Ten Years of Devolution

This is a day for anniversaries: my 35th and the Scottish Parliament’s 10th. The latter is, I concede, the more significant milestone. Once upon a time George Robertson, then Shadow Scottish Secretary, declared that devolution would kill the demand for independence “stone dead”. His Labour colleague, Tam Dalyell, disagreed predicting that devolution would put us on the “motorway” towards independence. Well, a decade later, neither man has been vindicated and, indeed, the case remains Not Proven.

Scotland does not stand where once she did, but nor has her future path been determined. It is still too soon to say whether devolution has been a success, but some myths concerning it deserve to be, forgive me, scotched. The first of these – one that one has frequently been aired in the pages of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – is that devolution was part of a Blairite plot to destroy Britain.