David Cameron’s response to the overwhelming success of the Scottish National Party in taking 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats has been to propose what he describes as ‘the strongest devolved government anywhere in the world.’   It is as inept a reaction as the hastily concocted ‘vow’ made by the party leaders to the Scottish electorate in the days before last September’s referendum.

       Mr Cameron is making the same mistake as George Robertson, then Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, did in 1995 in setting out the plan for devolution which the Labour Government subsequently implemented Lord Robertson proclaimed that it would ‘kill nationalism stone dead’. It did precisely the opposite.

If you want to maintain the United Kingdom, the way to do it is to provide a coherent vision of the Union and its advantages, not to drain the concept of Union of any content. The essence of a sustainable Union is a sense of common identity and the solidarity that follows from shared values.  A Unionist must set the claim that everyone in the UK should enjoy similar rights and responsibilities – the notion of fairness encapsulated in the phrase ‘postcode lottery’ – against the cries of nationalism.

        The nature of Union is the subject the founding fathers of America debated so constructively two centuries ago. The United Kingdom needs to have a similar discussion. Last week’s Bingham Centre Report, to which I contributed, is an attempt to begin that process.

American states are fiscally autonomous, but federal authority imposes a variety of common policies across the US.  No Child Left Behind, and Obamacare, are the results of federal legislation, even if much implementation is left to the state.  There is no explicit mechanism of redistribution of resources among states, but a good deal of implicit redistribution, to households through national policies such as social security, and to other levels of government as a result of federal funding of national policies.

  Most other countries treat redistribution between their devolved governments are an essential component of union.  In Germany, this is an explicit constitutional principle.  A loose confederation such as Switzerland makes transfers from richer to poorer cantons, but these cantons are largely free to spend as they think fit. This degree of solidarity is precisely that which citizens of the European Union is not yet ready to envisage, and is why the EU is today very far from being a unitary state.

A more extensive form of solidarity compensates for differences in needs as well as differences in resources.   Rural areas, and deprived urban communities, need more expenditure to achieve the same level of provision.  Australia’s grants commission attempts to parcel out Commonwealth funds on an objective basis to states and territories.

Thus there are several principled ways of expressing solidarity and distributing central resources within a devolved system.  The present and proposed system for the UK, however, reflects no principle at all:  it takes as base the allocations of expenditure in 1977-8 (sic) and applies a variety of increasingly large and arbitrary adjustments, a certain source of future disagreements.

There are, indeed, large problems in moving to any more rational basis.  One is that almost any objective formula leaves Scotland worse off.  Another is that since England accounts for more than 80% of the United Kingdom, any assessment of resources or needs in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland will be dominated by the policy choices made for England – leaving no room for a concept of English votes for English laws.

But the all too likely outcome of policy choices announced without sufficient thought for consequences is a steady erosion of the solidarity that is needed to make stable union possible. Perhaps the Scottish election results showed that we have already reached that point of no return.