Former blairite labour mp advises on buying royal mail

When the monitoring committee got round to the UK in June 1996 its report was politely damning. It dealt not only with Scotland, but also with Wales, and it undid the Thatcherite changes to the administration of London. Later additions dealt with other constitutional deficiencies like the method of appointing Scottish judges. 

The most humiliating of all was that it bracketed the UK in a group with Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Moldova and Ukraine as one of six states having “major problems in meeting standards of democracy.”

Devolution thereby ceased to be a political party issue and became a foreign policy commitment that had to be implemented, no matter what government was in office in London. 

John Major and the Conservatives were no doubt very thankful that this hot potato bounced onto the lap of Tony Blair and the Labour leadership, whose efforts to kill the Strasbourg action, even while out of office, had resulted in a monumental diplomatic disaster that never achieved publicity.

The Council of Europe issued a statement making it pointedly clear that failure to abide by the international norms of pluralist democracy “would be incompatible with membership of the Council.”

The Tories had stubbornly dragged their feet over the UK’s accession to the Charter of Local Self-Government, but then, in March 1997, a few weeks before the election that brought Blair’s Labour government to power, the Council of Europe pointedly spelled out the sanctions that would be applied, in a series of escalating steps, to any European state that did not “fully and swiftly comply with the basic democratic principles that are at the heart of the European Ideal.”

In plain language, get Scotland, Wales, etc. sorted out or be expelled from the Council of Europe in the most humiliatingly public manner – a step that would have had devastating international consequences, especially just a few weeks before the UK presidency of the European Union.

Total capitulation followed. With the entire international diplomatic corps breathing down its neck, the new UK government signed the Charter on 3 June 1997 (the last one in Europe to do so) and brought in bills for devolution to Scotland and Wales – to written approval by Strasbourg, but described by Blair as “a damnable nuisance.”

The fulfilment of this foreign policy obligation was therefore a diplomatic and not a political decision.