Federalism for the 21st Century: Inspiration from Burnham’s Britain
"Devolution" could help mitigate federal-state disputes in the United States
Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne
In the United States, we are used to the constant, though inconsistent, power struggle between the federal and state governments. Every time the party in the White House changes, the governor’s mansions in twenty states reverse their positions on every possible procedural legal matter, and twenty Attorneys General suddenly decide the federal government has too much power. The exact issues at hand may be rather innocuous, such as a fight over whether it is legal to kidnap innocent people and send them to an El Salvador prison, or they may be deeply fundamental, like the terribly chilling overreach of the federal government attempting to expand Medicaid coverage.
There is, of course, nothing new under the sun. Be it the Framers drafting the Tenth Amendment, Nicholas Katzenbach confronting George Wallace at the University of Alabama, or Anthony Kennedy writing for the Court in Arizona v. United States, Americans have always grappled with the often frustrating consequences of dividing power between federal and state governments. Our understanding of their respective responsibilities is, at first glance, perfectly reasonable: defense and foreign policy, along with large-scale budgetary matters like Social Security and the interstate highway system, are naturally the remit of the federal government; whereas, somewhat mundane matters like the assessment of property taxes and zoning regulation can be handled at a state level. This division both prevents the federal government from having to concern itself with trivial matters and gives citizens more local control over issues that directly affect them.
Things are different across the pond. The British state is exceedingly centralized, with decisions that might seem fundamentally local to an American instead taking place deep inside the London bureaucracy (This is, however, a clear improvement over one hundred years ago, when a London bureaucracy controlled a quarter of the world.) The latest Prime Minister and former Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has made “devolution”—the transfer of powers from central to local governments—key to his political agenda. Burnham boasts of the takeover of the “Bee Network,” a once-privatized system of buses, as an example of the benefits of devolution, after Manchester councils retook administration and almost-immediately delivered better results for riders. He cites this as a blueprint for what local governments can do if Westminster simply trusts them to make their own decisions.
The United Kingdom has no Tenth Amendment, however. The “devolved” powers granted to Greater Manchester, even the idea that this metropolitan region could have a “mayor,” are not the default modes of British local government. Before reforms made by the Blair and Brown ministries, local administration was formed from a patchwork of councils that had tremendous responsibility with little power and funding to meet it. The 1990s and 2000s saw the central government hand over power to the nations (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have their own parliaments), regions, and metropolitan governments. Burnham seeks to expand this scheme, granting local combined authorities across England even more authority—and giving them public funds to support it.
One particularly high-profile Burnhamite policy has been the creation of “Number 10 North,” a unit of the Prime Minister’s and Cabinet’s offices in Manchester. This scheme is meant to reduce London's centrality, and it will probably also result in economic benefits for Manchester with increased government spending. If successful, this plan could be expanded across the country. Furthermore, the political response to Burnham’s focus on devolution has been broadly positive. Though many of the Londoners who lost their positions in the Starmer–Burnham transition are somewhat miffed, the latest approval polls show something unheard of in recent British politics: a Prime Minister with a net positive rating.
What might Burnham’s success mean for the kilometer-ignorant, “color”-spelling, liberty-loving people of this continent? It is true that Burnham has been dealt a more centralized initial position than we currently occupy as a constitutional republic of willing States. Yet, there are aspects of Burnhamite devolution that even the American system does not capture. Most superficially perhaps, our political structures remain affixed to Washington . While I would be wary of a potential “1600 Pennsylvania Mar-a-Lago,” the political benefits of spreading the grandeur of the federal government, and the artificial stimulus that it could provide to another region of the country, might be justification enough.
Though the legal disputes between the states and federal government may be thornier and more impervious to Burnhamite trickery, they are not irrelevant here. While the perpetual disagreement about who gets to enforce immigration policy might not be solved by a second federal district in Albuquerque, it is easily imaginable how tensions between governors and the presidency could be reduced if Congress explicitly delegated certain civil immigration enforcement responsibilities to state governments. The entire concept of the sanctuary city/state only exists because the federal government has decided to shelve any solution to this ambiguity. Simply clarifying such distinctions between where the federal government must have ultimate control, and where states can exercise particular autonomy, would go a long way toward defusing our perpetual fights on several issues with a federal vs. state angle: immigration, welfare and entitlements, healthcare spending, infrastructure development, and climate policy.
Britain is not a perfect template for American policy, certainly not as much as it was for the Framers. However, in this case, we might be inspired by devolution to address our own federalist loose ends that have been bugging us for 250 years.
