Walk into any municipal office in the north of England or the central belt of Scotland, and you will hear a specific kind of sigh. It is the sound of a bureaucrat looking at a spreadsheet that does not balance, waiting for a decision from a room hundreds of miles away.
For decades, the promise of modern governance was simple: decisions about your life should be made by people who can actually see your street out of their window. We called it devolution. It felt like a steady, unstoppable march toward local control.
Then came Brexit.
When the United Kingdom severed its ties with the European Union, a massive wave of regulatory powers rushed back across the English Channel. The assumption made by many outside the capital was that these powers would fall naturally into the hands of the nations and regions closest to the ground. Instead, a quiet, administrative tug-of-war broke out. Westminster held the rope tightly. The devolved nations pulled back.
Recently, this tension spilled out of the quiet rooms of civil servants and onto the public stage. A Scottish minister stood before Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, and laid bare a grievance that has been simmering for years. The message was clear: the powers taken back from Brussels must be returned to Holyrood and the English regions, rather than being hoarded in Whitehall.
This is not a dry dispute over constitutional footnotes. It is a fight over who decides what goes into your shopping basket, how your local transport operates, and how your community rebuilds itself.
The Friction of the Internal Market
Imagine a small artisanal cheese maker in Perthshire. Let us call her Fiona. For years, Fiona operated under rules that were predictable, even if they were dictated by the distant machinery of the EU. When the UK left, Scotland hoped to set its own high standards for agriculture and food safety—standards that reflected its own agricultural heritage and environmental priorities.
But then came the UK Internal Market Act.
This piece of legislation was introduced to ensure that goods could flow freely between Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England without trade barriers. On paper, it sounds reasonable. Economically, it prevents chaos. In practice, however, it created a legal trapdoor.
Under the Act, if a product meets the regulatory standards to be sold in England, it must be allowed for sale in Scotland, even if Scottish lawmakers have voted to ban or heavily regulate that very product. If England decides to permit a certain pesticide or a lower standard of food labeling, Scotland cannot effectively block those goods from crossing the border without violating the internal market rules.
Suddenly, the power to legislate locally becomes an illusion. The Scottish Parliament might pass a law with a sweeping majority, only to find it hollowed out by a decision made down south.
This is the core of the argument presented to Andy Burnham. The frustration felt in Edinburgh resonates deeply with the frustration felt in Manchester. Both leaderships look at London and see a government that talks about "leveling up" and decentralization, while simultaneously tightening its grip on the purse strings and the rulebooks.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
The relationship between a Scottish government minister and an English metro mayor is an interesting political dynamic. They represent entirely different constitutional frameworks. Scotland has a parliament with primary legislative powers; Manchester has a combined authority focused on regional strategy and devolved budgets.
Yet, they are fighting the same gravity.
Consider what happens when local leaders try to fix something as basic as bus routes. In Greater Manchester, Burnham fought a long, bruising battle to bring the region’s buses back under public control—a move to ensure that profits from busy routes subsidize the quiet, vital routes that elderly residents rely on to buy groceries. It was a victory achieved by scratching and clawing for every inch of authority.
In Scotland, ministers face a similar hurdle when trying to implement large-scale environmental policies, such as deposit return schemes for bottles and cans. When the Scottish government tried to launch its own initiative, it ran directly into the brick wall of Westminster approval. The UK government insisted that the scheme must align perfectly with an English equivalent that had not even been fully realized yet. The project stalled. Millions of pounds in investment evaporated.
This is the human cost of administrative gridlock. It manifests as a mothballed recycling plant, a cancelled bus route, or a local business stuck in regulatory limbo, unsure which law will apply to them next month.
The argument presented to Burnham was an invitation to form a common front. It was an acknowledgment that the centralization of power is not just a Scottish grievance; it is a regional one. When Whitehall holds onto powers returned from the EU under the guise of maintaining national consistency, it deprives both the Scottish Parliament and the English regions of the tools they need to innovate.
The Weight of the Gavel
Constitutional law can feel incredibly distant until it alters the physical landscape of your town. The tension relies on a fundamental disagreement about what the United Kingdom is supposed to be.
One view sees the UK as a single, highly integrated economic unit where efficiency and uniformity are paramount to competing globally. In this view, allowing Scotland, Wales, or Greater Manchester to create distinct regulatory environments creates friction, confuses businesses, and slows down growth. Central control is seen as a stabilizing force.
The other view sees the UK as a voluntary association of nations and distinct regions, each with its own unique needs, values, and democratic mandates. To those holding this view, using post-Brexit legislation to override local decisions feels like a quiet rollback of the devolution settlements that the public voted for decades ago.
It is a profound instability masked by polite political correspondence.
When a Scottish minister asks an English mayor for solidarity, they are asking to redraw the map of power. They are arguing that true economic strength does not come from a single directive issued from a London office block, but from allowing different parts of the country to test different solutions to the same systemic problems.
The Unseen Horizon
We are left watching a machinery that is jammed. The post-Brexit landscape was promised to be an era of taking back control, yet the debate has merely shifted from a struggle between London and Brussels to a struggle between London and its own constituent parts.
The decisions made in the coming months regarding internal market rules and devolved authorities will dictate the shape of public services, environmental protections, and economic recovery for the next generation. If the power remains hoarded at the center, the frustration in the nations and regions will only deepen. If the grip is loosened, it will require a level of trust and cooperation that the political establishment has rarely shown itself capable of sustaining.
Somewhere, a local councillor is still looking at that unbalanced spreadsheet. A business owner is still waiting to find out if their product will be legal across the regional border next season. The papers have been shuffled, the speeches have been delivered, and the quiet tug-of-war continues, one regulatory clause at a time.
