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Welcome to the Scottish Independence Convention Blog. This weeks blog comes from Stephen Maxwell, the Treasurer of the Scottish Independence Convention and a trustee of a number of Scottish charities. If you would like to read comments or write one of your own scroll down the bottom of this page. |
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The Calman Commission Beginning its work in a year which saw record world oil prices and ending it in the middle of the worst global recession for six decades the Commission on Scottish Devolution under the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Calman measures Scotland’s future out in teaspoonfuls. Cynics will remind us that the Commission was a creation of the Unionist parties and that no fewer than twelve of its fifteen members were Life Peers, Knights or holders of other baubles from the British state. What did we expect? In fact by the dismal expectations trailing its birth the Commission did produce a few surprises. The biggest was the proposal that Scotland should be given responsibility for raising around one third of its own spending budget through enhanced taxing powers. But the initial surprise was soon doused by the content. The UK Government should cut 10p from income tax levied in Scotland, adjust Scotland’s block grant downwards, and leave the Scottish Parliament to make up the difference, more or less, through a new power to set a single rate of income tax in Scotland at whatever level it chose. Whether this proposal would achieve the Commission’s declared aim of bridging the accountability gap between the Parliament’s spending power and its current revenue raising power is doubtful. The Scottish Parliament already has the power to vary the standard rate of income tax in Scotland by 3p up or down. It has never used it, for understandable reasons. Of all taxes income tax is the most politically sensitive. Nor is the Scottish Parliament allowed to shift the burden from low and middle earners by altering the rate on the higher tax bands. While the new power would apply the Scottish tax to both standard and higher tax rates the same absolute increase or decrease would be applied to both. The structure of the tax regime - allowances, credits and thresholds - would remain the prerogative of Westminster. Given these restrictions the Parliament will probably choose to play safe by striking the same rate of income tax as in the rest of the UK while continuing to blame Westminster’s block grant, accounting for the remaining two thirds of its income, for any overall funding shortfall. The temptation will be reinforced by the Commission’s refusal, despite some press speculation, to give Scotland any preferential access to Scottish oil revenues. This refusal could become politically toxic as oil revenues rise on the back of a recovery in the global economy even as Westminster is cutting back public expenditure, Scotland’s block grant included. The only other substantial proposal Calman makes is for the Scottish Government to have a borrowing power for capital investment subject to Treasury approval. Calman’s failure even to begin to match the scale of the challenge and the opportunities facing Scotland is down to two factors. The Commission’s remit to review devolution was explicitly contained within an obligation to “secure the In that spirit the Commission treats the Union as a sacred axiom to be used to block any proposal not immediately certifiable as Union friendly. Thus proposals for devolution of control over elements of the welfare and employability budgets are rejected on the grounds of inconsistency with the ‘common social Union’ across the UK. Claims for differential corporation tax rates or for Scottish management of immigration are vetoed on the grounds of inconsistency with the ‘economic Union’. Claims for Scottish control of the Parliament’s electoral system fall on the grounds that “it is the essence of devolution that the powers of the sub-national parliament are exercised by the national legislature.” Taxation apart only minnows such as airgun control, drink driving and speed limits escape this intellectual drag net. As deployed by the Commission the Union is a fiction. Under the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty the Union is whatever the majority at Westminster want it to be. A base for nuclear weapons? Put it in Scotland. £billions of oil revenues from the Scottish North Sea? Give them all to London whatever the experience with resource revenues in Canada or Australia. Cut welfare benefits or public services to satisfy middle England?. They’re all part of Calman’s sacred Union. Only a Written Constitution defining among other things the division of powers between the nations of the UK and entrenching social and economic rights could create a Union of the sort imagined by Calman. That would be near impossible to achieve in this terminal phase of Britishness. But without it Calman’s Union is a sentimental dream. The second reason for the Commission’s failure is its reductionist view of Scotland. There is no acknowledgement of Scotland as a cultural or moral community. Its treatment of Scottish civil society is symptomatic. Despite submissions arguing the interdependence of political empowerment and a vigorous civil society, civil society does not feature in the report. The Scottish Broadcasting Commission’s case for a Scottish Digital Network is ignored. Professor John Haldane’s case for Scotland as a “moral community” to have the power to decide traditional moral ‘issues’ such as abortion and transplantation is not even acknowledged. Nor is the plea to protect Scotland’s allocated ‘good causes’ Lottery budgets from raids by Westminster politicians as per the London Olympics. And to rub salt in the wounds the Commission proposes that charities legislation be returned to Westminster on the entirely specious grounds that there is not room within a single UK tax regime for differing understandings of the purpose of charity. Champions of independence have little to fear from this intellectually threadbare review of devolution. They can accept its teaspoonfuls of progress confident that events will soon put more substantial fare before them.
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