Fear of development shows need for revised devolution

Scotland lacks a lot of the infrastructure we see in comparable countries, particularly in transport where we appear to have a claustrophobic antipathy to tunnelling. This makes little sense in a mountainous country with many islands. It therefore says something important about our political culture when modern infrastructure is proposed and people see it as a threat.

That is what the Scotsman is reporting happened at a meeting in the Western Isles at which the possibility of a tunnel connecting the islands to the mainland was discussed. This kind of modern connectivity is assumed in even near neighbours like the Faroe islands.

They have four major subsea tunnels connecting islands, each a two-lane road and the total stretching to 33km – with the world's first subsea roundabout as well. It is popular, widely used and key to the functioning of the community.

So why would this raise concern for Scotland's island communities? It isn't a 'not in my back yard' issue since this would primarily involve subsea engineering. At the meeting, the worry raised by objectors was that it would undermine the island, lead to centralisation and erode the distinctive culture of the islands.

It doesn't matter whether you see this as a reasonable reaction to a Scotland which is dreadfully centralised and poor at protecting its regional cultures or whether you see this as luddite and retrograde, the point is that people think it and it is acting as a barrier to national development.

Scotland is in a rut and it needs to rediscover some sort of drive and direction to move us forward. This becomes significantly more difficult if the individuals and communities that make up Scotland are inherently suspicious of development either because of past experience or because of the political culture.

Given the neglect islanders rightly feel after a never-ending ferry crisis over which they have no say or control, it is hard not to feel sympathy for those involved. It is very easy to imagine Edinburgh policy-makers concluding that 'now there is a tunnel there is no need to sustain full health/education services on the island'.

And given the rate of attrition on local infrastructure taking place everywhere just now, any community would have legitimate concerns about centralisation and decline in local infrastructure and services. Yet if that is then acting as a barrier to modernisation of infrastructure we are embedding structural decline into the governance of the nation.

Sadly this problem is anything but restricted to the islands – there is a significant rebellion over renewable energy in communities which are facing enormous (and permanent) disruption for badly-designed energy projects which bring next to no benefit to the communities affected.

At the start of the devolution era one of the major arguments in favour of devolution was that it would produce better governance because it is closer to and more trusted by Scotland's communities than Westminster. This remains true, but the decline in trust in government in Scotland (particularly related to centralisation, but also basic competence) has become a major problem.

It is also a circular problem; the solution to the inhibiting effect of centralisation would be to decentralise power and budgets so development can be handled by communities themselves, but that route is blocked because of continuous, reflexive centralisation.

Worse, the problem is circular but the power is not. Only those at the top of the circle have the power to break it, and they are the problem not the solution.

This must be a learning point for Scotland. We have learned what sociologist Robert Michels concluded more than 100 years ago in his 'Iron Law of Oligarchy' – if a bureaucracy can pull more and more power towards itself and reduce transparency and accountability, a bureaucracy will pull more and more power towards itself and reduce transparency and accountability.

What we must learn is the 'can' part. We need to revise the constitutional set-up in Scotland so that decentralisation is not something the centre can give or take, because it will take. The only way we can persuade communities and regions that power will not be used against them is to mandate that the power is wielded by them in a manner that central government cannot remove at a whim.

For now we are stuck in a situation where communities have ever reason to mistrust central government yet where national development cannot progress if there is such high mistrust between the centre and the periphery. This situation isn't fixing itself, so when there is an opportunity to fix it, it must be structurally baked in to Scottish democracy – or we will repeat the error.