"And yet we all would wish to feed on certainties..."

It is probably unwise to take Francis Urquhart, of the House of Cards, for a moral and political tutor, but the old villain had a fine line in insight into the allure and peril of denying contingency.

"So hard to know who to trust in these suspicious days. Does passion engender trust? Not necessarily. And yet we all would wish to feed on certainties. To hear the word "always", and believe it true. She trusts me absolutely, I believe. I trust she does. And I? I trust her absolutely... to be absolutely human."

In politics as in life, it matters what you are pessimistic about. Whatever some political scientists might have us believe, we don't live in a world straightforwardly structured according to immutable iron laws.  We may be tolerably confident that the sun will come up tomorrow (or at least some wan vestige of the sun, during the winter months), but absolute certainty about the future has the habit of eluding us. Fortuna kicks sand in our eyes. Our best laid plans unravel. Marvellous opportunity strikes, upending disaster for triumph.  Optimism, pessimism, and dicing the probabilities, are the elementary stuff of human affairs.  The rational soul has to make the best of it, weighing up likelihoods, assessing past conduct, and in the final analysis, take a calculated risk.  

On twitter this afternoon, Deputy Editor of the Scotland on Sunday, Kenny Farquharson laments recent Nationalist responses to the latest devolutionary wheeze from Alan Trench for the IPPR, with David Mundell claiming yesterday that all three pro-union parties would come up with another batch of proposals to wing more financial powers Holyrood's way, if independence is defeated in 2014.  Quoth Kenny:

It's sad that SNP is so casually dismissing those who have ambition to advance Scotland's cause in the event of a No vote in #indyref .
— Kenny Farquharson (@KennyFarq) January 22, 2013

Real change in tone in past couple of months. Last year, SNP warmly welcomed Devo Plus etc as useful contributions to debate on our future.
— Kenny Farquharson (@KennyFarq) January 22, 2013

Also tiring of the use of a promise made 34 years ago by a man born in 1903 as a block on eminently sensible proposals to advance home rule.
— Kenny Farquharson (@KennyFarq) January 22, 2013

I can understand Kenny's frustrations on many levels. He's not in favour of independence, but does support more powers. The case for independence is undeniably advanced by cultivating the idea that the UK is sclerotic, unreformable, unwilling to decentralise decision-making on key economic and social issue.  As Sturgeon put it in a recent speech:

"Devolution - to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - was itself an attempt to renew the UK state. But the UK’s ability to re-invent itself is spent. The Westminster parties are at best sceptical and at worst hostile to further substantial reform in Scotland’s interests."

Kenny's thesis, as I understand it, is that this is an over-pessimistic assessment, underestimating the continued plasticity of the UK state, and under-egging the potential within the UK to secure more powers for Holyrood. On a broad, theoretical level, I agree with him. It is possible, for example, to see some routes towards greater devolution after a no vote.  With the United Kingdom's half-scribbled constitution, I suppose one can envisage circumstances coming around in which a new spirit of governance might, maybe, somehow subvert the centralising, controlling habits of the UK treasury, prying greater powers from their grasp. Certainly, if political forces committed to such ideas took over in Westminster, there appears little in the way of formal barriers, save perhaps the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, to prevent them from radically reimagining, from reconstituting, the British state.

After all, if we lose the referendum in 2014, and any honest supporter of independence must concede the possibility, we'll be linking arms with folk like Kenny, in the hope of finding effective strategies for coaxing or cajoling Westminster into relinquishing greater responsibilities for Holyrood.  That'll be a grim business if we go into it on the basis that the struggle will inevitably avail us nothing.  None of this is a given, a certainty.  We have to make a calculation about what is more likely to happen using our best resources, and best ideas. And like Nicola, and most other pro-independence sorts, on balance, I can't share Kenny's confidence in the hitherto very vague devolutionary nostrums emanating from the pro-Union parties.

The argument for pessimism has a pedigree going back at least to Tom Nairn, and goes something like this.  Although for many of its proponents, devolution was a political end worth pursuing in itself, for a great many others, support for the creation of a Scottish Parliament was a work of expediency, not of political principle. Devolution to shoot the nationalist fox, to negate a little trouble on the northern frontier and secure the British state. On this account, nationalist agitation is understood to be the prime driver of the devolution of powers.

A defeat in the referendum, by eliminating the risk of independence breaking up Britain, will simultaneously blunt one of the most effective rationales - some would say the only effective rationale - which could and has persuaded the Mother of Parliaments to part with a single iota of power or responsibility. A defeat for independence will mute the nationalist clamour and eliminate those anxieties for a generation, and in a trice, significantly diminish Westminster's incentives to devolve more power to Holyrood. 

