Devolution & the Return of Parliament

The core factual claims on this card are Established: they rest on primary and institutional sources — the Scottish Parliament's own history pages, the Official Report (Hansard) of 12 May 1999, the House of Commons Library, National Records of Scotland, and legislation.gov.uk. A small number of points are Shared/Traditional or Contested in interpretation rather than fact — chiefly the exact date John Smith first used "the settled will" (1994 conference speech vs earlier 1990 usage) and the wider historical argument over whether Thatcherism "caused" devolution. These are flagged in the Caveats section.

The demand for a Scottish Parliament had a Victorian prehistory. The historian Graeme Morton, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), describes how thin the British state was in nineteenth-century Scotland. Before 1832 only about 4,500 Scots, all men, had the vote; the state did not register births, marriages and deaths in Scotland until 1855; and as late as 1911 there were only 944 civil servants and government officials in the country. Most government that Scots met was local: burgh police commissioners (Glasgow from 1800, Edinburgh from 1805), reformed town councils (1833, two years before English borough reform), and, after 1845, parochial boards under an Edinburgh-based Board of Supervision.

The first organised campaign was the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, founded in 1853 with the Tory Earl of Eglinton as its figurehead. Morton calls it "the clearest statement of the Unionist-nationalist position": its members did not want to leave the Union but complained that Scottish business was ignored at Westminster and that "imperial centralization" was eroding Scotland's local independence. The movement broke up during the Crimean War, and several members went on to raise money for the National Wallace Monument.

Duncan McLaren, Lord Provost of Edinburgh and MP from 1865 to 1881, known as the "Member for Scotland", made the case with statistics. He asked "why should Scotland have one-twelfth of the members when she pays for one-eighth of the taxes?", calculating that Scotland should have 78 MPs on taxation or 68 on population rather than 60. From 1853 he pressed for a Secretary for Scotland. In January 1884 a "National Meeting" in Edinburgh's Free Assembly Hall, backed by Conservative and Liberal MPs and town councils, demanded a separate department of state. The Scottish Office followed in 1885, though its first Secretary, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, had argued the post was unnecessary. Morton, following James Mitchell, stresses that this administrative devolution "paved the administrative path to devolution". When Gladstone gave priority to Irish home rule, disaffected Liberals formed the Scottish Home Rule Association in 1886. Like the 1850s campaigners, they sought to resist separation, not encourage it.

The political scientist Iain McLean, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), traces the challenge to the Union back to the 1880s, when Scottish politics followed the Irish home rule crisis. Gladstone's conversion to Irish home rule in 1885–86 created the Unionist Party, which dominated Scotland until the 1950s; the "Union" in its name was the one with Ireland. Unionist governments tried to "kill home rule with kindness". After the Crofters' Party won Highland seats in 1885, the Crofters Commission was set up in 1886 to protect crofting tenure. The office of Secretary for Scotland was created in 1885 and became a Secretaryship of State in 1926.

Money mattered from the start. In 1888 the Chancellor, G. J. Goschen, divided certain tax revenues between England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the ratio 80:11:9. As Scotland's share of UK population fell below 11/80 of England and Wales's, Scottish officials treated the Goschen proportion as a floor, never a ceiling. In 1926 Stanley Baldwin allowed Scottish spending to rise above it, on the grounds that cuts would stir nationalism. By the 1970s public spending per head in Scotland was about 20 per cent above England's. The Treasury then replaced Goschen with the Barnett Formula, which the historian Ewen Cameron notes was designed to be temporary, giving Scotland 10/85ths of changes in comparable English spending.

Home rule was long a cause of the left. Ramsay MacDonald entered politics in 1886 as London secretary of the Scottish Home Rule Association, and Labour MPs drafted home rule bills in 1924 and 1928. McLean argues that the UK-wide welfare state, financed by national taxation from the Old Age Pensions of 1908 and National Insurance of 1911, took much of the force out of these arguments. The SNP, formed in 1934, was a sideshow while strong Scottish Secretaries such as Walter Elliot and Tom Johnston defended Scotland's share. It won Motherwell at a wartime by-election in 1945, but lost it weeks later.

The breakthrough came after Labour's return to power in 1964. Winifred Ewing won Hamilton in 1967, one of Labour's safest seats, and the SNP took the Western Isles in 1970. With North Sea oil and the slogan "It's Scotland's Oil", it won seven seats in February 1974 and eleven in October, with over 30 per cent of the vote. McLean argues that Harold Wilson imposed devolution on a sceptical Scottish Labour Party for reasons of statecraft: with about 35 per cent of the vote, evenly spread, the SNP could win more than half of Scotland's seats under first-past-the-post. The Royal Commission on the Constitution had already recommended devolution in 1973.

