Doubts raised over Holyrood
HOLYROOD has been something of a let-down, the leader of the devolution campaign has said as the 20th anniversary of the historic vote to create a new Scottish Parliament takes place on Monday.
Nigel Smith, who spearheaded the crossparty push for devolution, said: “I would give it six out of 10, ie pass, but not as good as I hoped it would be.
“In the big areas of policy-making like education, health, the economy, [is] where I feel disappointed a bit by the Parliament,” he explained.
Wendy Alexander, the former Scottish Labour leader, who advised the then Scottish secretary Donald Dewar, recalled how there was considerable resistance in Whitehall.
“It was a battle because many Whitehall departments were highly sceptical of whether it made sense to devolve back to Scotland areas that they hitherto had been in charge of.
“So there was a huge amount of official scepticism about whether matters beyond those of education, health and housing should also come to Scotland,” she told the BBC.
While Ms Alexander said the Blair Government did much of the heavy lifting on devolution, Lord Wallace, the former Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, who would become the deputy first minister, stressed how the cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention laid the groundwork.
“The Constitutional Convention put forward a very comprehensive package,” declared the peer.
“It’s hard to think there was any major question that it didn’t actually address. Compare the Convention’s final report with what the Government put forward in its White Paper and the overlap is considerably greater than anything that was added on or changed by the Labour government,” he said. The referendum was Labour’s big constitutional proposal in its manifesto and took place quickly, just four months after the party’s landslide victory in the 1997 General Election.
The official Yes campaign, Scotland Forward, was led by Mr Smith and was borne out of those groups, which had previously
formed the Scottish Constitutional Convention, together with the SNP. The campaign had widespread backing and was supported by Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
The official No campaign, Think Twice, was headed by Brian Monteith, a former worker of Michael Forsyth, the former Conservative Scottish secretary.
Its board members included Donald Findlay QC, rector of the University of St Andrews and vice-chairman of Rangers FC and senior Conservative peer Lord Fraser of Carmyllie.
After a passionate campaign, the vote was overwhelming for devolution: 74 per cent to 26 per cent on a turnout of 60 per cent.
Professor Sir Tom Devine, Scotland’s most respected historian, described the vote on September 11, 1997 as “the most significant
development in Scottish political history since the Union of 1707”.
He added: “It was a precondition for the developments which have taken place since, including, of course, the more recent referendum on independence”.
Michael Russell, the Scottish Government’s Brexit minister, who was the SNP’s chief executive at the time of the 1997 poll, said his party had swung behind the devolution referendum because it kept the door to independence ajar.
“Dewar made a commitment to us that there would be no glass ceiling in the bill. So whatever the Scotland Bill had, it would have nothing that actually stopped the progress to independence. It wouldn’t enable it. There would be no mechanism to make it happen. But it wouldn’t stop it,” he explained.