Scotland Decides

The Devolution Issue and the 1997 Referendum

Hugh Bochel, David Denver, James Mitchell, Charles Pattie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780714650531
• eBook ISBN: 9781136331756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Scotland has a parliament for the first time in almost 300 years, and this book is an account of how this came about. The authors trace the origins and history of the demand for home rule in Scotland, focusing particularly on developments following the failure of the first referendum on the issue in 1979, which culminated in a second referendum in September 1997.
This major political event attracted national and international interest, and its decisive result was a milestone in Scottish history. This work presents an analysis of the referendum campaign at both national and local levels, including media coverage of the event and the outcome. The reactions of voters are explored on the basis of a large survey of the electorate, and lessons to be learnt about referendums in the UK and elsewhere are discussed.

1
Scottish Devolution: The
Historical Context

INTRODUCTION

The referendum on Scottish devolution held in September 1997, less than five months into the new Labour government's term in office, was the second to be held on this issue. Eighteen years before, in the dying days of the previous Labour administration, the Scottish electorate was asked to decide in a referendum whether, as proposed by the government, a Scottish Assembly should be established. A narrow majority of those who voted agreed that there should be an Assembly but this was not enough to overcome the qualification (that 40 per cent of the eligible electorate had to support the measure for it to be passed) which had been imposed by Parliament at Westminster. The change in the use of language between 1979 and 1997 is itself significant. By the time of the second referendum the debate was about creating a Scottish ‘Parliament’, not an ‘Assembly’. There were other changes which were more than symbolic, however. A substantial change of attitude had occurred among Scots although few home rulers could have anticipated this in 1979. Shortly after the first referendum, a cartoon appeared in a Nationalist newspaper. It showed a picture of a boy reading a book about ‘EVOLUTION’ with a picture of dinosaurs on its cover while his father was reading a newspaper with ‘DEVOLUTION LATEST’ on the front page. The caption below summed up the feeling of many supporters of Scottish devolution at the time. ‘No son — they're not the same thing — devolution takes longer!’, the father explained.

Although it was not until the 1970s that Scottish devolution became a serious possibility, it could be argued that it was indeed a long time in coming. A Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) had been set up in 1886 and Scottish home rule was part of Keir Hardie's platform when he contested the Mid-Lanark by-election, as the first independent Labour candidate, in 1888. Hardie was supported by the SHRA although this later proved controversial within the organisation, as its secretary argued that the SHRA had been mistaken in backing Hardie (Mitchell, 1996: 71). This was only the first difficulty Labour was to have in a long history of relations with umbrella groups campaigning for a Scottish Parliament, up to and including the 1997 referendum. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, Scottish home rule was not an important issue in British politics. The Irish question was far more pressing and divisive and it had a considerable impact on Scottish politics. The issue split the Liberals to the great advantage of the Conservatives. The Scottish Unionist Party, initially a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, was the official title of the Conservative Party in Scotland until 1965. Such was the relative importance of Scottish and Irish home rule, that the unionism expressed in the name of the party referred to the union between Ireland — later Northern Ireland — and Britain rather than to the constitutional position of Scotland. At the same time, while Labour in Scotland attracted strong support among Irish Catholic immigrants and there was much sympathy for Irish nationalism in Labour's ranks, this was not translated into support for Scottish nationalism. Indeed, Scottish Unionists and Conservatives often portrayed Scottish home rulers as in some way connected with Irish nationalism while Labour supporters, in the west of Scotland, often associated Scottish nationalism with the Orange Order and Irish unionism.¹

Despite these inauspicious beginnings, home rule sentiment in Scotland did not disappear. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the idea was sustained and promoted in a variety of ways — through pressure groups, constitutional conventions, petitions, parliamentary action by Scottish MPs, direct action (including removal of the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey in 1950) and the founding (in 1934), and subsequent electoral activity, of the Scottish National Party (SNP). As a result of these sorts of activities the issue intermittently crept on to the political agenda. Moreover, there is evidence of extensive support for some form of home rule for Scotland over a long period of time. From the 1890s to the 1920s, on 11 occasions a majority of Scottish MPs voted in favour of resolutions or private members' bills advocating the creation of a Scottish Parliament. In 1945, out of 84 Scottish parliamentary candidates who replied to a request by the Scottish Convention for their views on home rule only three declared themselves opposed to the idea. In July 1947, the Scottish Daily Express published the results of an opinion poll showing that 76 per cent of Scots approved of the establishment of a Parliament dealing with Scottish affairs while only 13 per cent disapproved and 11 per cent had no opinion. During 1949–50 a petition calling for a Scottish Parliament, known as the Covenant, circulated in Scotland and was signed, the organisers claimed, by 1.7 million people.

