NOT HOME RULE: The Smith Commission and the Lib Dems' need for critical perspective

Well, I am disappointed. Very disappointed.

Not, though, so much with the Smith Commission’s report (which you can read in full online at https://www.smith-commission.scot/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The_Smith_Commission_Report-1.pdf). OK, I’d have much liked it to go further, but knew this was unlikely – the time-frame, aside from anything else, militated against true ‘home rule’ proposals. There were compromises, many of them, and not too surprisingly today’s proposals were probably most in tune with the Tory submissions. So the report, in what it says, is just about meeting (my) expectations, indeed maybe even meeting some hopes a little better than I’d feared. It might even – just might – be another stage on the way to some kind of federal situation. Britain needs to change and this may move things on.

My disappointment, therefore, is not so much with the report – it’s with the comments that followed it.  First, I thought that John Swinney’s immediate comments were a bit too negative – he, after all, was one of the people presumably agreeing to this. He could have made it more evident that he did welcome what was proposed – his short welcome appeared a grudging one, followed as it was by all that was wrong… even while largely agreeing with him I found the timing misplaced.  Nicola Sturgeon’s comments in the Scottish Parliament were rather more welcoming – she made the same points, but made them rather better and I respect that.  However, Swinney’s comments gather only a minor quibble from me.

What I find wrong, yes wrong, indeed very wrong, is the response of my old ‘home’ party – the Scottish Liberal Democrats, whom I had been thinking to rejoin. That’s been pushed aside yet again. Michael Moore presumably does know that these proposals are not ‘home rule’ and should not have used that term, but his ‘welcoming’ comments were somewhat measured. Alistair Carmichael has promised to see them through, and I respect him for this. But the ‘welcome’ of Willie Rennie, online at http://www.scotlibdems.org.uk/more_powers_for_scotland is ridiculous. 

I mean that. Ridiculous. Laughable. The comments are laughable for people with no knowledge of the Liberal long-standing commitment to federalism, who’ll see Rennie’s claim that ‘we argued for these Home Rule powers’ as irrelevant – and also laughable, in a very sad way, for people who do know of that long-standing commitment and see this claim and 'welcome' as a serious backsliding, and as a serious inability to take any kind of critical view of what's going on here.

The STV news tonight had a comment from Bernard Ponsonby that 'Some traditional Liberals may well say that "home rule" amounts to a whole load more powers than is on offer'. Just so. Indeed this is very far from a federal or even a ‘quasi-federal’ solution, whatever that might have meant. Do we laugh or cry?

So why could not the Scottish Liberal Democrats be honest?  Why can they not say,  ‘We have a long-standing commitment to a Federal Britain. We know this is not Home Rule. Nevertheless, we pushed for such powers as could be got at this time. We much welcome the result, and it may be a stepping stone to a true British Federalism. We certainly hope so and will continue to work for such a solution.’

Had they said that – or something like it – they would now have had a rejoined member. As it is, I’m back to weighing up my political options, feeling more disgruntled than ever – and not because of the Smith report.