Power devolved but not responsibility

In their different ways, Burnham and Sturgeon are warnings of the failure of devolution in the UK. Promise more and blame Westminster when you fail is the lesson both applied.

The once and future kings.

The newly elected MP for Makerfield, Andy Burnham, and the former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon both have a touch of Dickens about them. It may be six months before the Christmas ghosts return to us but their careers are both cautionary tales.

In their different ways they expose the weakness of British devolution and the abuse that regionalism can hide. Now that Our Andy is returning to Westminster, it’s worth learning the lessons of Manchester, and the other centres of devolved power.

St Nicola, patron saint of the incurious, appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday show to explain away the chains that bind her to the past. Unlike Marley, she would not own her sins. Her husband, the auditors, even her own party were all, somehow, more responsible than she was.

She may have lived with Peter Murrell but when he pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 of party funds, spent on a camper van, cars and assorted luxuries, Sturgeon still told Koonssberg she had no conscious memory of the motorhome and rejected outright the idea that anyone had tried to warn the party. She says she feels she is serving a sentence for a crime she did not commit. A remarkable thing to say of a woman who ran Scotland for the better part of a decade, led her party throughout, and noticed nothing.

Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell in happier times, before prison.

She was, she claimed, just another woman taking responsibility for the actions of a man. Though having read her gender legislation it is hard to know quite what she means by that.

A few hundred miles south, Our Andy has tried a gentler version of the same trick. Do not look at the Department for Transport, then run by Conservative ministers, whose Bus Services Act 2017 handed him the power to franchise Manchester’s buses. Ignore the devolution deal George Osborne struck in 2014, and forget the quarter century of rebuilding under Sir Richard Leese, who led the council from 1996 to 2021. Look instead at Andy.

Looking at Andy is rather the point, because there is not a great deal else to look at. The metro mayoralty sounds like an executive office and is costumed as one, but it is nothing of the sort. It commands no great department. It raises almost none of the money it spends. It answers for very little that cannot be blamed on someone in London.

That is the weakness, and it is not Burnham’s alone. It is the office, and it is the same office in every city we have handed a mayor. What it offers instead is a microphone, and Burnham works it better than most.

He is the standard bearer of Manchesterism, a politics of the announcement, the photograph and the grievance, performed from a stage built for claiming credit and shifting blame in roughly equal measure.

It is not the private sector revolution that brought Manchester a century of prosperity, opportunity and growth. It is the nationalised tribute act, without the prosperity, without the opportunity, without the growth, and without the power to deliver a single one of them.

Both have hidden from scrutiny for years. Only now, one cornered by a criminal husband, the other by a larger ambition, are they finally being asked what really happened.

They are not the first devolved leaders to have hidden their incompetence in plain sight. Travel to Belfast and you find the same pattern with the accelerator pressed to the floor. The Renewable Heat Incentive, the cash for ash scheme, paid claimants more in subsidy than their fuel costs, so the rational thing to do was to burn it. Taxpayers’ money quite literally went up in smoke, the better part of £500m of it, and the minister responsible, like Sturgeon, blamed her officials. The scheme brought down the devolved government in 2017 but the bill is still being paid today.

The common thread is not party; it’s structure. This is political ventriloquism with power projected in one place and the money raised in another. The mayor spends; the Treasury collects. The First Minister announces; the taxpayer funds. Credit is local, cost is national, and accountability belongs to no one.

Wire the incentives that way and you would have to be an idiot, at every level, not to behave exactly as they have. Promise generously, demand more from Westminster, and pass the blame to the centre when your promises come to nothing. After all, it’s their fault for not stumping up the cash. The ratchet turns one way only: more spending, more state, more dependency, election after election, whoever wins.

That is how you make a country institutionally Left-wing. Not by argument and not by vote, but by wiring. We have built a machine in which the rational choice, in Edinburgh, in Manchester, and once in Belfast, is always to ask Westminster for more and answer for less. And because most of us are more worried about what is taken from us, the media scrutiny is on Westminster too.

So we see unwatched politicians, posing as leaders while luxuriating in irresponsibility. That’s why promises of devolution must be matched with accountability.

The press cannot hold power to account while so much of it sits inside the very local patronage networks it is meant to watch or is focused on Westminster alone. And real devolution cannot stop with Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast making new unitary states; it has to travel all the way down, to communities and to councils, and it has to carry the duty to raise the money as well as the pleasure of spending it. The United Kingdom is not a fire-and-forget system of one-way disbursement.

Now that Andy is marching on Number 10, vibe coding a policy agenda without a true mandate, it seems we’re going to test the next tale in our literary canon: The Government Inspector, by Gogol, in which an entire town convinces itself that a minor clerk is an important government official. Everyone colludes in the delusion because they alternative is… well, irrelevance.

Perhaps that has more parallels for the Labour MPs now pinning their hopes on the former mayor of Manchester than even Dickens.