs Starmer is politics as ice cream flavours, except the choice is limited to different brands of vanilla.

To my mind, the more significant, not to say worrying, by-election result yesterday was the one in Aberdeen South, where the SNP lost a seat to the Tories. The significance isn’t in the SNP losing, although that’s unwelcome, or even in the Tories winning, although that goes against the run of play. It is, rather, in the basis of the political upset, which is all about the oil and gas industry. It’s an issue that the SNP have not handled particularly well, but the outcome suggests that voters in Aberdeen have fallen for the snake oil being peddled by the Tories (as well as other parties of the ‘right’), namely the idea that we can both secure the planet’s future for coming generations and at the same time use all available resources with no concern for tomorrow. It isn’t just a problem in Aberdeen. Those who would deny the evidence of anthropogenic climate change have seen an opportunity to persuade voters to support them: after all, what’s not to like about a politician who tells you that you can do what you like today and you don’t need to worry about future consequences? Aided by a dumbed-down and lazy media which reports the debate as a “he said, she said” question rather than seeking out facts and scientific consensus, alongside echo-chamber social media, they are pushing against an open door.

Perhaps our end will come not with a bang or indeed any type of sudden event, but in the fug of a long drawn-out party.

Irrelevance may be infectious

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If there is a single UK politician who should understand what political irrelevance looks and feels like, it is surely ex-PM Tony Blair, and it’s tempting to dismiss his critique of the way the UK is becoming irrelevant under the leadership of his own party on that basis. That would, though, miss the point, because for all the robust rebuttals of that critique by current-day Labour figures, the whole episode serves to emphasise not the difference between the Blair generation and the Starmer generation but the intrinsic similarities.

It is clear, for instance, that both what Blair had to say and what Starmer has been doing are predicated on an idea of the UK as a great global power, with influence way beyond its size and economic importance to the world. It’s a sort of post-imperial delusion on the part of people who can’t quite get their heads around the idea of the UK as a medium-sized offshore European archipelago, and expect the rest of the world to somehow take them at their own evaluation of their relevance.

Some have been surprised at the similarity between the responses of Burnham and Streeting, with their insistence that the idea of inequality is missing from Blair’s response. But both men, like Blair himself, are wedded to the neoliberal economic creed that ‘the markets’ can solve every problem and that governments must do, fiscally, whatever they interpret the bond markets as demanding. Increasing inequality is not only baked into that creed, it is its main driving force. In his failure to pretend that he thinks it important, Blair is simply being more honest than either. There is no great ‘battle of ideas’ going on between the Labour leadership hopefuls, just a beauty contest between two over-ambitious wannabe Messiahs. Irrelevant is quite an apt description.

The five stages of Messiahdom

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Political parties finding themselves in difficulty whilst retaining an absolute conviction that they are right about everything have a tendency to start to believe in the idea of a Messiah. If only, the story goes, we had a different leader, all would be well. That’s the first stage of messiahdom.

The second stage comes when they alight upon the Chosen One. He (and it’s invariably a ‘he’) might not be immediately available: perhaps he’s overseas or at the very least stuck in political exile in the frozen and inhospitable north. These are simply obstacles to be overcome.

The third stage is when the Chosen One himself starts to believe that he really is the Messiah, the one the whole world has been waiting for, and the only one who can put right those things which need to be put right and lead his party to the sunlit uplands. That seems to be about the point at which the Labour Party has now arrived.

The fourth stage is the anointment of the new leader, and it’s the trickiest of all. It’s far from clear at this point whether Labour will overcome this particular hurdle. There will be those who lay obstacles in his route, such as re-opening a debate which makes it harder to persuade ordinary people outside the party to vote for him, whilst smiling sweetly and uttering welcoming words. Maybe his silvery northern tongue will win round the doubters, both inside the party membership and amongst the wider electorate, maybe not. I have a suspicion that at least some will feel more than a little p****d off at being taken for granted in the power games being played with and around them.

