The Question of Scotland – Devolution and After

Tam Dalyell

Birlinn, £9.99

Tam Daylell, that long time scourge of Scottish devolutionists, has kept a relatively close counsel during our recent constitutional tumults. But public reticence does not mask a private softening of views. “I find Nationalism, in general, distasteful,” the onetime Father of the House, now aged 84, declares within half a dozen lines of his new book The Question of Scotland. The capitalised “n” soon disappears but the fervent opposition to Holyrood and all her accoutrements is a running theme throughout this slight, engaging, if at times self-satisfied, volume.

The bad guys in Dalyell’s story are easily identified. The Scottish National Party is a “monster”, driven by grievance to break-up the United Kingdom. But The Question of Scotland is not simply an anti-nat jeremiad. Dalyell reserves much of his fiercest excoriations for former Labour colleagues, not least inaugural first minister Donald Dewar.

The subtitle ‘Devolution and After’ feels a little misleading. Dalyell is far closer to the end than the beginning of his story by the time the successful 1997 Scottish devolution campaign heaves into view. Dalyell campaigned for a ‘no’ vote then, but arguably his most important – or at least most memorable – contribution to Scottish politics came two decades earlier, during the ill-fated 1979 referendum.

It was Dalyell who gave the world “the West Lothian Question” (a sobriquet bequeathed by Enoch Powell, no less). How, Dalyell asked the Commons back in 1977, would he be able to vote on legislation affecting Blackburn, Lancashire but not Blackburn in his own West Lothian constituency? That almost forty years on we are still no closer to a definite answer to Dalyell’s inquiry strikes to the heart of the problems in British constitutional politics.

Dalyell’s solution is simple: Holyrood should be scrapped. Littered throughout The Question of Scotland are curious ‘what ifs’ that, Dalyell believes, would have scunnered the devolution project in its infancy: if Willie Whitelaw, not Margaret Thatcher, had become prime minister; if the SNP had not managed to win the Western Isles in the 1970 general election; most recondite, if Geoffrey Crowther, then chair of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, had not succumbed to a heart attack in Heathrow airport in 1972.

Overwhelmingly, in Daylell’s telling, demands for Scottish autonomy were a naive reaction to a succession of “local factors”. Poor Labour candidates chosen by trade union diktat. A grubby desire to get local hands on the black gold pouring forth from the North Sea.

For Dalyell, devolution is essentially an ill thought-through Labour party “fix” foisted upon a reluctant nation for political expediency. An entire chapter is dedicated to Labour’s Scottish Executive’s almost farcical endorsement of a Scottish parliament in 1974, complete with contemporary diary entries decrying “the tartan curtain…falling all around us”. This is all rich material for the student of Scottish politics and history but it risks ignoring the social realities that Labour was reacting to. Why else did demands for devolution not only endure but strengthen after 1979’s failure?

Dalyell is at his most entertaining, and his most revealing, when penning portraits of former colleagues. Donald Dewar “did not like me and I, slowly over the years until he died, had an increasing distaste for him.” Despite the “settled will” soundbite, John Smith “had not thought very much” about devolution. For Neil Kinnock the whole enterprise was “bollocks”.

Similarly, no punches are pulled in discussing Labour’s current incarnation. Dalyell feels “sorry” for Kezia Dugdale, describes Jeremy Corbyn as “my friend” and watches aghast as his former “nice Scottish whip” Jim Murphy will now “be remembered for jogging, kicking a football and twirling a balloon in front of kids on television, rather than delivering a political message.”

Dalyell is often right, even if he takes a little too much pleasure in telling you. Devolution has been a disaster for Labour. It has brought the United Kingdom to the point of break-up. Whether life under devolved parliaments is better or worse is an open question.

But what is certain is that the public supports devolution, overwhelmingly so. In response to this inconvenient fact, Dalyell too often slips into counterfactual wish fulfilment: the 1980s decimation of Scotland’s steel industry was due to “possible devolutionary developments”. If ‘devo max’ had been on the ballot in 2014, less than the 45 per cent who backed independence would have backed it. Another independence referendum in the next year or two would produce a 65 per cent ‘no’ vote. Holyrood will eventually wither away.

Nevertheless, Dalyell is an avuncular companion through some of the pivotal moments in modern Scottish history. His tone is breezy, his writing taut. At root is the solemn, lugubriousness of a serious man who fears that the thing he loves most, the United Kingdom, has been damaged, perhaps irrevocably.

“I am a Man of the Union because the alternative is puerile, romantic folly,” Dalyell writes towards the end of this slender tome. There is no doubting Dalyell’s sincerity - and his intellectual rigour - but his critique would have been far more incisive if, rather than caricaturing proponents of Scottish devolution, he had tried to understand their motives. Without that, unionism really is in trouble.