David Millard

It has been said that for Scotland, being in a union with England is like being in bed with an elephant. The numbers speak for themselves. Scotland has a population of just over 5 million, England over 53 million. That makes Scotland around the same size (in population) as Yorkshire, England’s largest county. It is no wonder that the Scottish feel disenfranchised and a bit cramped by their bloated and not-always-considerate neighbour.

This year Scotland votes on whether to remain as part of the UK, or whether to dissolve the union and go their own way. I hope they vote to stay, although I understand completely why they might want to leave. The truth is that while nationalism and patriotism may play a part, Scotland is at its heart a social democratic nation, and has shown a growing political divide with England for decades. The sad thing is that the Scottish would find joint cause with tens of millions of English people with similar views, but the UK political system separates and hides this common cause. As a result Scotland has begun to feel that it is being ruled by an increasingly foreign power.

Meanwhile the campaign to keep Scotland in the union is doing a fabulous job of driving it away. It doesn’t help that the question for the referendum frames leaving as Yes, and staying as No. Negative messages about membership of the EU, dividing up North Sea resources, keeping the pound, or distributing the UK’s staggering debts are alienating Scottish voters, and while the polls still show a majority of Scots wish to stay in the UK, the figures are moving. It’s not inconceivable that if the pro-unionists continue to threaten and bully, the Scots will draw from that a natural conclusion. And leave.

So we need a positive message. Something that shows that as a country we acknowledge the problems with the union, and that we have potential solutions. In short, we need to do some National Systems Engineering.

The problem is that no-one in government has the skills to deliver this. Our political class is full of politics, philosophy, economics and history graduates who can write lovely essays about the post-war settlement, but who think that a system design is a pattern on a toilet. Sigh. Where are the Engineers?

Yet a Systems Designer would look at the political structure of the UK and immediately see critical problems. Legislative zones that are wildly different in size, a lack of a consistent relationship between different regions of the UK and Westminster, and an undemocratic second house that alienates the regions.

It’s fixable:

• Get rid of first-past-the-post. As a voting algorithm it delivers quick results, but utterly fails to build consensual government. Stage one of making the Scottish feel welcome again is to show them that they are part of a larger UK social democratic voice. The Alternative Vote mechanism is better, and keeps the strong ties between a voter and their MP that UK democracy is founded on.
• Introduce English regional assemblies with powers that are consistent with the Scottish parliament and the Welsh and NI assemblies. We would probably need between 5 and 10. Aiming for no more that 10 million citizens in each. You could do worse that taking the old Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy as a basis (Mercia, Wessex, etc.) The solution to being in bed with an elephant is to break the elephant up into smaller, more manageable companions.
• Reform the House of Lords around those regions – including Wales, Scotland and NI. In the same way that states in the USA have equal representation in the Senate regardless of size, we can have regional representation in the UK that divides power equally between members of the union. This would be unrealistic with England as one lump, but as a collection of smaller regions it would work. Use proportional representation for the second house (giving a genuine relection of voter opinion) with nice long terms for representatives to make sure that they work on a longer timescale to the commons (one of the better features of the Lords today).

Proper distribution of powers between assemblies and the two houses of UK government would solve the West Lothian question, give Scotland (and Wales and NI) an equal and secure place in the union, and remove the feeling that they are dominated by Westminster (a feeling that is shared, incidentally, by quite a few of the English regions – London is a bit of an elephant all on its own).

And before anyone says anything, I am aware that we’ve had referendums on two of the points above and they have failed, but that just shows you how short-sighted referendums can be – see my thoughts on the woeful AV debate. There is a desperate need to see the political system as a System – and not as a piecemeal set of ideas. (Engineers understand this, they would never let the rear passenger corner of a car vote on whether to have a different sized wheel.) Devolution and Regional Assemblies go hand in hand – they are co-dependent – and the people of the North-East may well have chosen differently had the assembly they were offered been given real teeth, and linked more clearly to an overarching strategy for the UK democratic system.

There has been so much political bungling of these issues since devolution, that I’m not sure how we make this happen, but I do know that we need to change the tone of this debate to prevent a messy divorce (or perhaps even worse, a continuing and unhappy marriage). Scotland is big enough, smart enough, and well structured enough to survive as its own nation – and pretending otherwise is counter productive. Instead we need to give the Scottish reasons to stay, not just to say that they are valuable fellow citizens, but to demonstrate it with action.

There can be a positive No.