Andy Burnham should face up to the Celtic Exit

The UK’s next unelected Prime Minister Andy Burnham is all about pushing power out of Westminster and down to the people. Yet weeks before he actually becomes PM he told Scottish Labour MPs he would ‘just say No’ to another referendum on Scottish independence.

This left many Scottish voters scratching their heads, asking: How does denying Scots the right to self-determination fit with Burnham’s supposed respect for democratic values? 

All of the Celtic nations now have pro-independence/pro Irish unification First Ministers. Surely this is a moment to grasp the nettle and make real changes to the status quo? Instead of being in denial, Burnham should be preparing England for self-government.

Here are three reasons Burnham has got off to a shaky start with Scotland. 

1 - Comparing Holyrood to Westminster makes no sense

At Burnham’s big event in Manchester, the front row was cordoned off for English mayors. Before the event, mayors like Tracy Babin of West Yorkshire were taking selfies with the VIP group. But nobody was invited from the Scottish government. 

So the kind of devolution Andy Burnham is interested in is obviously not Scottish devolution, which was the UK’s half-hearted attempt to give Scotland a measure of Home Rule and stem demands for independence. That experiment is coming to a close now. 

Setting out his stall, Burnham said that people in Dundee feel just as distant from Holyrood as people in Manchester do from Westminster. 

Burnham seems to have selected the place name ‘Dundee’ randomly.  Dundee is known as the Yes City voting for independence in 2014 and is run by an SNP council, the SNP won the recent by-election in Broughty Ferry and John Swinney himself is the MSP for Perthshire North almost next door to Dundee.  

But the comparison doesn’t work. Holyrood is a devolved administration which is not in charge of many of the areas which affect people in Dundee or anywhere else in Scotland. Holyrood does not hold any of the great offices of state. Holyrood has no power, or even the right to be consulted, over issues like Brexit, trade deals, energy policy or immigration. It has very limited borrowing powers which hamper its ability to build infrastructure. 

All those powers are held at Westminster. The Scottish people might have hoped that a Prime Minister who was interested in devolution would be prepared to look at improving Scotland’s devolution settlement.

For example, the UK manages energy in an anglocentric way. Scotland is a net exporter of power yet it has energy poverty rates almost three times as high as England. That is partly because a fifth of Scots don’t have access to the gas network and so have to pay much more to heat their homes. But the UK government - or should we start calling it the English government - has said no to demands for a separate tariff in Scotland. That is deeply unfair given that Scotland produces much of the lowest cost renewable energy in the UK.

Devolved territories in Canada and Australia control energy regulation - electricity prices in South Australia are now tumbling. They also have their own immigration policies. Quebec has the right to be consulted over trade deals. It also has the right to call an independence referendum if it ever wants to do so. 

2 - Andy Burnham talks about England but says Britain

Burnham’s mental map of the UK is obvious from his big idea of “Number 10 in the North”. Anyone who calls Manchester the North is clearly talking about England. It is closer to London than it is to the Scottish border.

Andy Burnham has implied that he wants to bypass Holyrood and to create other devolved areas within Scotland. This is a classic divide and rule tactic. Any attempt to fund initiatives in Scotland that don’t go through Holyrood will be an attempt to undermine Scottish demands for independence. The EU with its funding always worked in partnership with the Scottish government. 

In a piece he wrote for the Scotsman, Burnham simply cut and pasted the same text he sent to the London Evening Standard and the Birmingham Mail. Because he just swapped out English city names for Scottish ones (like Easterhouse and Paisley), he made some embarrassing errors that reveal the depth of his ignorance of Scottish affairs.  

• He generously offered to let Scots take public control of water and transport - Scottish Water has always been public and ScotRail was nationalised back in 2022.

• He bemoaned Margaret Thatcher's "Right-to-Buy" housing scheme and promised to fix it, missing the fact that the SNP abolished Right-to-Buy in Scotland in 2016.

The evidence so far is that Burnham sees Scotland not as a nation, one of the most ancient in the world, and a member country of the UK, but as a region of England. 

3 - Burnham appears to be in denial about the reality that is facing the UK

Ten years after Brexit,  three of the four nations of the UK have leaders that support independence. That is no accident.

It is to do with the way the nations including Scotland have been treated by an overweening England. Brexit is just the most obvious example of how the English majority outweighed the voice of other nations within the UK, in that case Scotland and Northern Ireland.

With its first past the post electoral system, and the swollen, undemocratic House of Lords, the UK system is very anglocentric. Scotland has little democratic heft. It can easily be outvoted and unlike in other countries with a more federal system like Switzerland there is no protection for Scotland from being ruled over by a Prime Minister it did not elect, making policies that don’t work for Scotland. 

In an interview in the New Statesman, entitled England, ethno-nationalism and what I told Andy Burnham, author of the Break Up of Britain, Anthony Barnett, argued that Burnham must accept the fact that the UK is about to change in a big way.

“There are two acceptable democratic options in the long run. One is a federal Britain, where the Scots and the Welsh – Northern Ireland is different because its status is already agreed by international treaty – and the English concur on a shared constitution, in which the membership is freely made and can be freely undone, a proper federal relationship. And we all join the EU as Britain.

“The second is that Scotland and Wales become independent, and we all rejoin the European Union independently…What would be intolerable is for Britain to become a prison of nations policed by England.”

The UK won’t last long as “a prison of nations policed by England”

Andy Burnham’s refusal to grant a second referendum isn't just a betrayal of what he claims is his own key principle; it is a denial of reality. What answer has he got to our petition asking the UK - English - government to recognise Scotland’s democratic right to choose its own future?

Treating Scotland as a region of England rather than an ancient nation and a member of a voluntary Union is not going to make the issue go away. Burnham risks just repeating the mistakes of the past.

Instead of trying increasingly desperately to block Scotland from reclaiming its independence and its place in Europe, the Prime Minister needs to recognise reality. The "Celtic Exit" is underway because the three smaller UK nations refuse to be continually outvoted, ignored, and economically harmed by an anglocentric status quo.

It’s time for Andy Burnham and the UK/ English government to stop trying to keep a dying Union on life support and start to prepare England for its own self-government. The Celtic Exit is underway - it’s time to face up to it.