There are two views of Scotland's First Minister, Henry McLeish. One is that he is a somewhat clumsy Mr Deeds come to power and spending a fortune on worthy causes. The other is that he is a cunning manipulator who is using devolution and the new consensus politics to thwart his own cabinet, out-manoeuvre Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, drive a wedge into the United Kingdom and build an image as Scotland's champion.
Either way, the beneficiaries are Scotland's old people, who will receive free personal care, irrespective of their financial circumstances, sometime after April 2002. After weeks of fudging and moments of pure farce, McLeish ended all uncertainty with the kind of unequivocal declaration that comes rarely from politicians in power. "We are embracing the principles of the Sutherland Commission in full. There will be no backsliding. I cannot be more explicit."
He also announced an expert development group, which will bring forward an implementation report in August, while the Minister for Finance and Local Government, Angus MacKay, is to review Scotland's Budget and come up with the resources. The group will take advice from Sir Stewart Sutherland, who chaired the royal commission that said it was "equitable and proper" for the state to meet the "catastrophic" individual costs of long-term care.
Blair's government denounced this as too heavy a financial burden; it will now have to explain to the "grey vote" in the rest of the UK why fellow OAPs in Scotland are being treated with greater consideration. Age Concern England voiced the obvious grievance: "It is patently ridiculous that we are going to have a situation where an elderly person living a few miles across the border will be up to £350 a week worse off in terms of paying for their care."
Although the Scottish Executive group will be looking at cross-border issues, it dismisses the possibility of a northerly migration by elderly English, the "Zimmer exodus" first suggested in this column. One campaigner said: "This is Scotland, not Florida." No argument there.
However, diverging policies between Edinburgh and Westminster are cause for increasing concern. With Scotland already going its own way on student tuition fees and teachers' salaries, the formula response from Downing Street was: "That's devolution for you."
Now those words are issued through gritted teeth. After the McLeish declaration of independence on care of the elderly, there was a flurry of phone calls from Whitehall to the Scottish media, making it clear that the First Minister was on his own and did not have the "all-clear" from anyone in the UK government.
Devolution in Scotland, then, is beginning to work. It is taking the same form as that described by Paul Starling, our Cardiff columnist, last week: as in Wales, devolution in Scotland threatens to resurrect the S-word; for, like Wales, Scotland has always been less new Labour and more s-----ist than England. McLeish, from a former mining constituency and with a background in left-wing local government in Fife (a bastion of cradle-to-grave provision), is on a personal crusade: universal care of the elderly, he says, is a non-negotiable commitment.
McLeish either does not appreciate, or does not care, that this involves a big personal risk. Just when a pre-election period of calm was wanted, he is creating another shock wave and thwarting the majority of his cabinet.
He is also going against his predecessor, Donald Dewar, who rejected Sutherland by arguing that it was unthinkable that citizens in one part of the UK could have better basic benefits than others. Disgruntled English MPs, voicing the justified jealousy of their constituents, will demand a reduction in the money Westminster remits for Scottish government.
McLeish's Scottish cabinet, most of whom voted against him in the Scottish Labour leadership election, is split. The majority, who oppose free care for the well-off, thought they had outgunned him at their last meeting and resent his declaration.
MacKay's scrutiny of spending programmes is bound to show that McLeish made his commitment without thinking where he would get the necessary £110m. Gordon Brown's comprehensive spending review made more money available, but most of it has already been ear-marked. This will lead to more feuding in the Scottish cabinet over which projects will have to suffer.
McLeish makes the point that it is the "will of the Scottish Parliament" that matters. This means that he is having to rely on his Lib Dem partners in the coalition government, and even to mobilise opposition parties against his party colleagues.
Such is the strange new world of devolution, proportional representation and consensus politics. Mr Deeds seems to know where he is going - but the rest of us are still feeling our way.
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