The 1970s scheme was undone at Westminster. Labour backbenchers from the north-east of England, led from Newcastle, objected that Scots already received more public spending per head than the poorer "Geordies", only because they could threaten to vote SNP. McLean calls this revolt the key event in the failure of devolution in the 1970s, because it showed that any future scheme had to be fair to England too. A further revolt imposed the rule that 40 per cent of the whole electorate must vote Yes, a threshold that, McLean notes, no post-war UK government had been elected on.

Card #24 closed on the wreckage of 1979: a referendum that won a wafer-thin popular majority but failed the "40% rule," and the SNP-backed confidence motion that toppled James Callaghan's Labour government by a single vote (311–310) on 28 March 1979, opening the door to Margaret Thatcher's May election victory. For devolutionists this looked like total defeat. In fact it was the beginning of a slow reversal.

Through the 1980s and 1990s a striking asymmetry emerged: the Conservatives won UK general elections but steadily lost Scotland. Their Scottish vote share fell from 31.4% (22 seats) in 1979 to 28.4% (21 seats) in 1983, then collapsed to 24.0% (10 seats) at the 1987 election — a result the Glasgow Herald called "the humiliation of the Tories north of the border." A modest recovery to 25.6% (11 seats) under John Major in 1992 proved a false dawn before the total wipeout of 1997. (Figures per Rallings and Thrasher, British Electoral Facts, and the per-election records for Scotland; Scotland had 71 seats in 1979 and 72 from 1983 to 1997.)

The gap between how Scotland voted and who governed it gave rise to the "democratic deficit" argument: that a government with a shrinking Scottish mandate was imposing policies Scots had rejected. As written evidence to a UK parliamentary committee later put it, the 1987 election "placed firmly on the political agenda the question of Scotland's 'democratic deficit'" — whether a government "with only ten Conservative seats out of seventy-two Scottish constituencies" possessed "a mandate to govern Scotland." Activists around the magazine Radical Scotland reframed the same idea as the "Doomsday Scenario" to pressure Labour into action. Crucially, the argument was not primarily separatist: its main political beneficiary in the 1980s was Labour, then a firmly unionist party.

Nothing dramatised the democratic deficit more sharply than the Community Charge — universally known as the poll tax. It replaced domestic rates with a flat per-adult charge, and it was introduced in Scotland from 1 April 1989, a full year before England and Wales (April 1990). The timing — following the Abolition of Domestic Rates etc. (Scotland) Act 1987 — was widely perceived as making Scotland a "testing ground" or guinea pig for an unpopular policy, though the then Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind later argued it was brought in early to relieve Scots from a punishing rates revaluation rather than out of hostility. Rifkind nonetheless conceded on BBC Radio Scotland in December 2003 that the poll tax had been "a great political mistake."

The reaction was a large, organised campaign of non-payment. Councils described non-payment levels as "frighteningly high," and by December 1989 Strathclyde's convener was warning the region might have to write off large sums. In January 1990 Strathclyde Regional Council alone sought around a quarter of a million summary warrants against non-payers. The backlash damaged the Conservatives in Scotland further and contributed to the pressures that led to Thatcher's fall in November 1990; the tax was abolished (replaced by the Council Tax) from 1993.

The political grievance sat atop a deep economic one, already surveyed in Card #24. The emblematic closures — the Linwood car plant (1981), the Bathgate truck and tractor plant (1986) and Ravenscraig steelworks (24 June 1992) — became shorthand for what some called Scotland's "industrial clearances." Ravenscraig, once the largest hot-strip steel mill in western Europe, marked the end of integrated steelmaking in Scotland, not of all steel activity. Around 770 workers lost their jobs at closure, while the wider regional losses and their attribution are harder to quantify. Labour argued these losses showed Scotland needed protection from Westminster, folding economic decline into the constitutional case.

Out of the 1987 "Doomsday" moment came the decisive institutional innovation. The Campaign for a Scottish Assembly commissioned a report, A Claim of Right for Scotland (1988), which recommended a broad-based convention. On 30 March 1989, at the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on the Mound in Edinburgh, the Scottish Constitutional Convention held its first meeting and signatories put their names to the Claim of Right, whose central sentence read: "We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs."

The signing was a remarkable display of civic breadth: 58 of Scotland's 72 MPs, 7 of 8 MEPs, 59 of 65 local authorities, and numerous churches, trade unions and civic bodies. It has often been said that every Scottish Labour MP except the anti-devolution Tam Dalyell signed, though not all were present on the day. The document's title deliberately echoed the tradition of the 1689 Claim of Right — the assertion of popular/national sovereignty touched on in Card #15's material on the Glorious Revolution — making it a conscious link back through Scottish constitutional history.