Nonetheless, it was not until the 1960s that Scottish home rule became a politically significant issue first within Scotland and then in British politics. The catalyst for this change was the electoral success (in both local and national contests) of the SNP. The effect was that the 1970s became what Andrew Marr has dubbed ‘The Devolution Years’ (Marr, 1992) culminating in the first referendum. To account for the transformation of home rule from an issue at the fringe of politics to one that dominated Scottish political debate for almost 30 years we need to look in more detail at the development of the parties' attitudes on the issue.

THE POLITICAL PARTIES AND HOME RULE

For each of the political parties in Scotland, the 1997 referendum was the culmination of years of internal debate. Past experiences and memories, some bitter, were important in the internal debates in each party as they decided how they would campaign. Most prominent, of course, were memories of the 1970s and the previous referendum. But the referendum also evoked old themes which have been present throughout the century of campaigning for a Scottish Parliament — cross-party pressure groups for home rule, the changing policies of existing parties and the relationships between different parties on the issue. In this section we trace the development of the policies of the major parties on the question of Scottish devolution.

Labour

As we have seen, the Labour pioneer Keir Hardie was a supporter of Scottish home rule and, from its inception, Labour had a commitment to home rule in its programme. In the inter-war period the ‘Red Clydesiders’ were staunch supporters of the policy. After 1945, however, Labour's position changed as a centralist ethos came to dominate Labour thinking on the economy. Gordon Brown, later to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote in his doctoral thesis on the Scottish Labour Party that, ‘No theorist attempted in sufficient depth to reconcile the conflicting aspirations for home rule and a British Socialist advance. In particular, no one was able to show how capturing power in Britain — and legislating for minimum levels of welfare, for example — could be combined with a policy of devolution for Scotland’ (Brown, 1981: 527). This tension proved important over much of the post-war period.

Home rule agitation during the Attlee government's period in office (1945–51) proved embarrassing for Labour. In a confidential cabinet memorandum in 1947, Arthur Woodburn, the Secretary of State for Scotland, identified four groupings within Scotland at that time (see Mitchell, 1996: 44). The first, ‘extreme home rulers’, were a ‘small, picturesque and articulate’ group but it was ‘difficult to say whether there is any considerable support for their view’. The second, the Scottish Convention, was a body demanding a separate Parliament in Edinburgh while retaining Scottish representation in the ‘British Parliament for British affairs’. This group, according to the Secretary of State, was ‘certainly strong, though its numbers are difficult to estimate, as during elections its vote is not recorded because of stronger loyalty to the main political parties’. Nonetheless, it had a ‘large number of supporters in all parties’. The third group, not formally organised, was ‘by far the largest’ (‘almost universal’) and had ‘strong emotional feeling behind it in Scotland’. It wanted Scottish affairs to be given more time and to be dealt with by Scots themselves ‘within the British Constitution and the unity of the two countries’. The fourth group was one calling for a ‘fact-finding enquiry’ into the constitutional, economic and political relations between Scotland and England including the possibility of some form of devolution.

Woodburn's memorandum serves as a useful benchmark against which subsequent events and developments can be analysed. It is difficult to gauge the state of public opinion in Scotland at that time with a great deal of confidence but the memorandum gives a confidential and, one would assume, well-informed interpretation by one of Scotland's senior politicians of the period. He quoted the Daily Express poll referred to above, noting that 80 per cent of Socialists were in favour of a Scottish Parliament, as were 75 per cent of Tories and 70 per cent of Liberals. The memorandum also highlighted reasons why support for some kind of change had arisen. It seemed clear to Woodburn that this demand was not solely a product of national sentiment. Government policies had provoked a backlash. The nationalisation of industries was thought to take control of Scottish industries out of Scotland. A ‘contemptuous suppression of Scottish initiative’ had been attacked in transport policy. Of course, the Conservatives in opposition had played on these feelings. There was, warned the Secretary of State, a ‘smouldering pile that might break through the party loyalties and become a formidable national movement’. In particular, he thought that this was becoming a more likely possibility as the Labour programme was fulfilled and the ‘great dividing issues are settled, leaving the cleavage between the parties less deep and intense’. Woodburn was raising the possibility of a new cleavage emerging, based on national identity, and the prospect of a decline in party identification associated with class. In addition, he was signalling the contingent nature of national identity. Each of these predictions was, to some extent, prescient. However, he was wrong in thinking that a period of relative social tranquillity and economic improvement, marked by a consensus across the two main parties, would see the eruption of Scottish nationalism.

