Scotland's Referendum In Retrospect

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2000 by R.D. Kernohan

Since the book was written further short-term political uncertainties have been created by the illness of the First Minister Donald Dewar, whose summer recess began early with a heart operation and subsequent convalescence, and the unexpected retirement from the SNP leadership of Alex Salmond, one of the few senior Nationalists to make any mark as a political personality. But neither the immediate uncertainty of politics in Edinburgh's permanently hung Parliament, nor the more important question of the Parliament's longer-term evolution, diminishes the need or opportunity for analysis of what happened, and how, in September 1997. Nor do they seriously handicap the necessary narrative and analysis of events and trends between the 1979 referendum immediately before the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher, and the 1997 one, after her successor's defeat.

For example the authors' tables suggest that support for devolution (and probably Scottish nationalism) was strongest in the youngest age-group of electors and weakest among the old; that it had overwhelming support among manual workers and a much smaller majority among professional and managerial ones; that it had a much smaller majority among Presbyterians and other Protestants (smallest of all among Episcopalians, with their close English Anglican connections) than among Roman Catholics, with their Irish connections.

Some of the statistics, of course, relate very closely to social patterns and traditional political inclinations. Council and other tenants were more solidly 'Yes' than owner-occupiers. Voters with only a basic education were more inclined to be favourable than others, though there was more support from university graduates than from non-university professional groups. One of the few major groups not to give an outright Yes - by voting for the tax option as well as the Parliament - was composed of those who described themselves as 'middle-class' (only 46 per cent support).

There is also worthwhile analysis of how Scots see their national identity, with evidence that there was a significant trend between the 1992 and 1997 elections towards feeling Scottish rather than British, mainly by a movement from the 'more Scottish than British' category into an exclusively Scottish one. (Nevertheless 70 per cent of Scots still accept 'British' as part of their identity, even when pollsters demand rather simplified answers to complexities of feeling and experience. In a BBC/NOP survey the figure was nearly 80 per cent.) The authors recognise some of this complexity in suggesting that in the referendum voting, and in their response to Scottish nationalism more generally, Scottish voters may have two 'identities' - of national feeling and class inclination - which sometimes reinforce each other but may also cut across each other.

Valuable as these analyses are, however, they provide a clearer view of the recent past than a guide to the middle-distance future. For example there may be complications even in Scotland if the nature and extent of British commitment to Europe, the issue which tormented the Major Government but left Labour and the SNP almost unscathed for the time being, becomes both a major party issue and a divisive force in public opinion.