The Convention's composition also defined the politics of devolution. The Conservative government refused to participate and was hostile to it (even challenging local authorities' right to fund it, unsuccessfully). The SNP took part in early planning but withdrew after the meeting of 27 January 1989, because the Convention would not put independence on the table; the party leadership under Gordon Wilson and Jim Sillars judged it a body that could not "reflect nor deliver Scottish demands." That left Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and civic Scotland to hammer out a scheme through consensus, chaired executively by Canon Kenyon Wright. Its blueprint, Scotland's Parliament, Scotland's Right, was published on St Andrew's Day, 30 November 1995, and became the basis of the 1997 settlement — including, notably, a commitment to proportional representation.

Devolution's cause found a devoted champion in John Smith, the Scottish lawyer who had steered the 1970s devolution legislation through the Commons and who became Labour leader in 1992. He famously described a Scottish Parliament as "the settled will of the Scottish people" — a phrase most often dated to his 1994 Scottish Labour conference speech and which the House of Commons Library treats as such (though some accounts trace an earlier use around 1990). Smith called devolution "unfinished business."

His sudden death from a heart attack on 12 May 1994, aged 55, removed devolution's most authoritative advocate at a critical moment. The task of carrying it forward fell substantially to Donald Dewar, the long-serving Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, who became Secretary of State for Scotland after Labour's 1997 victory and shepherded the Scotland Act through Parliament. Dewar's central role earned him the epithet "father of the nation" (or "father of devolution"); he would become Scotland's first First Minister.

The general election of 1 May 1997 produced a Labour landslide under Tony Blair — a 179-seat UK majority. In Scotland the result was historic in a different way: the Conservatives, on 17.5% of the Scottish vote, lost every one of their seats, falling from 11 (of 72) in 1992 to zero. For the first time in modern history Scotland had no Conservative MP at Westminster. With the party that had resisted devolution eliminated from Scottish representation, the path to reform was clear, and Labour moved swiftly to honour its manifesto commitment to a pre-legislative referendum.

The referendum was held on 11 September 1997 under the Referendums (Scotland and Wales) Act 1997. Three features distinguished it sharply from 1979. First, it was pre-legislative — held before the Bill was enacted, to establish the settled will of the people rather than to ratify a completed statute. Second, it asked two questions: whether there should be a Scottish Parliament, and whether it should have tax-varying powers (up to 3p in the pound on the basic rate). Third — and decisively — there was no 40% threshold: a simple majority of those voting would suffice, a deliberate departure from the rule that had sunk the 1979 result.

The verdict was emphatic. On the first question, 74.3% voted Yes (1,775,045 votes) to 25.7% No (614,400); on the second, 63.5% voted Yes (1,512,889) to 36.5% No (870,263). Overall turnout was about 60.4%; the numbers of valid votes differed between the two questions. Every one of Scotland's regions returned a Yes majority on the principle of a Parliament — a transformation from 1979, when only half had done so and Orkney and Shetland had voted No. Support for devolution had risen roughly 23 points since 1979 (when 51.6% had backed an Assembly). The contrast is the heart of this card: identical constitutional aspiration, but a fairer rule, a stronger campaign, a demonstrated grievance, and a broad civic coalition turned a technical failure into a decisive mandate.

The Scotland Bill followed in December 1997 and received Royal Assent as the Scotland Act 1998 on 19 November 1998. Its opening clause — "There shall be a Scottish Parliament" — was later inscribed on the Parliament's ceremonial Mace; Donald Dewar noted that Smith would have relished it.

The Act's most important structural feature was the reserved powers model. Rather than listing the powers being handed over (as the 1978 Act had done — an "additive" or conferred-powers approach that enumerated only what was devolved), the 1998 Act defined competence negatively: the Scottish Parliament may legislate on anything that is not explicitly reserved to Westminster. Reserved matters are set out in Schedule 5. This reversal is legally and politically significant: it creates a presumption of devolved competence and lets the Parliament act in areas unforeseen in 1998, provided they do not trespass on reserved matters.

Reserved matters include the constitution, foreign affairs, defence, national security, immigration and nationality, macroeconomic and monetary policy, and (at the time) most social security. Devolved areas include health, education, local government, housing, agriculture, justice and the courts, and economic development. The Act also created the Scottish Executive (later renamed the Scottish Government), headed by a First Minister. The Sewel convention — that Westminster will not normally legislate on devolved matters without the Scottish Parliament's consent — accompanied the settlement as a political (non-justiciable) understanding.

