Keir Starmer is due to chair the inaugural meeting of the UK government’s newly created ‘Council of the Nations and Regions’ in Scotland this Friday. The summit is due to focus on investment and growth ahead of a much bigger international investment summit to be held in London the following Monday.
For Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, this has potential importance politically and constitutionally all round. Are we going to see much better, serious cooperation between the devolved governments and the UK/England’s prime minister? How will the mayors of England’s combined authorities fit in? Or is the political presence, a clear downgrading of the three devolved nations and parliaments?
Media attention may be more on whether Sue Gray – recently demoted from her chief of staff job – turned up in her new, undefined, bizarre-sounding and potentially condescending role of ‘envoy to the nations and regions’. Apparently, she will not attend.
But there are bigger questions than that – for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
All one team now?
In his pre-council briefing, Starmer said he wants all present to “work as one team to maximise opportunities ahead of the Investment Summit”. In one way, this looks fairly obvious. Why wouldn’t different parts of the UK state coordinate international investment efforts after all?
But the first meeting of a supposedly new Council of the Nations and Regions being set up as a pre-meeting to a business summit is not exactly symbolic of a high-level new politics of respect within the UK.
Some sharp political questions need to be asked about this new Council. Existing and previous devolved structures for dialogue between the UK prime minister and the three nations’ devolved leaders have often been seen as low-key, low-impact – a political sop in effect. Such structures did not stop the several previous Tory governments from ignoring Scotland’s views on Brexit or regularly ignoring the Sewell convention which should mean Westminster will not legislate on devolved areas.
And, of course, the devolved nations and England are not always one team. Diversity and difference are the whole point of devolution. So, we will see how centre-devolved relations work out over time under the new UK government – and this council will give some first indications.
What is the council’s purpose?
It’s worth asking about whether there will be any discussion on the purpose and goals of this council. Did the devolved leaders and mayors get any say on its formation or the agenda or did Number 10 just announce it? Will there be any focus on how, constitutionally, the different parts of the UK work together now and the changes that are needed? For sure, there won’t be any agenda item to pick up the need for the UK to be a voluntary union. But presumably Scotland’s First Minister will still make this point. After all, a Council of Nations and Regions that doesn’t allow discussion of constitutional issues would be rather an oxymoron.
Starmer’s plan may be for this to be a positive, cooperative and effectively technocratic forum to discuss ‘safe’ issues such as business and investment. But that is unlikely to mesh well with current political and constitutional differences and challenges. Nor is there a political consensus on growth and whether and how to achieve it as the climate and biodiversity crisis intensifies.
There’s also the question of whether the ‘nations and regions’ idea is a way to downgrade Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, putting them on a par with England’s mayors. This is, so far, unclear in that the pre-existing Intergovernmental Relations Council (IGR), set up in 2022, still exists. In the IGR Council, the UK Prime Minister meets with the leaders of the three nations (without the regions). How the two councils will relate is quite unclear and a possible recipe for confusion.
Putting Scotland as a country in with English regions has already ruffled feathers in Scotland, with the leader of Glasgow’s city council asking why they, as a major UK metro area, were not invited. Certainly, the political ramifications of this grouping are many and Scotland’s leaders will want to be highly alert to those.
So, on Friday, will it all be sweetness and light as devolved leaders and mayors all show they are, of course, ready and keen to work with the UK’s new and strangely embattled prime minister? Quite possibly so.
But there are many tough questions and challenges around Keir Starmer’s growth strategy. Hopefully Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney will raise some of these.
Scotland’s interests: seven questions
Starmer’s big international investment summit next Monday is sponsored, amongst others, by three big banks – Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds. Number 10 hopes up to 300 business leaders will attend. But the Council of Nations and Regions discussion needs to be much broader than simply a pre-meeting on how to attract international investment.
Scotland’s First Minister could raise at least seven big points at the Council.
1. The Constitutional Questions
The Council should have a discussion of how relations and cooperation across the three nations currently work and could be improved. That should include the need for the union to be voluntary, further devolution, better consultation, and respect for devolution . This would seem appropriate at the beginning of this new body’s work.
2. Unions and NGOs
There’s no mention of inviting trade unions or NGOs to the big international investment summit. Yet, if green growth is the order of the day, plus with Starmer’s insistence he focuses on working people, then surely unions and NGOs should be there. John Swinney could usefully make this point. ‘One team’ cannot only mean government and business.