To tackle the mounting pressure for some form of home rule, Woodburn recommended changes in parliamentary procedure and other administrative reforms, falling far short of devolution or even an enquiry into it. Attlee's government eventually agreed to establish a committee to consider the financial and economic relations between Scotland and England but more immediately two sets of proposals were recommended. It was suggested that certain bills and Scottish Estimates should be transferred for debate in the Scottish Grand Committee and that there should be greater co-ordination of economic affairs in Scotland itself. These proposals were published in a white paper in 1948 (Scottish Home Department, 1948). A Scottish Economic Conference should also be established which would meet regularly under the chairmanship of the Secretary of State for Scotland. It would have members from the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) representing all sides of industry plus business and commerce, the nationalised industries and government departments. These were measures designed to appease any feelings of neglect among the Scottish public and to reinforce the government's commitment to Scotland as a distinct entity. In many respects, these moves were very similar to proposals which emanated from John Major's Conservative government in the 1990s in response to home rule agitation (see Scottish Office, 1993). Devolution had not been formally abandoned by Labour under Attlee but that was what had happened in effect. By the late 1950s, even the paper commitment to Scottish home rule was abandoned (Keating and Bleiman, 1979: 147). Labour had entered a period of staunch unionism. Devolution continued to be supported by some party members but it was neither a salient issue nor one which carried much support amongst activists. By the early 1960s Labour was unequivocally a unionist party hostile to Scottish home rule.

The rise of the SNP in the 1960s changed all that. The early optimism and success of the new Labour government elected in 1964 gave way in the late 1960s to a period of relative economic decline and crisis. As a consequence Labour became deeply unpopular among the voters and in Scotland this benefited the SNP. The Nationalist advance in local and by-elections forced the issue of Scotland's constitutional status to the forefront of Scottish politics. Initially Labour remained hostile to making any concession to Nationalist demands. William Ross, Secretary of State for Scotland under Harold Wilson, was vehemently opposed and his views found an echo among many activists in the constituencies, who came to regard the SNP as an enemy posing a serious electoral threat. In 1969, however, Wilson set up a Royal Commission on the Constitution, expecting that it would ‘spend years taking minutes’. Instead of buying time for Labour, however, this gave the Tories an excuse for prevaricating when they came to power the next year. In addition, when the Commission finally reported in late 1973, recommending devolution in its majority report (Kilbrandon, 1973), it helped to fuel the very demands which it had been set up to douse. In the interim, North Sea Oil had been discovered and the SNP had found a new lease of life, capitalising on the vast wealth lying beneath the sea off Scotland's coast. Adding grist to the SNP mill, the British economy was once again in trouble and the government was plagued by serious industrial relations problems.

The change in Labour policy came in 1974, a year in which the SNP made spectacular advances in two general elections. In August, a special conference was held at which the trade unions forced through a change in Labour Party policy. Devolution became official policy in time for the October 1974 general election. Many party members remained sceptical, however. Devolution was seen as a dangerous sop to the Nationalists which was inconsistent with both core values such as equality of service provision and traditional policies such as central economic management. The party's official endorsement of devolution in the late 1970s was superficial as became clear in the referendum in 1979. John Smith, charged with piloting the devolution legislation through the House of Commons, was among those who had spoken against devolution in the past and he had argued in a newspaper article in May 1974 that the cost of devolution was ‘too high’ (McSmith, 1994: 76). Smith reiterated this point at Labour's special conference in August and argued that anyone claiming that Scotland could have an Assembly without losing its Secretary of State and some MPs in the House of Commons was guilty of dishonesty (McSmith, 1994: 76). These were matters to which Labour was to return in the 1990s. Smith later (in 1992) became leader of the Labour Party. He was the only Labour leader in modern times to be associated with strong support for Scottish home rule but he had once been, like his party, opposed to the idea. He had come round to it rather reluctantly at first before becoming an enthusiast for devolution.

Although Labour's switch to a pro-devolution stance was opposed by some in the party, for others it did not go far enough. In July 1976 some of the home rule enthusiasts broke with Labour to launch a new party — the Scottish Labour Party — which tried to marry socialism and nationalism. The Scottish Labour Party was created by Jim Sillars. Sillars, MP for Ayrshire South from March 1970, when his chief by-election opponent was the SNP candidate, had been a leading figure in the Labour Party in Scotland but had become disillusioned and left with one other Labour MP (John Robertson who represented Paisley) to form the new party. With much journalistic support, but experiencing the vehement denunciations of all political apostates, Sillars and his party were built up with the same hype and suffered the same fate as that of Scotland's international football team in the 1978 World Cup. Great hopes and expectations were succeeded by contemptuous dismissals, sometimes written by the same people. Sillars and the SLP, however, (unlike the ‘tartan army’) had an enduring effect. The SNP came close to adopting the programme of the party a decade later when it moved more decisively to the left and embraced membership of the European Community. By then Sillars himself had joined the SNP.

The Conservatives

The Conservatives, long known as ‘Unionists’ in Scotland, su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Scottish Devolution: The Historical Context
• 2 The Politics of Devolution 1979–97
• 3 The National Campaign
• 4 The Scottish Media and the Referendum
• 5 Local Campaigning in the Referendum
• 6 The Referendum Results
• 7 Voting in the Referendum
• 8 The Referendum in Context
• 9 The Aftermath of the Referendum
• 10 Postscript: The First Elections to the Scottish Parliament
• Appendix 1: The Referendum Results
• Appendix 2: The Survey of Electors
• References
• Index