Having the Full Support of the Chairman

In football you can generally tell when an under pressure manager is about to get the sack. It comes just a wee while after its publicly announced that they have the full support of the chairman and the board. Tomorrow on the BBC’s politics show Gordon Brown is going to give his full public backing to Wendy Alexander’s leadership.

In the same interview he also has a thing or two to say about the Scottish Constitutional Commission…or review as he insists on calling it.

He’s reported as saying that “there is a very strong case for moving forward with this review [ahem], a strong case for looking after 10 years of devolution at what is the right steps forward…There is an issue about the financial responsibility of an Executive or an administration that has £30 billion to spend but doesn't have any responsibility for raising (that)."

Which to me sounds like that he’s support more fiscal powers for the Scottish Parliament. He was asked this directly and said "Well this is what any review should look at…Nobody should pre-judge it…There is a case for saying that in any other devolved administration in the world there is usually a financial responsibility that requires not only the spending of money by the administration but also its responsibility to take seriously how it raises money."

This is significant policy shift from Labour and is a remarkable intervention after in the last week David Cairns described the calls for more powers as being only of interesting to the ‘McChattering Classes’. He also said that the UK Governments “position is that we think the current fiscal arrangements benefit Scotland. There are stable, transparent increases in public spending in Scotland. There is no case for the massive restructuring of that.”

Also reported in the Herald last week was a senior Scottish Labour MP (he has attempted to remain anonymous) who said that “This is an agenda [the commission] that is run by a very, very small minority of people within the Labour Party who I don't think are representative of the Labour Party in Scotland."…Overwhelmingly there is hostility towards it[among Labour MPs] and hostility that Wendy proposed this without reference to MPs. Frankly, the view is that whatever the commission comes up with, it has to get a majority in the House of Commons and it won't get that."

On one hand Cairns and the mystery M.P are saying no to the review and definitely no to new fiscal powers…and Brown tomorrow saying the ‘review’ has his backing and that fiscal powers are on the table.

What does Brown’s intervention tells us. Not only that Labour are still all over the place on this issue but also that Alexander has no authority left is needs to try and borrow some from Brown. Only time will tell whether Brown’s clunking fist is enough to save Alexander.