He was a pariah for Labour during the Corbyn years but now Sir Tony Blair is back in action – with his party smugly assuming it’s on the cusp of regaining power.
For some activists, candidates and voters, his intervention in the campaign will cause dismay as he is still a divisive figure, despite his knack for winning elections.
But he is close to Sir Keir Starmer, who has said he wants to follow in Sir Tony’s footsteps – and we can expect to see a lot more of him, should Labour win.
It’s a remarkable turnaround given many assumed he would retreat from public life after he was condemned by the 2016 Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War.
Whether you see him as a bad penny or an electoral genius, Sir Tony is out of exile and back in the headlines after claiming at the weekend that devolution has been a success.
Enthusiastic
That might not be too surprising, as his government was responsible for the creation of the Scottish parliament back in 1999 – though Sir Tony wasn’t always an enthusiastic supporter of the exercise.
He now asserts that it’s been a success insofar as it prevented independence, which is in abeyance – or possibly on life support.
The former Labour Defence Secretary George (now Lord) Robertson once infamously claimed that devolution would ‘kill nationalism stone dead’.
Sir Tony echoed his sentiment, to some extent, by saying that Scotland is ‘still part of the UK, which was part of the design – so devolution has worked, as far as I am concerned’.
Well, it may have worked for him, and for everyone else who hasn’t been around to suffer it directly, but for the rest of us, Sir Tony, it’s been a painful ordeal. Devolution paved the way for nearly 20 years of circular ‘debate’ about Scotland’s constitutional future, while the present was ignored or badly neglected.
Not even a pandemic prevented the SNP from plotting another referendum, as we know from the findings of the Covid inquiry, notwithstanding the mass deletion of WhatsApp messages – including those scrubbed by the present First Minister.
Nicola Sturgeon, now busy writing her memoir, admitted in 2021 that the SNP took its eye ‘off the ball’ on drug deaths, which now average more than three a day – the highest rate in Europe.
The NHS is in crisis, as always, but last week John Swinney said that Scotland would be in a ‘stronger position to take greater decisions about investment in the NHS if we had the full powers’ of an independent country.
Yet health spending – which is set to fall, despite an SNP tax hike on higher earners – is entirely a matter for the Scottish Government, and has been since 1999.
The same old shtick is trotted out, though presumably not even Mr Swinney believes it’s on the horizon.
Independence is stuck in a cul-de-sac – Sir Tony is right about that – but it’s a bit rich of him to claim devolution is responsible for keeping it at bay.
It enabled separatism to dominate and paralyse political discourse for the past 17 years, and led to the psychodrama of the 2014 referendum.
Everything is seen through the prism of independence, allowing the SNP to peddle the claim that ripping Scotland out of one of the world’s most successful political and economic partnerships is a panacea which lies just beyond our grasp – thanks to our colonial overlords in Whitehall.
The SNP sticks to this absurd line despite the fact there’s no viable legal mechanism of achieving another referendum, and no majority support for it.
Devolution merely created the means for the separatists to hijack parliament for their own narrow ends, turning the noble aims of its founding fathers into little more than a sick joke.
Sir Tony is claiming effectively that everything turned out all right in the end, but it was no thanks to him.
The fallout from those 17 years of decline and constitutional obsession is evident in the state of our collapsing public services, and it will take many years to fix the damage – assuming the SNP can be ousted in 2026, and that its successors can be trusted to get on with the repair job.
Outcry
Back in 1997, Sir Tony elicited an outcry after using an ill-advised analogy to explain a proposed policy during the general election campaign.
It came when he was challenged on whether tax-raising powers for a future Scottish parliament would conflict with his party’s pledge not to raise the basic rate of income tax.
Sir Tony stated: ‘The Scottish Labour Party is not planning to raise income tax and once the power is given [to Holyrood] it is like any parish council, it’s got the right to exercise it’.
At the time there was a great deal of performative fury about what was seen as a reductive comparison, and Sir Tony probably bitterly regretted his choice of words. But how many of us would be glad now if the parliament had become nothing more than a parish council, with limited power over our lives?
A lot of us would have been spared the unrelenting tax raids mounted by the SNP, which says its manifesto will be the only one that’s ‘Left-wing’ – portentous words.
Then again, it’s unlikely to spell out detailed plans for further punitive taxation at this stage, with the SNP staring down the barrel of heavy losses on July 4.
And without devolution we would have avoided abortive transgender reforms, the Named Person fiasco, and the furore over the bottle Deposit Return Scheme.
Lunacy
The time spent on nanny state lunacy could have been used straining every sinew to rescue and bolster the flagging economy.
Holyrood is certainly no ‘parish council’. It has been transformed into a costly behemoth, filled with duds and placemen whose only skill in some cases is the ruthless exploitation of the expenses system – as we saw with the Michael Matheson iPad saga.
Now Labour is determined to devolve even more powers to government in Edinburgh – as if it hadn’t caused enough carnage with the ones it already has.
Sir Keir is hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of Sir Tony and the architects of devolution – and we’ll find out more about his plans when the Scottish Labour manifesto is published today.
The existing institutions don’t work – so there’s no point giving them even more scope to interfere in our lives.
The only intervention most Scots would have welcomed from Sir Tony is an apology for the wasted years of SNP rule inflicted upon us by the devolution project he helped to mastermind.