McLean identifies three key differences from the failed 1978 scheme. Ministers believed in it, so there was no repeat of the departmental resistance of the 1970s. The 1998 Act listed the powers reserved to Westminster rather than those devolved, giving a shorter and clearer list. And the Parliament was elected by proportional representation: 73 of its 129 members from constituencies and the rest as regional top-ups. Donald Dewar called the PR provisions "the best example of charitable giving this century in politics", since they would deny Labour a majority. He believed they would also stop the SNP winning a majority without more than half of all votes, but, McLean notes, "he got one crucial sum wrong": in 2011 the SNP won 69 seats with about 45 per cent of the vote. The Constitutional Convention had also avoided the two hardest issues, representation at Westminster (the West Lothian Question) and finance (the Barnett Formula).

The first election to the new Parliament was held on 6 May 1999. It used the Additional Member System (AMS) — 73 constituency MSPs elected by first-past-the-post plus 56 regional "top-up" members elected by closed list across eight regions (seven each), 129 seats in total — a proportional system deliberately unlike Westminster's first-past-the-post and intended to prevent single-party domination.

The results delivered exactly that. Labour was the largest party with 56 seats — nine short of the 65 needed for a majority. The SNP took 35 seats to become the official opposition, the Conservatives 18 (all from the regional lists, giving the party representation despite winning no constituencies), and the Liberal Democrats 17. Turnout was 58.4% in the constituency vote and 58.3% on the regional list. With no majority, Labour and the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition, and on 13 May 1999 Donald Dewar was elected the first First Minister and was formally appointed on 17 May, with the Liberal Democrat leader Jim Wallace as his deputy.

The Parliament's first working session met on 12 May 1999 in its temporary home, the Church of Scotland's General Assembly Hall on the Mound. As the oldest returned member, it fell to Winnie Ewing — the SNP figure whose 1967 Hamilton by-election win ("Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on") had launched the modern nationalist surge — to preside over the opening.

Her words, recorded in the Scottish Parliament's Official Report of 12 May 1999, were these: "I want to start with the words that I have always wanted either to say or to hear someone else say — the Scottish Parliament, which adjourned on 25 March 1707, is hereby reconvened." The date was chosen with precision: it reached directly back to the adjournment of the old Parliament of Scotland at the Union of 1707 — the event at the centre of Card #16 of this series, of which it was said at the time that it was "the end of an auld sang." Ewing added: "All of us here can begin to write together a new Scottish song, and I urge all of you to sing it in harmony — fortissimo." This is the genuine, well-documented full-circle moment: not a legal continuation of the pre-Union Parliament (the 1999 body is a new, statutory, devolved legislature), but a deliberate and historically literate act of symbolic reconnection.

The Queen formally opened the Parliament on 1 July 1999, presenting the Mace inscribed "There shall be a Scottish Parliament." Donald Dewar's speech that day reached back "to that other Parliament dissolved in controversy nearly three centuries ago" and forward to "the day when democracy was renewed in Scotland." The Parliament sat in the General Assembly Hall until the purpose-built Holyrood building — designed by the Catalan architect Enric Miralles, controversial for a final cost of around £414 million against early estimates of £10–40 million (more than ten times over and roughly three years late) — opened in 2004 (first debate 7 September; formal opening by the Queen 9 October 2004). That building lies beyond this card's scope.

The sociologist David McCrone saw the opening as "the reclaiming of history". It was reinforced when a number of MSPs prefaced their oath of allegiance with a statement that sovereignty lay with the people rather than the Crown. He notes that history was claimed by both sides. In the mid-1990s the Conservative Scottish Secretary Ian Lang wrote that the event he would most like to have witnessed was Bannockburn, because only a Scotland that had won its independence could enter the Union as an equal partner. This is the "unionist nationalism" that Graeme Morton found dominant in the 19th century. The SNP, though committed to a civic rather than ethnic nationalism, rode the Braveheart phenomenon of 1995 with leaflets outside cinemas ("You've seen the movie – now face reality"). In the so-called "Braveheart blip" it rose eight points in the polls and received about sixty membership applications a day. McCrone's verdict: "Braveheart might have been bad history, but it made good politics, at least for a time."

This card closes the History series where the story of 1707 finally turned back on itself — but Scotland's constitutional journey did not end on the Mound in 1999. The Parliament's powers were later broadened by the Scotland Acts of 2012 and 2016; the SNP formed its first government in 2007 and won an outright majority in 2011; and in 2014 Scotland held a referendum on independence itself, which the "No" side won by 55.3% to 44.7%. Debates over independence, further devolution and Scotland's place in the United Kingdom (and, after 2016, in relation to the European Union) have continued into the present. Those chapters belong to a later telling. What this final card records is the moment the "auld sang" of 1707 gained a new verse — when, in Winnie Ewing's words, a Parliament adjourned in 1707 was, at last, "hereby reconvened."