Jon Bright (London, OK): Anyone who has worked in a busy office will know how quickly the first draft can turn into the final copy, how an off the cuff suggestion can turn quickly into a policy, how a quick fix can become a permanent feature. No-one must be more aware of this than Lord Barnett, whose political mission it seems to be to destroy his own formula - which was developed as a temporary solution for distributing money round the UK in the 1970s - and has since become a feature of our much maligned constitutional landscape.
icWales reports that Barnett tried - and failed - to set up a House of Lords committee to review the formula last week. They also note, in the same article, that Nick Clegg is calling today for a cross party constitutional convention. He said:
I have a lot of sympathy with members of the public who feel that we live in a country that has an unbalanced and incomplete constitutional settlement.
We have taken some steps forward towards far greater devolution in Scotland and Wales; we have taken, in my view, no meaningful steps forward in releasing the iron grip of Whitehall on the way in which politics is conducted in Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol, and every rural and suburban community in England
So there is a lopsided quality to the way England is hamstrung by Whitehall; that needs to change
Clegg says that his call, unsurprisingly, has received a lukewarm response from the other two parties. But he is correct. Just like Barnett, Labour's 1997 devolution settlement was incomplete - intended as the first part of a process that was supposed to end in similar devolutions of power to English regions. As has been well documented on OK, the plan failed in the North East - I will leave you to decide the exact reason why. But the lesson is clear - opportunities for change are not endless, we do not have the luxury of drafting and redrafting a constitutional settlement for the UK until we finally hit upon the perfect formula. Instead, there are moments of opportunity - and the decisions made in those moments can continue to have consequences for years to come. Barnett's formula has been with us since the 1970s. Will we still be talking about Brown's formula in 2050? And if so, will we be doing it in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Britain, the UK, the EU - or somewhere else entirely?
