David Cameron was a disaster for the Union
Politics Notebook #2: He failed on the constitution, he’ll fail on foreign affairs too.
In the worst comeback since parachute pants and Noel Edmonds, David Cameron has returned to the Cabinet.
The former prime minister has been drafted in by Rishi Sunak, the alleged prime minister, to help stabilise his government. Who better to do that than the man who called a referendum that threw the country into its worst political crisis in over a century then quit the next morning?
I have a piece over at The Spectator explaining why Cameron is fantastically ill-suited to his new role as foreign secretary, on account of his record in international affairs while in Number 10. Stuff like debasing Britain’s global reputation in a failed attempt to curry favour with the Chinese Communist Party and spearheading a military intervention that caused Libya to collapse into anarchy and the Islamic State to spread across north Africa. You know, minor things.
But if you care, as I do, about constitutional politics, your disdain should be reserved for Cameron’s Scotland policy, one of the most abject, ignorant, ill-conceived, self-harming, and counterproductive of any prime minister in recent times.
Let’s start with the Scotland Act 2012.
Introduced to implement the recommendations of the Calman Commission, the 2012 Act essentially doubled down on the devolution experiment by expanding the powers of the Scottish Parliament.
Remember the Scottish Executive?
Some critics of devolution insist the Scottish Government is nothing more than an executive, but they’re wrong. The Scottish Government was known as ‘the Scottish Executive’ between 1999 and 2007, when the SNP came to power and rebranded the institution as a government. Its legal name, however, remained ‘the Scottish Executive’.
So, what happened? David Cameron and the Scotland Act 2012 happened. That legislation amended the 1998 Act to change the Scottish Executive’s legal name to ‘the Scottish Government’. The SNP had unilaterally renamed a devolved institution, spent taxpayers’ money on rebranding and signs and the like, and Cameron rewarded them by changing the law to accommodate their rhetorical power grab.
Object to having to pay higher income tax simply because you live in Scotland?
You can thank the 2012 Act for that, too. It was this legislation that handed Holyrood the power to vary income tax north of the border by up to 10 per cent. This allowed the SNP to introduce its Scottish Rate of Income Tax and give Scotland the highest income tax rate in the UK.
Been stung by the SNP’s Land and Buildings Transaction Tax?
Well, it used to be called Stamp Duty, the rates were set at Westminster and Holyrood had no say over it. That is until Cameron devolved the powers.
Averse to Holyrood’s ever-expanding bureaucracy?
It was the Cameron government and the 2012 Act that created the Nationalists their very own version of HMRC, Revenue Scotland.
Have your doubts about Holyrood’s finances?
Take it up with Cameron. His 2012 legislation gave the Scottish Parliament borrowing powers so that ministers can borrow up to £3bn for capital spending and up to £1.75bn for resource spending for cash management or to remedy forecast errors.
Then there’s his biggest gamble of all: the independence referendum.
Allow me to say this for the 9,742nd time: Cameron was under no obligation, legal or otherwise, to concede the SNP’s demand for an independence referendum. It doesn’t matter that they won a majority of seats at Holyrood in the 2011 election. It doesn’t matter that they mentioned a referendum on page 28 of their manifesto.
They had no mandate for an independence referendum because it was a Holyrood election and the constitution is reserved to Westminster. They could have won all 129 seats and this would still be the case. It is democratically and constitutionally impossible to secure at an election to one parliament a mandate to exercise powers held by another parliament.
All Cameron had to do was congratulate Alex Salmond on the scale of his election victory, wish him every success in taking forward his programme in devolved areas, and that was it. Cameron had the law on his side; he had parliamentary sovereignty on his side; he had a House of Commons where the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems held 96% of seats between them. The Nationalists could shout, they could scream, they could march, they could sulk, but what they could not do was force Cameron to give them a referendum.
Tories will come up with all sorts of excuses for why Cameron didn’t do this, but the reasons were simple: Cameron, his party and his government were weak and running scared of the SNP. Rather than stand their ground, and have a bit of faith in the United Kingdom, they let Salmond call the shots while telling anyone who would listen that this was part of some terribly clever strategy.
And Salmond really did call the shots. Cameron not only gave him a referendum, he allowed him to decide the date, the franchise, the question (subject to revision by the Electoral Commission), and the campaign finance rules. Considering just how much Cameron’s government allowed the referendum process to be stacked in the SNP’s favour, it is hardly surprising the Yes vote was almost 45%.
But Cameron wasn’t finished yet.
After the SNP lost, it was rewarded with another tranche of additional powers.
This came about as a result of the cross-party Smith Commission, and reflected last-minute promises such as The Vow, even though the government was under no obligation to do any of this. The Smith process squandered the No victory in the referendum, handing the Nationalists a consolation prize in the form of extra powers. David Cameron’s government bought into the logic of ever-weakening union, in which it was the job of Whitehall to salami-slice the United Kingdom in a never-ending process of appeasement.
One particularly thick wodge of salami was the Scotland Act 2016. This gave Holyrood powers to set income tax rates and thresholds; a raft of powers over welfare, including the ability to create new benefits; control over elections and the franchise, abortion, equal opportunities, air passenger duty, railway policing, and the Crown Estate.
The Act, introduced by Cameron’s government, showed just how far the Tories had strayed from their opposition to devolution in the 1997 referendum. The first provision of the legislation declares that ‘the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are a permanent part of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements’ and ‘are not to be abolished except on the basis of a decision of the people of Scotland voting in a referendum’.
Tony Blair may have set up the Scottish Parliament, but it was David Cameron who made it stick. (To those who protest that Labour and the Lib Dems voted for this legislation too, that is the point. After just over a decade of the Scottish Parliament experiment, the Tories had become sufficiently devolutionist that their constitutional policies were in harmony with those of the two parties which had most lustily championed devolution.)
Predictably to all except the constitutional gurus of the political class, and of course Britain’s peerless civil servants, giving separatists and devolutionists more and more of what they wanted only made them want more and more. It did not reduce support for independence. It did not pressure the SNP into being more fiscally prudent. It did not make them govern more competently.
After six years of David Cameron in Number 10, the United Kingdom was weakened, the Scottish Government empowered, the SNP emboldened, separatism boosted and the ties that hold the Union together frayed to little more than defence, foreign policy and pensions policy. That Scottish nationalism is currently struggling is mostly down to self-inflicted wounds and nothing whatsoever to do with anything Cameron did. The Union was not saved by David Cameron, it somehow managed to survive him.
Thanks for this clear exposition of Cameron’s negligent and casual approach to the referendum. Salmond won 45% of the vote on a 50% turnout in 2011. Yes, Cameron should simply have congratulated Salmond and moved on. But then he should have asked ‘Has any other country been faced by this, and, if so, what did they do about it?’ It wouldn’t have taken much research to find ‘Quebec’, ‘Canada’ and ‘The Clarity Act’. Cameron - with an EU referendum also a possibility - should have had a task force beavering away to set a template of rules for referendums on major constitutional issues before the Edinburgh Agreement was signed, including the requirement for a 2/3 majority for change - just like the SNP’s constitution. It could all have been so different, and we could have been spared the dreary constitutional wrangling of the last decade. Rewarding the losers with the Smith Commission was a real slap in the face for those on the winning side. The damage the ensuing Scotland Act 2016 has done is an indictment of Cameron’s stupidity.
I fear you are right.