Saturday 5 November 2011

Cameron is Davidson's Prime Minister not her boss

Ruth Davidson, new leader of the Scottish Conservatives
The BBC in talking about the new leader of Scottish Conservatives in a different way to some of the tabloids, for more on that see Scottish Liberal. What they have picked up on is that Ruth Davidson under the new structure of the Conservative Party is a colleague of David Cameron with a final say on what goes on in Scotland.

You see the thing is that the Scottish Conservatives like Scottish Labour are both going to be lead by a leader of the party overall in Scotland and not have a leader of their MSPs as previously. Or to put it in a Lib Dem sort of way some sort of federalism. I'm not sure if the same rules are being brought into the Conservatives and Labour parties in Wales but it has happened in Scotland. Surely this move can't be solely down to the fact that any party that wasn't the SNP did poorly in the Scottish Parliament elections in May.

The Liberal Democrats have always operated on a federal format with leaders and policy making for Scotland and Wales devolved to those national conferences and party members. Of course unlike the Tories and Labour that policy making is further devolved to the conference reps themselves who get to vote on the policies. Conservatives and Labour are merely handing over the decision making and policy differences to the leaderships, heaven forbid if they started to once again trust the members of their party to actually make any real decisions that actually affect the real people they see around them all the time without being told just what they need from the Westminster 'experts'.

However, it is a step that Scottish politics will it seems now be decided by the Scottish parties (in whatever way they allow this to happen). It may put a bit of a kibosh to the SNP talking about the Westminster parties when all of them can clearly point to policies that differ from Westminster to talk into account Scottish needs and situations.

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