One needn't favour independence to see that this argument is not without some force, even if you think that it overstates the role of pro-independence politics in achieving devolution, and understates the potential interest in more devolution in a United Kingdom which includes Scotland after the 2014 poll.  In that context, it seems eminently reasonable to me for nationalists to ask folk, musing on the likelihood and scale of any post-referendum devolution, not to take every claim at face value, and weigh up the risks and opportunities independently.  

An analysis of the past conduct and declared ideas of the major political parties in the UK must be part of that.  The Liberal Democrats have a long-standing commitment to federalism, which is well and good, but the calculating voter can hardly neglect to notice that they are 1) not likely to be elected as a majority party at the next UK election; 2) will in all probability receive a drubbing to relegate them once again to distant third party-status, frozen out of influence; and 3) even if, after 2014, they remain part of a coalition government in Westminster, their priorities will inevitably end up being significantly qualified by the politics of their partner.

And from neither the Labour Party, nor the Conservative Party, has any clear statement of principle yet emerged on what their preferred constitutional structures might look like, beyond the status quo. That flexible lack of programmatic commitments, of course, can cut both ways, leaving space for more devolution, and the door open for none, but it can hardly fill the doubting pro-devolutionist, considering voting yes in the absence of a better alternative, with much confidence that something like their preferred constitutional option is an incipient possibility. 

The Conservative Party was notoriously first opposed to devolution, and now it appears to have no principled position in favour of greater devolution. Although a right-inflected case for the devolution of fiscal decision-making is readily made, its most enthusiastic proponent in the Scottish party, Darth Murdo Fraser, stood and failed to be elected leader in 2011.  David Mundell their sole MP representing a Scottish constituency, it isn't at all clear that his English and Welsh colleagues are interested in further fracturing Westminster's powers, beyond some vague nostrums from David Cameron in that direction during 2011. Simultaneously, as anyone who has leant an ear to its recent rhetoric cannot have missed, the Tory parliamentary membership are increasingly fixated on parliamentary sovereignty. They hardly look like a mob, burning with enthusiasm to distribute Westminster and Whitehall's power with a more generous hand. 

On the Labour side of the chamber, things remain similarly opaque. If the tenor of their recent debate on the section 30 order is anything to go by, many of the party's Scottish MPs seem to want "devolution without devolution". Just a week ago, the House of Commons atmosphere was thick with condensation, and regret. For Scottish Labour's Deputy leader, Anas Sarwar, Holyrood was "not a democratic place in the conventional sense", crushed under the yoke of the (from his perspective, somehow illegitimate) SNP majority.

In other areas, including electoral reform, the Labour party has shown it to be every inch as conservative as their colleagues with the blue rosettes.  The party's parliamentary delegation from north of the border do not, to my eye, cut a compelling image of a crew keen to cut the Scottish Parliament in on more powers.  Its English MPs, by contrast, don't seem to give a fig one way or the other, beyond vaguely endorsing Labour's constitutional record during its last term of office.

In the absence of a clear body of principles from either of the large Westminster parties, it seems entirely admissible to look at their past conduct. Particularly their recent past conduct. Labour enjoyed office in this country between 1997 and 2010.  They are certainly not to be criticised for leaving the Scotland Act 1998 a decent time to bed down before revisiting many of its powers, but in the subsequent time, they've proven themselves implacably opposed to introducing just the sort and scale of powers which Alan Trench's IPPR report will seemingly propose. 

If they are such eager beavers for more devolution of further financial powers, why did they not make economic use of parliamentary time and ministerial resources in a penny-pinched period of our history, and use the latest Scotland Act as the vehicle to realise those apparently cherished ambitions? Remember, the Calman Commission proposals did not go unamended or enacted in full in the Scotland Act 2012.  Claims of fidelity to the proposals which Kenneth and his colleagues agreed upon simply won't do.

If you were such a grand enthusiast for greater devolution all along, why the devil didn't you tell anyone, act on those convictions, and even more mystifyingly, actually oppose introducing any further changes to Scotland's constitutional compact just a year ago? There may be persuasive answers to these questions. Frank ones, perhaps. We haven't the foggiest how we'd like to see new financial powers distributed, to be honest, but we're giving it a proper look now. 

I await worked proposals from the Tories and from Labour with anticipation. Until then, I don't think pessimism about loose commitments to greater devolution is disreputable, unreasonable grinchwork or a perverse conclusion to reach having weighed up the evidence before us, estimating what's plausible and what's probable.  Francis Urquhart has the right of it.