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Stoking the fire of the Scottish independence movement
30th July 2008
I would hope that the Politics blog stimulates readers sufficiently to think about politics beyond being only an A level, and that there is some consideration of the significance of current events in shaping the way we are governed. Today’s Guardian contains an article suggesting that the devolution plans that Labour introduced for purely political reasons have backfired on them. But does this sort of comment really add much to the debate over our constitutional future?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes that:
‘Labour was a belated, reluctant and insincere convert to devolution. For good reasons it had long been a British centralist party, with an intense dislike of Celtic nationalism or separatism. But Labour was terrified by the rising threat from Plaid Cymru, and still more from the Scottish National party, which won 11 seats at the second 1974 election.
This was much more dangerous for Labour than the Tories. From the days in 1955 when - now hard to believe - the Tories could actually win a majority of seats in Scotland, they had begun the long decline which would lead to their total disappearance north of the Tweed in 1997. But in 1987, with only 10 of 72 Scottish seats, the Tories could still win a large parliamentary majority.
And so Labour took up devolution for purely tactical and cynical reasons. The object of the exercise was to hold off the SNP while retaining as many as possible of Labour’s Scottish pocket boroughs at Westminster. This worked in the short term: in 1997, with devolution promised, Labour won 56 out of 72 Scottish seats, more than ever before. Even then not everyone was so happy. Tony Blair never liked devolution, would have dropped it if he could, and insultingly implied that the Edinburgh assembly would have little more power than a parish council, which turned out to be very far from the case.’
This raises a number of important questions. Was it not the case that the Conservatives briefly flirted then abandoned plans for devolution for purely cynical reasons? Is David Cameron’s continued focus on the supposed West Lothian Question not also cynically tactical?
The only high ranking politician that has given serious consideration to constitutional arrangements in recent years is Gordon Brown, but he has had to drop any idea of long term strategic thinking about the quality of governance in order to focus solely on short term tactics in order to combat the spin twins of David Cameron and George Osborne.
Unless politicians, as well as columnists like Wheatcroft, begin to give more serious thought to the needs and wishes of the Scottish people and how they could possibly be accommodated in a federal or confederal structure then Scotland’s path to independence may well attain an unstoppable momentum.