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Scotland's Referendum In Retrospect
Contemporary Review, Oct, 2000 by R.D. Kernohan
THE working clothes of Scottish devolution are very different from the trappings of the new Parliament's election and inauguration in May 1999. The dialect and diet of an older Scotland would have summed things up as a move back to 'auld claes and parritch'. There is an even greater difference, however, between the moods and styles of devolution in practice and those of the referendum campaign in the heady aftermath of the 1997 General Election.
The changes are not only of demeanour among politicians and in the media but of wider public expectation. The motto of contemporary Scotland might almost be: 'We are all realists now'. Well, nearly all.
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This makes it possible for the emotions of 1997 to be recollected and assessed in relative tranquillity. There can even be at least very tentative interim judgments on the significance of the new and distinctive creation. For Scotland has a Parliament exercising powers which might be appropriate in a federal system but which sit uneasily with the role of Parliament at Westminster as legislature for both the United Kingdom (on major reserved matters) and for England, but with different powers in relation to Welsh and Northern Irish devolution.
This is the background to a serious analysis of the 1997 referendum, with some assessment of trends before and since, by four Scottish academics. [*] David Denver, James Mitchell, Charles Pattie, and Hugh Bochel have found their way to Northern English universities at a time when many nationalists complain of the alleged anglicisation of the Scottish ones. Even after devolution there remains scope for neo-Johnsonian jokes about Scotland's noblest prospect being the motorway to England. But they profess themselves to be expatriates 'strongly attached to our country'. Fortunately their book, despite a cover-picture of a campaigner dressed as an extra for the film Braveheart, is much more an objective enquiry than a demonstration of attachment.
There may be some reservations about the part of their research which depended on a random sample postal survey with a 53 per cent response rate but it may be accepted as 'reasonably representative in terms of the vote for a Scottish Parliament'. The clearest hint of a pro-devolution bias is not in their coverage of 1997 but in the way they draw on earlier work about the 1979 referendum, when in the dying days of the Callaghan Government a less radical devolution scheme failed to win the level of support laid down by Parliament. The late Lord Home's opposition is described, in a phrase that seems to belong to politics and not academic research, as a 'cynical exercise'.
That 1979 result not only reflected a different mood in Scottish opinion and the different balance at the time between the major U.K. parties, as the authors make clear, but a lack within the Callaghan Government of the confidence (or brashness, or rashness) with which Tony Blair's 'New Labour' followed up its crushing victory of four months before.
The fact that the 1997 referendum result was almost a foregone conclusion, although the reasons for that remain debatable, does not lessen the importance of this study of how it reflected Scottish opinion at the time and revealed longer term uncertainties, even contradictions. These make it difficult to predict the future course of events and even, up to point, to judge the significance of the double victory for devolution.
The Scottish electorate on a 60 per cent poll voted 74:26 for the new Parliament and 64:36 for the limited tax-varying power allowed to it, which so far has not been used and remains unlikely to be used in present political conditions.
David Butler, the high priest of British psephology, refers in his foreword to 11 September 1997 as a 'turning point in the history of the United Kingdom'. The authors themselves (who emphasise that their authorship is a unitary system and not a confederal one) present the occasion as a major change not only in the government and public identity of Scotland but in the politics of the United Kingdom. Yet in their conclusion they quite rightly hedge their bets about the future.
They recognise that there is nothing static in politics and that the expectations of 1997 may alter - whether by being partly satisfied, adjusted, or frustrated. They also raise the possibility that the present state of Scottish opinion - for they use the dangerous shorthand of writing about what 'Scots believe' - may incline to political scepticism. There is scepticism about the extent to which expectations can be fulfilled by the new system being implemented by a Labour dominated alliance with the Liberals. But it is accompanied by a similar scepticism about the prospects for greater fulfilment under the independence favoured by the Scottish National Party, who came second in the first elections for the new Parliament.
'If this interpretation is correct', the authors say, 'then the referendum on devolution may prove to have been a very important watershed on Scottish politics but by no means a defining moment in Scotland's constitutional status'.
