THERE was a triad of Scottish leaders on the platform for the section on Scotland at the Labour Party conference last week. They probably all thought that they were the most significant person in the Scottish Labour Party.

There was the leader, Anas Sarwar, who is the public face of Labour in Scotland. There was Ian Murray, Secretary of State for Scotland and a member of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet, and then there was Jackie Baillie, deputy leader of the Scottish party, election co-ordinator and its representative on Labour’s national executive committee.
 
While it was only Murray and Sarwar who made speeches, the significance of Baillie shouldn’t be underestimated. She is the direct link between the Labour Party machine in London and Scotland.

It was she who brought down Richard Leonard and ensured Sarwar as his replacement. She played a leading role in candidate selection and as deputy leader, is a key player in both the Scottish parliamentary party and the Scottish executive committee.
 
The speeches from Murray and Sarwar were short and almost totally devoid of policy. Murray went first, trying to make the case for his role as secretary of state.

He said: “My department, the Scotland Office, has a crucial role in changing things now. The Scotland Office has four priorities to help deliver our government’s missions. Economic growth. Green energy. Brand Scotland. And, of course, tackling poverty.”
 
He went on to say: “I want to see the Scotland Office working directly with the Scottish government and local governments in Scotland to drive growth in every community.”
 
Sarwar followed on with a list of criticisms of the SNP government and his hopes for the future, but, he stated, it was the Scottish Office that was to be Scotland’s window to the world.
 
By the time these speeches were being made, Labour was already losing support, including in Scotland. There is no certainty that Labour will win the Scottish election in 2026 and that Sarwar will become the first Labour First Minister in nearly 20 years. But in the meantime, Ian Murray will, for the time being, be the Secretary of State for Scotland.
 
It is now 25 years since the Scotland Act (1998). The Act had to include which powers the Secretary of State for Scotland would retain and the limitations on their powers.
 
The Tory government’s interventions in Scotland, in particular the poll tax under Thatcher, famously helped stoke demands for devolution. The role of the secretary of state added to these demands, particularly when Michael Forsyth completely transformed the structure of local government.

Regional councils had played an important role in redistributing resources between more wealthy areas and poorer areas. Strathclyde covered a population of over two million, from Oban down to Ayrshire and across to Lanarkshire. It was the biggest local authority in Europe.
 
Strathclyde, always Labour-controlled, became synonymous with Labour’s power in the West of Scotland. It was responsible for education, water, transport, police, fire services and planning. Strathclyde, in particular, was keen on levelling up standards of services between deprived and better-off areas.
 
An example of how the region could influence politics came in 1994 when it organised a referendum on the Tory proposals for water privatisation. There was a 70 per cent turnout and 97 per cent opposition. The Tories backed off, and Scottish Water remained within public ownership.
 
The regions and local councils were replaced with gerrymandered district councils. Glasgow lost its wealthier suburbs but kept its “peripheral schemes” that had the greatest deprivation. That was the power of a secretary of state for Scotland before devolution.
 
More recently, Alister Jack decided to reassert the role’s powers of intervention. When problems between devolved and retained powers are identified, these are usually dealt with before legislation becomes law.

Jack chose to wait until the law on gender recognition was passed before raising his concerns that it would “have an adverse effect on the operation of the law as it applies to reserved matters.” It appears like a deliberate attempt to undermine the Scottish government on a controversial issue.
 
So what sort of secretary of state will Murray be? There is the strange issue of whether he will have funds to disburse in his role as secretary of state.

The Daily Record and its sister paper, the Sunday Mail, ran stories in June and in August, which stated that Labour “is set to change the law within months to allow Scottish Secretary Ian Murray bypass Holyrood and directly fund anti-poverty schemes.”
 
The articles claimed that new legislation to expand the powers of the Scotland Office by turning it into a “spending department” is likely to be voted on by MPs around the time of the Budget on October 30.
 
If true, it would allow Chancellor Rachel Reeves to allocate a £150 million war chest to Murray, which can be used to finance projects with local authorities. Murray has, in the last week, claimed that the journalist had made up the figures and that they had not come from him. It took him a while to correct these stories, and one has to ask how the journalist got it so wrong.
 
What this exposes is the lack of clarity about the role of the secretary of state for Scotland. It is possible that Murray thought that he would be able to make direct interventions into Scottish public spending. He may have seen himself as some sort of 17th-century colonial governor acting as the long arm of the Westminster government in Scotland.
 
What is clear is that there is no attempt being made by him or the new government to return powers that were removed from the Scottish government by the Tories, including the Internal Markets Act, Subsidy Control Act, Financial Services and Markets Act, Economic Activities of Public Bodies Act and Illegal Migration Act.
 
It is clear that the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd and the regions of England need a direct voice in Westminster. This year’s Labour election manifesto did not repeat the commitment to a Senate of the Nations and Regions that had been in Labour manifestos since 2010. It looks like we are back to square one on constitutional change.
 
Pauline Bryan is convener of the Red Paper collective and a Labour Peer.