With Scottish independence very much the issue of the week, we thought you might enjoy this Spectator leader from 1979, arguing for a ‘No’ vote in that year’s referendum on Scottish devolution:
To preserve the Union, 24 February 1979
‘So, Sir, you laugh at schemes of political improvement?’ ‘Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.’
The Scotland Act, which comes before the judgement of the Scottish people on Thursday, is certainly laughable. Would that it were no more than that. If the Scottish Assembly is instituted it will be the most important constitutional change the United Kingdom has known since the Irish Free State came into being; more important in fact than any since the Union of 1707 which ‘devolution’ is designed to improve on. We pass by the contemporary referendum in Wales, not out of indifference to the Welsh but because Welsh devolution is clearly of less significance, and it seems much less likely that the referendum will pass in Wales.
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