Every few months, the political ritual repeats with clockwork predictability. First ministers from Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Belfast gather for another high-profile summit, flanked by battalions of civil servants, spin doctors, and camera crews. Press releases trumpet cooperation, shared ambitions, and constructive dialogue. Then everyone flies home, nothing changes, and the structural friction between central and regional administrations grinds on uninterrupted.
We are fed a steady diet of institutional theatre. The lazy consensus insists that if leaders just sit in the same room long enough, structural contradictions magically dissolve. That is nonsense. These summits do not solve policy deadlocks. They provide political cover for stagnation, allowing each administration to perform concern while carefully avoiding the hard choices required to actually govern.
Strip away the diplomatic language and look at the incentives. Regional leaders arrive needing a scalp or a subsidy to wave at their local electorates. Westminster arrives wanting to project unity without surrendering fiscal control. The result is a perpetual motion machine of managed grievances.
The Myth of Intergovernmental Harmony
Intergovernmental relations are routinely described as broken, as if a better committee structure or a modernized memorandum of understanding could bridge fundamentally divergent political goals. This misdiagnosis treats a deep constitutional divergence as a simple communication failure.
Imagine a corporate board where half the directors want to expand into new markets while the other half want to dissolve the company. You do not fix that board with a better retreat agenda or a nicer conference room in Cardiff. You face the reality of conflicting mandates.
When the first ministers meet, they are not engaged in collaborative problem-solving. They are playing a zero-sum game of perception. Every press conference is an audition for the evening news bulletin in Cardiff, Glasgow, and Belfast. Success is measured not by joint legislative output, but by who managed to look most aggrieved by the Treasury's funding formulas.
Follow the Money and the Blame
The core malfunction of devolved governance is the separation of spending power from revenue responsibility. When regional assemblies can spend money without the political burden of raising every penny through local taxation, fiscal discipline vanishes.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. Regional politicians maximize their political leverage by demanding greater block grants while simultaneously blaming central authorities for any economic underperformance. It is a brilliant political strategy and a disastrous governance strategy.
Look at infrastructure delivery. Months are lost debating administrative jurisdiction over regional transport links while actual asphalt fails to lay. The summit in Cardiff produced the usual communiques about green transition and economic resilience, but omitted the basic economic truth: you cannot tax your way to prosperity when your primary growth strategy is extracting concessions from a centralized exchequer.
Disrupting the Status Quo
If we want actual progress rather than expensive photo opportunities, we must stop pretending these summits accomplish anything substantive. Real reform requires structural clarity, not emotional reassurance.
First, tie regional spending directly to local tax-raising autonomy. Until local politicians have to look voters in the eye and explain why income or property taxes must rise to fund their preferred programs, fiscal fantasy will reign.
Second, abolish the permanent summit circuit. Stop treating meetings as achievements in themselves. If there is no specific, binding legislative trade on the table, stay home and do the unglamorous work of local administration.
The political class loves these gatherings because movement is mistaken for momentum. It is time to stop funding their therapy sessions.
