Tom Miers: This devolution obsession is wrecking Scotland

The usual response to this in Scotland is either to deny failure altogether or to claim that Scotland needs more self determination if it is to address these problems. Both reactions are wrong-headed and speak of a deep malaise at the heart of the Scottish political elite. Scotland has a political problem, not a constitutional one.

The evidence of failure is unambiguous. Economic growth before the recession averaged less than two per cent. The trend is not just lower than the UK average - Scotland has underperformed all those small European countries so admired by the Scottish body politic, as well as both the EU and OECD averages. Low rates of new business formation seem to be part of the problem, along with the dampening effect of high public spending.

The great public services are the main direct responsibility of the devolved administration. Scotland's politicians have doubled their budgets since devolution, and spending is now 12 per cent higher per head than the UK norm. Yet the available evidence shows that key services such as health and education - accounting together for 15 per cent of GDP - have barely improved in absolute terms, and are in relative decline compared to services in comparable countries.

The denialists quibble with these figures. So you would have thought that the Scottish Government would make every effort to compare the performance of its monopoly public services with those elsewhere. Far from it. With every passing year the data collected on health and schooling deviates in methodology more and more from counterparts in the rest of the UK. So it gets harder for us to tell how badly we're doing.

There are many on the right of Scottish politics who have joined the nationalist call for more powers to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. This, they claim, is the only route to improvement, at least on the economy. By making the parliament accountable for the money it raises, surely it will become more fiscally responsible, more interested in promoting growth?

But a cursory examination of the actual powers of the Scottish Parliament reveal that this is a red herring. The Scottish Government already controls more taxes than it would ever realistically use. It is therefore capable of setting the overall level of taxation in Scotland. It is therefore fiscally autonomous and, being elected, presumably accountable too.

Just the formal devolved tax powers - 3p of income tax, council tax and non domestic rates, account for 14 per cent of the Scottish Government's budget.

It is very hard to envisage any elected administration here using those to the full either way. And in practice there are yet more fiscal levers to be pulled. The Scottish Government can (and does at the margins) invent or increase all sorts of charges and levies. Alternatively, a hypothetical free market government here could rebate or reduce taxes and charges with the opposite effect.

In truth, the devolved administration already holds the powers it needs to make a difference on most of the big issues. On education, health and criminal justice, it is essentially sovereign. On the economy it possesses not just fiscal powers, but infrastructure finance, planning and development law, higher education and most aspects of transport policy.

If the various Scottish administrations elected since 1999 have achieved so little with the enormous transfer of power to them at that stage, there is no reason to believe that more powers will make any difference. The reason for the impasse is political, not constitutional. The history of democracy is full of examples of political elites that do not respond to evidence of decline, however obvious. So what is it with our own political class? What makes Scottish politics so deeply conservative, so hostile to the notion of reform, so defensive about the performance of Scottish institutions?

An amazing thing happened in Scotland three years ago. After 75 years of its existence, the SNP finally won power. What did it do, after all those decades of bitter political fighting with its opponents? Absolutely nothing. It transpired that this supposedly revolutionary force agreed after all with everything its predecessors had done in all the big areas of public policy except the constitution.

Two months after their election, SNP ministers could be heard defending the same failing schools and hospitals in the same way as their Labour forebears.

It is arguable that all the main factions in Scottish politics have a motive for inaction. The nationalist case is based on the notion that Scotland can only reach its potential with independence. So the SNP has a vested interest in achieving nothing.

Labour created the devolved settlement to inoculate Scotland from Westminster - generated reforms, and so the status quo justifies the devolution settlement. The defeated right does not want to rock the boat. And overarching all is a deep mistrust of any ideas that seem to come from England, backed up by powerful public sector unions. All this plays into the hands of those peddling further constitutional reform. Yet the endless debate on independence, "fiscal federalism", fiscal autonomy and the rest actually makes things worse. It is a huge diversion of political energy and well away from the real issues that matter.

When the Calman Commission was established it seemed as if yet another tiresome round of constitutional navel gazing was about to begin.

But in the event, the Calman recommendations were remarkably subtle. Instead of proposing major new powers, they emphasised the existing ones, for example by making the Scottish Government announce which income tax rate it wanted to set. The unionist parties in particular (but also level-headed nationalists) would do well to embrace Calman and use it to draw a line under the constitutional debate. What Scotland needs, for at least a generation, is less talk and more action.

• Tom Miers is the author of The Devolution Distraction, published by The Policy Exchange...