Tag Archives: Donald Dewar

The history behind Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a Claim of Right for Scotland

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Nicola Sturgeon has stated her intention to endorse a modern Claim of Right for Scotland, but there has been little discussion about the 1988 Claim that is the precedent for her new proposal. David Torrance describes the Claim’s history, and argues that it has meant different things at different times to various people.

Speaking in Edinburgh last week, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she intended to invite Scotland’s ‘elected representatives’ to ‘come together to endorse a modern Claim of Right for Scotland through a new Constitutional Convention’ to:

‘declare that it is for the Scottish Parliament to decide whether and when there should be an independence choice and build support for that principle amongst civic Scotland.’

The First Minister was referring to the 1988/89 Claim of Right, which argued for a Scottish Constitutional Convention. That Claim is much cited but little studied. This blog will look at three different uses of the Claim: devolutionist, nationalist and the ‘right to choose’.

Origins and publication

The impetus for the Claim of Right was the 1987 general election. The Campaign for a Scottish Assembly established a Constitutional Steering Committee (CSC) of ‘prominent Scots’ to make practical recommendations on persuading the UK government to devolve power. The idea of a 1689-like Claim probably came from a fringe group called ‘Scotland-UN’, which had submitted Scotland’s Claim of Right to Self-Determination to the United Nations in 1980.

Sir Robert Grieve, an eminent planner, led the cross-party CSC, which included Una Mackintosh (widow of the Labour MP and devolutionist John P Mackintosh), Judy Steel (a Liberal) and three prominent SNP figures: Isobel Lindsay, Neil MacCormick and Paul Henderson Scott. It was drafted by a retired civil servant called Jim Ross. Professor James Kellas called them ‘worthy Scots from the middle-class professions’.

Henderson Scott believed the final CSC report ‘was closer to the views of the SNP than of Labour’, with its talk of the Union as ‘a glaring anomaly’ and ‘a threat to the survival of a distinctive culture in Scotland’. Yet as the cultural historian Scott Hames has observed, the Claim ‘veers away from the consequences of its central argument’ and instead urges the creation of a constitutional convention ‘to draw up a scheme for a Scottish Assembly’. Continue reading →

The Scottish Parliament at twenty

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jim.johnston.jpg.pngIMG_20190801_195645.jpgThe Scottish Parliament is now two decades old, making it a good time to take stock of its performance and how it might seek to change its processes, behaviours and attitude following the political uncertainty of the last three years. Jim Johnston and James Mitchell have co-edited a new book, The Scottish Parliament at Twenty, which aims to answer these questions. Here, they outline how the Parliament has operated in its early years and where it might be going.

Just as the political, fiscal and economic environments have become more volatile in the twenty years since the Scottish Parliament was created, its powers have significantly increased, leaving Holyrood increasingly exposed to that volatility. Where previously it could shelter under the relative comfort of a block grant almost entirely funded through the Barnett formula, it is now much more exposed to the vagaries of economic growth, income tax receipts and demand for devolved welfare benefits. And all at the same time as dealing with the impact of Brexit. The fundamental question, therefore, is how the Parliament should respond to this increased exposure and capitalise on its new powers. 

The Parliament was not established to pursue a radically new policy programme, so much as to protect Scotland from any future Thatcher-like government. It would probably not even exist but for Margaret Thatcher. She was more successful in uniting a significant majority of Scots than any previous or (so far) subsequent politician, but that unity was based on opposition to Thatcher, her party and her policies. This opposition was then mobilised in support of a Scottish Parliament whose initial ‘logic’ was conservative, preserving well established policies and institutions and opposing innovation deemed to have been imposed on Scotland by London. But, despite this conservative reflex, commentators have focused on the extent to which the Parliament has gone its own way.  Continue reading →

The narrative of devolution twenty years on

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gtwuaP6C (1)Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the first Scottish Parliament elections. In this post, David Torrance looks back at how political parties in Scotland have fought to control the narrative of devolution and examines how that ‘story’ has evolved over the past two decades.

Pollsters and sociologists have long understood the power of political storytelling. James Carville, who engineered Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory, believed that an effective narrative was ‘the key to everything’, while the NATO strategist Mark Laity has described how a narrative with historical overtones can influence decision- making more than logical argument.

This is not, however, a contemporary political phenomenon, but rather something as old as spin and fake news. As others reflect on the twentieth anniversary of devolution in Scotland, it’s worth looking at the role narrative – or rather political ownership of narrative – played in the run-up to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in May 1999, and indeed thereafter.

Broadly speaking, the ‘story’ of devolution in Scotland was owned, at first, by the Scottish Labour Party from the 1980s until the early 2000s, before the Scottish National Party (SNP) assumed control in the mid-2000s. More recently, ownership has become more competitive, with the Scottish Conservative Party belatedly expressing comfort with devolution and challenging the SNP’s claim to ‘stand up for Scotland’.

As I’ve argued in an earlier essay, this narrative marketplace has much deeper roots, for since the late nineteenth century every major political party in Scotland has told a ‘story’ of an autonomous Scotland while claiming to defend that autonomy from internal and external threats. Initially it was the Liberals with ‘Home Rule’, then the old Scottish Unionist Party, which presented itself – most ostentatiously between the early 1930s and mid 1950s – as the main ‘guardian’ of a distinct Scottish national identity, while extending what was known as ‘administrative devolution’ within the United Kingdom.

Later, this political story passed to Scottish Labour in augmented form, at its most salient after the 1987 general election when the party resolved various internal debates to emerge as the main champion of a devolved Scottish Assembly/Parliament. A necessary corollary was delegitimising the Scottish Conservative Party’s claim to guardianship of Scottish identity, thus the charge that the governments of Margaret Thatcher were ‘anti-Scottish’ and hostile to distinctively Scottish institutions.

There were echoes of the earlier Unionist approach. Not only did Scottish Labour draw upon its considerable reserves of political symbolism, but it pushed the SNP’s competing nationalism (‘independence in Europe’) to the periphery of political discourse, all the while pursuing its own electoral strategy north of the border with the tacit approval of the UK Labour Party, classic features of what the sociologist Michael Billig called ‘banal nationalism’ and Jim Bulpitt’s description of territorial management in the United Kingdom.

Although the SNP attempted to challenge Labour’s ownership of the devolution agenda – Alex Salmond used to claim the party couldn’t ‘deliver a pizza let alone a parliament’ – Donald Dewar, Scottish Secretary after 1997 and Scotland’s inaugural First Minister in 1999, understood well the power of political storytelling. His memorable speech at the Scottish Parliament’s official opening on 1 July 1999 invoked:
Continue reading →