Ruth's Pushmi-Pullyu routine...

Just a brief thought today. Yesterday, Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson gave a speech entitled "Scotland First". critically reviewed this morning by Alan Cochrane for the Telegraph and Alex Massie in the Scotsman.  Both more or less agree that the address served at least two functions. Firstly, it represented an attempt to distinguish Davidson from her colleagues in England and Wales and to assert a distinctly Scottish Conservative identity and agenda. No longer stooges for southron masters, no more mere peripheral scoffers on the Scottish political scene, tomorrow's Scottish Conservatives, she insists, must be right-trusty guardians of the Scottish interest, no longer seen as "London’s party in Scotland".

As Alex rightly recognises, this sort of the rhetoric has the nasty habit of re-enforcing rather than subverting the very stereotypes which Ruth hopes to assail, but for now, let's take her argument on its own terms.  The second string on her fiddle was devosomething. Ruth took the opportunity of the speech to slap a boot into the dunes, and in the stinging fug, attempted a pretty outrageous constitutional volte face. Well, probably attempted. As Sieur Cochrane notes, detail there was little. You may remember that on launching her campaign against Darth Murdo in September 2011, Davidson insisted that

“The Scotland Bill currently going through Westminster is the line in the sand. The time for arguing about the powers the people want is over. It’s time now to use the powers that we have.”

Just a few short months later, all's change it would seem. Or rather, all's-apparently-enthusiastically-but-vaguely-guesturing-towards-change. "Viewing devolution only through the prism of the threat of separation has been too one-dimensional," she says. Having hoodwinked her party's anti-devolutionist hardliners into supporting her candidacy agin the perfidious Murdo, she now declares herself devolution's friend, shoots admiring glances towards North Carolina in the United States, envisioning, albeit in a vague manner, yet another bout of "arguing about the powers the people want". Quoth she:

"... once the debate has been won, the threat of separation has receded and Scotland’s place in the Union is secure, we can take a serious and considered look at a new spread of responsibilities within the UK."

All well and good, you might well think. But I find myself wondering, is it really possible to serve these two ends simultaneously, at once to distance yourself from your colleagues down south, while dreaming up proposals for further constitutional change that will be at once practicable and credible? Consider a few simple facts. While the precise ambit of proposals for more devolution need not be made in Westminster, ultimately, it is the politicians in Westminster who must endorse and adopt them. In this ledger, the Scottish Tories are notoriously of paltry scope. Just the less-than-robust David Mundell with a vote and voice in the House of Commons for the last two parliaments. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, a No vote in 2014, the Tories won't go into the Westminister general election of 2016 suffused with confidence that a host of colleagues will be joining Mundell on the blue benches.

As a consequence, if the Tories are going to be the party of further constitutional reform in the short to medium term, those reforms will have to be carried pre-eminently by the party's MPs representing English constituencies.  Of course, the party might well attempt to cobble together a consensual coalition across the Liberal Democratic and Labour parties, but ultimately, a Conservative-led government must rely on its own representatives, few of whom seem won-over to the virtues of devolution, or more than tepid proponents of innovating substantially to alter the balance of power in this country. Ruth Davidson's practical answer for realising more devolution can't be "vote Labour or Liberal Democrat instead and they might take care of it".

In this situation, you might well think that a Scottish Conservative leader would need to emphasise their close ties with her colleagues in Westminster rather than the distance separating them; her ability to bend arms, to convince the skeptical on her own side, to be Scotland's representative in the Tory councils in London, rather than a semi-detached figure, commanding little to no influence with them. Pushmi-Pullyu can't clop north and south simultaneously.