In the cold – and wet – light of Friday morning, with the not ‘too close to call’ Scottish referendum ‘NO’ result declared, this newspaper headline has even more relevance: ‘Tory minister joins rebellion over money for Scotland’ (The ‘i’ – September 19.)
The minister concerned is Devizes MP Claire Perry and the text for her ‘rebellion’ came in her pre-vote local newspaper column.
The headline’s reference to ‘money’ picks up Mrs Perry’s description of the Barnett formula for central government payments to both England and the three other nations (which she calls ‘the funding formula for Scotland’) as ‘rather cobbled together’. That is a strange phrase when the formula, set-up in the late 1970s, was retained by both the Thatcher and Major governments and on into the new century.
Mrs Perry referred dismissively to offers of further devolution as “promises of financial party bags” and wrote critically of the “whole raft of goodies on offer for Scotland that will be paid for by us, south of the border, to appease the Yes voters.”
But the headline misses the crux of the matter: it is not merely about money but about serious constitutional reform. The result may not have been, as Mrs Perry predicted, ‘too close to call’, but a remarkable 45 per cent of Scotland’s massive turn out voted ‘Yes’ to splitting away from the United Kingdom.
What is more, an unquantifiable number of the ‘No’ voters will be keen on the promised ‘devo-max’ offers. What a shame the ‘devo max’ option was not on the referendum ballot papers.
As one commentator pointed out after the Scottish result was announced, the convention that after a democratic vote, the government needs to govern for all the people, seems to have disappeared from the current political agenda. Rather it should be strengthened by the number of people who went to their polling stations in Scotland on Thursday.
Mrs Perry calls for “Cool, calm analysis” before decisions are taken. With the Prime Minister’s talk on Friday morning of more self-government for “our great cities”, Mrs Perry will need to turn her attention to new governance and rights for all the rural communities left outside the cities which appear to be at the centre of this new constitutional revolution.
The Prime Minister does need to watch his own MPs. The MP for the constituency adjacent to Mrs Perry’s, James Gray (MP for North Wiltshire), has gone even further, writing of the Scots: “Talk about feeding an addiction. The more you give them the more they want, and we would be back with calls for independence within a decade or sooner.”
To older heads, that sentiment is redolent of those opposing the end of Empire in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mr Gray is a backbencher. Mrs Perry is a Transport Minister responsible for most of the Department for Transport’s rail portfolio.
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