As he blasts his way through the remaining support beams of the UK constitution, Gordon Brown is doing more to deliver Scottish independence than the SNP. The former Prime Minister is reportedly poised to recommend that Labour adopt ‘devo max’ as a policy, which would see the SNP-run Scottish parliament handed yet another tranche of powers. Only defence and foreign policy would remain in the hands of Westminster: everything else would be at the whim of Nicola Sturgeon.
The theory is that by increasing the powers of Holyrood, the Scots’ appetite for independence will be sated. But is no evidence for this, and 23 years of evidence against it. From the opening of the Scottish parliament in 1999, it took just eight years for the SNP to gain control of the institution and its grip has remained iron tight ever since.
The Tories warned devolution was a historic error. So when they returned to office in 2010, they naturally set about entrenching it.
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