Britain’s Devolution Illusion: Leased Power Is Not Self-Government

Let me say this plainly. I believe in pushing power as close to the people as possible. But the United Kingdom's twenty-five-year experiment with devolution should stand as a warning to anyone who assumes that decentralization automatically means liberty. It does not. For a quarter century, the British have been building regional self-government without a constitutional foundation. They have delegated authority without fixed limits, created regional parliaments without equal standing, and funded them without fiscal responsibility. The result is not a revival of local freedom. It is a slow constitutional breakdown dressed up as localism.

Most American commentary on British devolution starts and ends with Scottish independence. That misses the deeper lesson. The real story is the English Question and the fiscal illusion. Devolution has not settled the question of who governs the United Kingdom. It has moved the argument inside the system, and because that system has no constitutional anchor, the argument grows worse every year.

The difference between federalism and a lease

The United Kingdom remains a unitary state. Parliament at Westminster is sovereign. The Scottish Parliament, the Senedd in Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly are statutory creations. They exist because Parliament passed acts in 1998, and they can be overridden or abolished by Parliament. Their powers are not original powers. They are permissions.

Compare that to the American settlement. The Tenth Amendment is plain. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. American states are not branch offices of Washington. They hold original constitutional authority, and their powers are not on loan from the federal government.

British devolution, by contrast, is leasehold government. The powers given to Edinburgh or Cardiff are specified by statute and can be reclaimed by a majority at Westminster. The Sewel convention, the rule that Westminster will not normally legislate on devolved matters without consent, is just that. It is a convention. The United Kingdom Supreme Court made that clear in 2017, during the Miller litigation over Brexit, when it held that the convention carries no legal force. Then in 2020, Westminster passed the Internal Market Act over the explicit objection of the Scottish Parliament. That is not federalism. That is a landlord reminding the tenant who actually holds the title.

Our Founders understood the distinction. In Federalist No. 45, James Madison explained that the powers of the federal government are few and defined, while those reserved to the states are numerous and indefinite. That is not poetic language. It is the structural guarantee of a constitutional republic. Without that fixed division, every level of government becomes a matter of preference for the current majority, and local power exists only until it becomes inconvenient in London.

The English problem no one wants to solve

Here is the part most foreign observers overlook. Devolution created legislatures for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but not for England, which contains roughly eighty-four percent of the United Kingdom's population. That creates a constitutional absurdity.

A Scottish MP at Westminster can vote on laws affecting only England, on health, education, and housing, while an English MP cannot vote on those same policy areas when they are decided in Edinburgh. The Scottish Parliament has power over Scottish health and education. The English have no equivalent body. This is the West Lothian Question, and it was never answered. The attempt to patch it with the so-called English votes for English laws procedure was introduced in 2015 and then quietly abolished in 2021. The asymmetry remains.

From an American constitutional perspective, this is the most instructive failure. Our system rests on the idea that all parts of the union share in national decisions while each state runs its own domestic government. In the United Kingdom, representatives from one part of the union legislate for the internal governance of another part that has no reciprocal voice. That is not decentralization. It is unequal citizenship.

The predictable result is grievance, not gratitude. English voters increasingly ask why they are treated differently from Scots and Welsh. Scottish nationalists use every new grievance, real or manufactured, as fuel for separation. Scotland voted fifty-five to forty-five to remain in the United Kingdom in 2014, but the question has not gone away. It has intensified. Devolution was sold as a way to strengthen the union. In practice, it has given separatism an institutional base and made the union's defenders sound like they are negotiating with tenants rather than speaking for a common country.

Spending other people's money

There is a second neglected failure, and it may be the more corrosive one. Devolved government in the United Kingdom is spending without taxing.

The Scottish Parliament controls health, education, justice, and a range of other services, but the great bulk of its funding still arrives as a block grant from Westminster, calculated through something called the Barnett formula. Holyrood gets much of the credit for spending decisions while Westminster gets much of the blame for the taxes that fund them. That is a moral hazard, and it is built into the system on purpose.

Milton Friedman spent a lifetime explaining that government becomes more accountable when the people who spend the money are the same people who have to raise it. A government that can spend other people's money without facing the tax consequences will always spend too much and blame its problems on someone else. British devolution institutionalizes exactly that arrangement. It is representation without taxation, the reverse of the American Revolution's complaint and just as corrosive to responsible government.

Henry Hazlitt taught us to look for the seen and the unseen. The seen benefit of devolution is a new parliament building, a local decision-maker, and the appearance of self-rule. The unseen cost is a steady erosion of fiscal responsibility and a permanent incentive for regional governments to lobby London for more money rather than govern well. That is not local self-government. It is centralized administration with regional grievance managers.

Every year, the Scottish and Welsh governments return to Westminster asking for more. When budgets are tight, they blame London. When services improve, they take the credit. The taxpayer in England, Scotland, and Wales has no clear answer to the simplest question in politics: who is responsible for this money? That is not accountability. It is a shell game with a second parliament attached.

What the British experiment actually teaches

The instinct behind devolution is right. Friedrich Hayek explained that a distant central planner cannot know local conditions as well as the people who live inside them. That knowledge problem applies to government as much as to markets. But the solution to that knowledge problem is not to have a sovereign parliament hand down a list of powers as a political favor. The solution is to fix the division of powers in a written constitution that neither the center nor the parts can unilaterally rewrite.

The British approach does the opposite. It keeps Parliament sovereign and then pretends that delegated powers are permanent. That is a constitutional contradiction. It produces a system that is neither truly unitary nor truly federal, a system in which every party has an incentive to reopen the settlement and none has the security of a settled rule.

There is a reason the American Founders insisted on a written constitution, enumerated powers, and equal standing for the states. They knew that liberty depends on law, not on the sufferance of the powerful. The United Kingdom's devolution experiment is a quarter-century case study in what happens when a country tries to get the benefits of federalism without accepting its constitutional discipline.

The lesson for Americans is direct. If you want local control, you do not ask a distant legislature to be generous. You demand a constitutional order that recognizes the people's right to govern themselves as a matter of law, not as a matter of favor. Anything less is not decentralization. It is centralized power wearing a local costume.

Power that can be lent can be taken back. Freedom that depends on a grant is not freedom. It is a lease, and leasehold government is always only one election away from eviction.