3. Climate, biodiversity and green growth
Core questions must be raised on how to ensure growth is green and sustainable, tackling the twin climate and biodiversity crises together – and rejecting the Labour government’s preferred, more slippery, ‘clean growth’ phrasing. The Scottish government has also done a lot of work on wellbeing as a goal not just growth – this should be raised.
The Scottish Government, having rashly put too much emphasis on carbon capture technology, is not in a good position to critique last week’s announcement of £22bn over 25 years for carbon capture, though it should.
But there are other key questions, including about the role of Great British Energy – now to be headquartered in Aberdeen. The Scottish Government should have its own suggestions on how this new ‘green’ company should operate, within its unhelpfully small budget (or with a larger budget as Labour originally planned), and what would bring the greatest benefits to Scotland.
Challenges of a just transition exist across the UK (not least at a moment when big fossil fuel companies are reneging on plans to cut oil output) are also key to the discussion.
4. Benefits from International Investment
More broadly, there are serious questions to be asked across the UK on how to ensure any international investment creates benefits for local communities and economies, not just repatriating profits abroad or relying on trickle-down economics. Any growth strategy must have a clear focus on tackling poverty and inequality and promoting wellbeing.
There are big questions, too, being rightly asked around domestic and foreign ownership of Scotland’s land including for ‘green’ carbon credits.
5. Cuts and self-imposed fiscal rules
The wider UK macro-economic context is crucial for Scotland. The council is meeting before Rachel Reeves’ budget. But the threat from the new UK government of gloomy prospects, the £22bn Tory black hole, and the cut to the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance are not inspiring the sort of confidence and ‘one team’ outlook the UK may need both to grow and to attract international investors.
The unnecessary and damaging fiscal rules the UK government has imposed on itself must be brought up. As must the key point that ‘current’ spending on schools and health is also an investment in our future and should not be something subject to a cap around current tax receipts, while the government refuses to increase income taxes on the wealthy.
6. Brexit and the EU: impact on the UK’s growth
Brexit will be the biggest elephant in the room. Scotland’s First Minister will surely raise this. Last week, just like its Conservative predecessors, the Labour government delayed yet again the implementation of a set of safety and security border controls for EU imports. Brexit is not working.
The Council of Nations and Regions should be briefed and then asked to input on the EU-UK talks to improve the Brexit deal (albeit at the margins), announced after Starmer met Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week. This is clearly something where devolved leaders, and doubtless mayors, will have a view. But is this on the agenda – or not allowed as foreign policy?
An EU-UK youth mobility deal is strongly in Scotland’s interests, but how much may the UK government water it down or will it not do a deal at all?
The Scottish government also needs to be clear on what sort of climate cooperation it would like to see between the EU and UK, including on emission trading schemes and aligning climate border taxes if possible.
Northern Ireland, of course, has different interests and a different context for EU-UK relations. It remains in the EU’s single market for goods and is effectively in the EU customs union. Its interests are not the same as those of Scotland or Wales on all these issues. So ‘one team’ is not always going to work well.
More broadly, and inevitably, when talking about international investment, there will be competition between different parts of the UK. Managing the different contexts and competition raises another set of issues.
7. Migration as a plus
Next week, the EU’s leaders look like pushing to clamp down even harder on migration and asylum flows into the bloc. This is an area where Starmer’s government wants to look for EU-UK cooperation with a similar restrictive perspective. But the UK, Scotland and the EU all need migration, and more workers across public and private sectors. More and smoother legal migration routes are needed. So, this is another issue to bring up at Starmer’s growth council on Friday.
Scotland’s agenda
The new UK government, and a new, additional constitutional structure – the Council of Nations and Regions – gives the Scottish government an opportunity to present its policy agenda and what it wants to see at UK level that will benefit Scotland (and other parts of the UK).
From genuine green growth and a just transition to Brexit and re-joining the EU, from migration to fiscal rules and control of international investment, there is a substantial set of points that Scotland’s First Minister can and should bring to this meeting.
The politics of the meeting will lie in how much overlap or conflict there is between the views of the three nations, England’s regional mayors, and the UK Prime Minister. The wider politics also lies in who controls the agenda and where the discussion is allowed to go.
Of course, the council meeting may prove a damp squib – joint assertions of common interests in ‘clean’ growth, investment, jobs, innovation and skills. But it could and should be much more. It will, at least, provide a pointer for how Starmer sees the UK’s constitutional setup, how he politically wants to engage with that, and how the three nations (and England’s devolved mayors) see it. If it’s a genuine discussion it may not look too much like ‘one team’ UK.
This article was first published on Substack: Europe & Scotland Newsletter.
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