Devolved Democracy

November 30th, 2007

Views: 628

Posted by ChrisG at 12:56 pm

Someone once said that devolution is a process, not an event. A process about which most people in England know very little, and care even less, until those moments when someone decides its results can best be summed up by a ‘they’re spending your money!’ -style headline. However, it may be that the devolved constitutional settlements may (especially in Scotland) be the best bulwark against a key feature of NuLabour’s neo-liberal governance agenda, namely the increasing unaccountable centralisation of planning decisions, together with the central role played by private corporate interests in deciding long-term planning priorities. Together these form a pincer manoeuvre which more and more people are going to find themselves being caught in as the Government’s energy security agenda continues to coalesce.

What I have in mind is the devolution of powers to the Scottish government to deal with environmental matters, including the management of pollution, and planning matters insofar as they are connected to these issues. Energy policy still remains, for the most part, a reserved matter, meaning that responsibility for it stays with Westminster. This is especially true with respect to nuclear power.

However, one of the emerging unintended consequences of the devolution of environmental and planning responsibilities to Holyrood concerns the conflicts that are likely to emerge when (no matter how much I’d like to write ‘if’, it’s hardly appropriate) Brown and co. announce a new generation of nuclear plants, some of which would have to be imposed on the Scots. As nuclear policy is a reserved power, the Scots cannot simply decide not to have nukes, but they can decide that, for instance, there are no suitable locations for new stations given the short term, and moreover, long-term environmental risks that building them would impose on the Scottish people.

The great and the good have started to wake up to this prospect. Viz. Hansard for Wednesday 28 November, and the contributions by Ben Wallace, Tory incumbent for Lancaster and Wyre (whose interest in the issue is no doubt piqued by the proximity of Heysham, Sellafield and the now defunct Calder Hall station, and the likelihood of there being new build in that area):

Yesterday, British Energy announced an interest in two sites in Scotland for the next generation of nuclear power stations. Why should both the United Kingdom’s energy policy and its ambition to reduce carbon emissions be held hostage by Scottish nationalists using planning technicalities in a Scottish Parliament? What will the Secretary of State and his colleague do to ensure that the First Minister does not gamble with Britain’s environment on constitutional politics?

It’s interesting how he phrases this: instead of the issue being framed as one concerning the unjust distribution of risk (which would have been a good tack to take, given the concentration of nuclear capacity in Ben’s constituents’ immediate neighbourhood, and the lack of concentration of nuclear capacity in, say, Dorset), it becomes one of national versus regional interest.

Given that any use by the Government of the national interest argument on energy security should be viewed with suspicion, given the overwhelming influence of powerful private corporate interests over how it is framed, this way of interpreting the problem is not doesn’t get us anywhere. It may turn out the move towards devolved political power turns out to be a crucial way of exposing the illegitimacy of what the Government is trying to do, before the marginalised (including future generations) end up being burdened with the costs.