WATCH: Politics guru Alastair Campbell wants devolution to include more power for the Highlands
Speaking to Inverness Chamber of Commerce’s chief executive Colin Marr ahead of this year’s Highland Business Dinner, politics guru Alastair Campbell shared his thoughts on the ups and downs of devolution.
As former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Mr Campbell - guest speaker at this year’s dinner organised by the chamber of commerce - was at the heart of the administration which revived the Scottish Parliament, supposedly with a voting system that would prevent one party ever being able to hold sway unilaterally.
Speaking before the general election was announced, he admitted: “For the SNP to have gone on to become so all-powerful over a period of time was not exactly what was intended.
“However I still think devolution has been a good thing, ultimately.”
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Having also told The Inverness Courier in an exclusive interview ahead of this year’s business dinner that ‘“you have got to believe that things can get better“, he added: “Where I think we still have a problem - and we saw this recently in the English local and mayoral elections - is I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job of explaining, and the public understanding, how the different layers of government relate to each other.
“The politicians don’t always help in a way because they’ll always say ‘if it’s going well, that’s down to me; if it’s going badly that’s down to some other part of the political framework’, but in general I still think there should be more devolution, not less.”
Asked whether this meant he would seek to give more power to local areas such as the Highlands, he said: “Yeah absolutely…the phrase we always used to talk about was ‘subsidiarity’ - what can be local should be local and what can’t be local kind of goes up - and I think that’s the best way to think about.
“Where the Scottish parties have a point about the arrangements with Westminster is they are dependent upon the UK government, ultimately, for overall funding in the main.
“That makes things difficult, particularly when we’ve been through the period of austerity after 2010 that’s left local government around the country in a pretty poor state - and then you get to the point where we’re back to the blame game: ‘well, whose fault is it that the local services aren’t as good as they should be?’; ‘whose fault is it that mental health services aren’t what they ought to be?’.
“I wish we could get to a place where all layers of government, whatever their political views, understood that there’s a shared objective in trying to deliver the services for which they’re responsible…and that the public understood who was responsible for what.”
