The National:

Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Craig Dalzell, head of  policy and research at Common Weal. To receive the newsletter direct to your inbox every week click here.

HOW would you feel if I, personally, had total control over the strategic direction of several key areas of public services that affect you?

The odds of me being able to make a successful bid to win election as a Scottish “metro mayor” are not zero. I’ve been in politics long enough to become well known at least in political circles, I have a few friends and hopefully not many more enemies. It’s even possible that you’d like some of my policies.

And if I win, I get to decide whether or not houses are built in your community. I would have the final say over planning issues of “strategic importance”. I would have powers over justice and what happens to former convicts and how prisons are run. And it would be me who decides if mass transit should be privately owned, publicly owned or even if it should exist at all.

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And if I don’t win, it’d be someone else who gets to do all of that.

Don’t worry. This isn’t the launch of my campaign into elected politics but is a warning against bringing the “metro mayors” to Scotland.

This isn’t to say that we need more local powers. The UK as a whole and Scotland in particular are incredibly centralised countries – the worst in Europe with only Ireland (which largely patterned its local government model from the UK) coming anywhere close. While Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland managed to partially address their lack of local power via devolution and the creation of their parliaments, England remains the only nation of the UK that doesn’t have a parliament to call its own (brief dalliance in the Commons with “English Votes for English Laws” aside).

The feeling was that some areas – especially the urban sprawls – weren’t adequately governed by their multiple interlocking local authorities, so the concept of the “metro mayor” arose to govern a council of mayors as a kind of quasi-regional intermediate layer of government between the local and the national.

This has resulted in those metro mayors (especially the likes of Andy Burnham, above) becoming well-known personalities even outwith their regions and therein lies the danger of directly electing singular positions of office. By definition, one cannot use proportional representation to elect a single seat – the victory can only ever be all or nothing. This results in the elections very rapidly becoming more of a personality contest than any idea of collegiate governance based on consensus.

There remains a question of how the metro mayor proposal would even work in Scotland. A metro area with the same population as Greater Manchester’s 2.8 million would cover both Glasgow AND Edinburgh and would take in more than half of the entire population of Scotland. Limiting the metro areas to the urban chunks of our cities would merely cover the areas already covered by our local authorities and would, in effect, merely act to directly elect our (largely ceremonial) provosts and hand them powers largely already held by those councils.

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I also worry for the chunks of Scotland that – like vast swathes of England at the moment – would not be covered by their own metro mayor and therefore could lose out as political focus and prestige (as well as leverage) cause more funding to flow to those regions with mayors than those without.

More likely, there would be some kind of middle way which, applied to Scotland, could look something akin to the restoration of the pre-1996 districts and regions but would centralise the power of those councils into the office of one person. Powers might come down from Holyrood (or maybe even Westminster) into the metro mayor but would more likely move up from the existing local authorities. Again, this is a centralisation plan more than a decentralisation one.

(Image: PA)

So why is there even a push for metro mayors in Scotland? It’s largely a policy of the Labour Party but more than that I believe it’s largely a policy of UK Labour (now the UK Government) and is being imposed on Scottish Labour rather than being developed by them.

The hint is in the name. The historic and traditional name for the leader of a town council in Scotland has never been “mayor” (from Latin via French maior, “superior”) but “provost” (from the Latin praepositus, “one who is placed at the front”). One might not think there’s much in a name but I do see the linguistic significance of leading by example rather than by authority.

More importantly, if the designers of the policy can’t even get the name right, then I have even less hope of them designing a system of governance that can be appropriately imposed on Scotland.

The second aspect is one, of course, of power. The UK Labour Party won massive power based on a minority of votes in the General Election and would struggle to replicate that in our more proportional voting systems in Holyrood and local authorities – but in a winner takes everything contest for metro mayor? That equation changes dramatically.

Scotland needs much more power held much more locally and this applies to all of the levels of government that currently rule us but the solution is not to centralise that power into a single office but to spread that power out among many hands at all levels. Even if you’d like what I, personally, might do with those powers – would you be equally welcoming of my successor from the other side?