Indeed the decision of the Scottish Parliament to reject tuition fees was right or wrong of far greater salience for
Indeed, the decision of the Scottish Parliament to reject tuition fees, was, right or wrong, of far greater salience for the Scottish public than whether Tyson is or isn’t admitted. And the Blair government was forced to accept it because education was slap bang at the heart of the Parliament’s remit. But when it comes to such issues as the Tyson decision, the power resides in Westminster – where, indeed, Scottish MPs and others opposed to Tyson’s admission will properly pursue their case this week. And in that sense it is hardly different from the powers the Scottish Parliament can itself use to overrule the desires of – say – the Highland Regional Council if it pursues the even more populist cause of ending tolls on the Skye Bridge.There are, moreover, good reasons for this. Maybe it is also patronising to point out that in the United States, where state legislatures – not to mention tax raising powers – have a much longer recent continuous history than devolution here, nobody questions the idea that immigration should be a federal issue. But this is for obvious reasons, which apply every bit as much as the UK.
Give the Scottish executive and its justice minister, Jim Wallace, control over immigration, and you are accepting, as Wallace to his credit has pointed out, border posts at Berwick.Now if that’s what Salmond and the SNP’s fellow travellers in other parties are about, they had better say so. Salmond is shrewd enough to know that a very large majority of Scots would recoil from such a prospect. Indeed the purpose of tomorrow’s debate is ostensibly to do no more than to force the Edinburgh executive to initiate a judicial review of Mr Straw’ s decision. But the fact is that most lawyers think Mr Straw would win in a judicial review hearing – as he did before – not least because Tyson’s visit went off so smoothly last time.Moreover, the fact that the polls show a majority of Scots currently opposed to Tyson’s entry is hardly conclusive. They almost certainly closely match the state of public opinion in England when Mr Straw took the first decision. And if immigration decisions are to be taken on the basis of opinion poll, then the UK is not, to put it mildly, going to be a good country to live in.But the SNP has a much larger purpose.
Which, in defiance of the majority vote for a clearly defined devolution settlement, is to try to use every flashpoint issue to inflame anti-London opinion in Scotland. In fact, the Scottish electorate is fully entitled to vote down Labour Westminster MPs at the next general election if it so dislikes Mr Straw’s decision. The reality is that the Scottish Parliament will be earning its money in its first term rather better if it can show that it is producing real, tangible results in the hospitals and schools over which it has a crystal clear remit.In the meantime, if Mr Straw now yields on Tyson, he will be letting down the Scotland Office, whose ministers have robustly defended him. But more importantly, he will be taking one more little step down that famous slippery slope to separation.d.macintyre independent.co.uk
More from Donald Macintyre. As befits a drug which has also become a iconic indicator of the times, Prozac appears to be well and truly out of its “build ‘em up” stage, and advancing into “knock ‘em down” territory.
