Analysis: Breathing space for a party still looking to fill in the details

‘DEVOLUTION is a process, not an event,” Donald Dewar famously said. The late first minister wasn’t joking. For the past 20 years, it has often seemed that devolution has been about little else but process.

To the long list of conventions and commissions dating back over two decades, Labour now adds another, with new leader Johann Lamont revealing she intends to set up a new body to look into the balance of powers.

The party’s position on where the boundaries should lie is now clearly moving, with key figures like Douglas Alexander and Alistair Darling both signed up to the principle of a more accountable Scottish Parliament. The problem lies in the detail. Labour’s will is very much yet to be settled. It may be argued that Ms Lamont’s commission is long overdue. Certainly, with the SNP enjoying itself over Labour’s haziness, the commission makes sense, giving the party breathing space to work all this out.

But despite the current woolliness, there are some clues as to where Labour is heading. Yesterday, Ed Miliband echoed David Cameron’s Edinburgh speech from two weeks ago, talking up the ties of “solidarity” between different parts of the UK. Today, Ms Lamont will use her speech to carry on Miliband’s attack on the SNP’s support for devolving corporation tax, insisting that a “race to the bottom” on tax rates within the UK is not in the country’s interests. Both these statements show Labour is sceptical of devo-plus, under which business taxation control would head north.

A second clue comes today with Ms Lamont talking up how local government must also be in the equation. “Devolution can’t just mean powers going from London to Edinburgh,” she will say. The new leader has already said she would like to look again at the powers of councils (elected provosts, perhaps?) So maybe, under Labour’s plan, money and powers could go from either Holyrood or Westminster to local authorities.

Ms Lamont insists the party “cannot allow ourselves to be boxed into an Orwellian debate – more powers good, anything else bad”. She will not, she says, consider more powers as test of her “political virility”. Given that the public is overwhelmingly in favour of more powers, that sets her on an uphill task.