Can Westminster and Holyrood get on post-Smith?

There is plenty of scope for disagreement when the Smith powers are passed to Edinburgh over the next few years.

There are certain things only Liberal Democrats get excited about.

There’s the obvious ones such as sandals, organic food and liberalising drugs policy. But these might be termed gateway policies pushed by apparently cuddly characters like Mr Tumnuslook-a-like and Cambridge MP, Julian Huppert.

They may snare the impressionable and lead them down a path that leads to hard-core Lib Demmery. Years later such people find themselves loudly extolling the virtues of an inquiry into intergovernmental relations.

Just like other addicts panhandling for cash to pay for their next hit, most normal folk tend to give them a wide berth. However the House of Lords is not entirely full of normal people.

And so the Upper Chamber’s Constitution Committee decided to take up the issue of intergovernmental relations after the Lib Dem team at the Smith Commission negotiations didn’t just insist it was part of the final agreement but loudly boasted about their “achievement” in doing so.

The nub of the issue is whether Westminster and Holyrood get on and whether something can be done to make sure they don’t fall out when the Smith powers are passed to Edinburgh over the next few years.

The answer is that, generally, both governments co-operate well but it’s only the bust-ups that get reported.

And those disagreements are rarely to do with shadowy civil servants and more often because the SNP administration in Edinburgh wants to show it’s standing up to Westminster or the Coalition thinks it would be fun to ensnare the nationalists into admitting the UK isn’t all bad.

Labour’s Ian Davidson, chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee and called before the Lords to share his thoughts on the issue, summed it up: “It’s not about process, it’s about politics”.

Davidson was not best pleased to be before their Lordships, so put on a performance as a surly teenager.

Asked a question by Lord Goldsmith who knows a thing or two about making the wheels of government run smoothly, it was he who eventually saw his way to sign off the Iraq invasion as legal for Tony Blair Davidson replied: “What’s the point?”

He peppered his evidence with further adolescent phrases including, “I’ve got better things to do with my time” and when asked by Lord Lexden, a Tory peer who looks like an aged Mr Banks from Mary Poppins worn down by his spoonful of sugar-fuelled children, if his committee staff liaise with their counterparts in Holyrood Davidson replied, “Don’t know, don’t care”

Sitting next to him the SNP’s Bruce Crawford, who does a similar job to Davidson in Edinburgh, was able to name the clerks of both his own and Davidson’s committee.

And Scottish Labour wonder why they are taking a hammering from the SNP in the polls!

If Ian Davidson was behaving like a recalcitrant teenager it may have been because he was suffering the Select Committee version of a hangover. The previous day he’d been in charge of his own committee as they quizzed the boss of delivery firm City Link about the company’s Christmas collapse.

The private equity boss who lost £20 million in City Link, but still expects to get another £20m back on the deal, poor dear, was taken to task by MPs for leaving the people that worked for his firm out of pocket and out of spirits as news of the insolvency broke on Christmas Day.

Here was the committee system working well.

MPs putting the questions people want answered and investigating, not some nebulous claptrap like intergovernmental relations, but the livelihoods of hardworking people apparently ill-treated by hard-hearted business.

Davidson ran that particular circus well proving he’s an excellent ringmaster.

Unfortunately in front of the Lords his stroppy attitude made him appear more of a clown.