Whether the Labour Party gets through stage 4 or not might be an open question, but if they do, then stage 5 has a degree of inevitability about it. This is when it becomes clear that he’s not the Messiah at all, just a very naughty boy. Heroes almost invariably turn out to have feet of clay. The chances that a change of leadership will solve the problems of the Labour Party are slim; the historical record (particularly over the past decade) does not exactly convince me that switching out the person at the top will change any of the fundamentals, even if it may deliver a short term boost based more on hope than experience. A glib tongue and a chameleon-like ability to change position are no substitute for substance, and a few years spent in the political wilderness do not necessarily equip someone to succeed in the top job.

The potential for doing more harm than good is high, particularly if he falls off the horse at the next hurdle. Still, as spectator sports go, it’s better than a lot of politics.

Labour needs more than a better story-teller

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Nobody really knows how much impact an individual has on the outcome of an election. I can say from experience as a candidate that a number of electors will tell candidates something along the lines of ‘I don’t usually vote for your party, but I’m going to vote for you’. I can also say from experience as a canvasser on behalf of other candidates that a similar number of electors will tell canvassers something along the lines of ‘I usually vote for your party, but I won’t vote for X’. Whether they net down to zero is an unanswered – and unanswerable – question, but the overall effect is that most candidates (guilty as charged!) end up believing that their own personality and ability is having a greater effect than it actually is. What we simply can’t do is run the same election twice and see what the impact of different candidates might be. Martin Shipton, on Nation.Cymru, wrote a timely reminder last week about the dangers of believing in political Messiahs.

It’s clear that Andy Burnham, to say nothing of his friends and supporters, believes that he is uniquely placed to win the pending by-election in Manchester – or would be, if he were allowed to stand. Those same friends and allies are now warning of the dire consequences of blocking his candidature, claiming that the seat will be lost to Labour as a result. There is a danger, for Labour, of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, which will leave Burnham and pals on the sidelines declaring that it all could have been so different if only he’d been allowed to stand. He might well have lost anyway, of course; which outcome we choose to believe depends on the extent to which we believe that the personality and profile of candidates makes a net difference in one direction or the other. In blocking the candidature of one individual, Sir Starmer and his allies might well have blocked one potential source of challenge at the expense of making a challenge from another direction even more probable. It was a gamble either way.

For those of us not party to the drama, intrigue, and machinations of the Labour Party at its worst, the bigger question is about policy rather than personality. Clearly, Burnham is a more effective communicator than Starmer, although most would probably agree that that is not a particularly high bar. But how different is he really in terms of a policy agenda? Not as much as the spin suggests, would be my assessment. That is the real problem for Labour – they’re so committed to their self-imposed fiscal rules that a minor tweak to those rules would make little real difference; they need to do more than tell the story a bit better. Those who are arguing that the answer is a change of leader are asking the wrong question.

Andy and Ben

Tweet I bet that Ben Bradshaw is glad right now that he was reshuffled out of the Health Department in June, given that the Health Secretary has announced today that car parking charges will be abolished in English hospitals, following the lead set by Wales and already followed by Scotland. If he was still at health, he might well have found today's speech by Andy Burnham to be a bit too much to swallow.

When Wales set the pace, Bradshaw claimed it would be at the expense of reducing waiting times.

When Scotland followed suit, he said that it was not a "sensible use of limited resources". He also seemed to be saying that it was not a decision which could be taken centrally, since "In England, hospital car parking charges are decided locally by individual trusts to cover the cost of running and maintaining a car park".

Twelve months on, and the English Health Minister declares to the Labour Party conference that it's not only possible; it's both desirable and a priority for use of resources. Amazing how an impending election concentrates the mind and enables objections to be overcome.

There's a wider lesson to be borne in mind as well. When a Labour Minister says that something can't be done, (s)he is not necessarily telling the whole truth.