Scotland the Brief

Part 3: Choosing a Future
21 The Road to Holyrood

In 1996 the Conservative Secretary of State Michael Forsyth celebrated the 700 th anniversary of Edward Is first invasion by repatriating the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey to Edinburgh Castle. This was partly in response to Braveheart, Mel Gibsons Hollywood version of the life of William Wallace, variously called by the unkind Mad Mac or Woad Rage. It didnt help Forsyth's party: in the May election of 1997 it lost its last Scottish seats, and in a referendum in September the parliament proposal was endorsed 74% to 26%. A week later the Welsh narrowly approved their own, more limited, scheme.

The Government of Scotland bill, regarded as a tiresome necessity by Tony Blair, made its way through cabinet and parliament in 1998, steered by Donald Dewar, the gangling, eccentric intellectual who had stuck to the idea since the centralising sixties. No-one beyond the SNP, a few Labour MPs, and the Nationalists was interested. Elections were held in May 1999, when oil prices were in the cellar, at $ 10 a barrel, depriving Alex Salmonds SNP of its main platform. Labour became the largest party, but would have to share power with the Liberal Democrats. The latter won most of their seats as constituency local heroes while the Conservatives, paradoxically, were saved as a British party by their list MSPs.

The Dewar cabinet wasnt expert in the black arts of spin, and the first couple of years were chaotic, dogged not least by the saga of the Holyrood building, commissioned by Dewar from the Catalan architect Enric Miralles, which went catastrophically over budget. Dewars health deteriorated and in the autumn of 2000 he died of a brain haemorrhage. The First Minister post passed to Henry McLeish, Gordon Browns ally, who shortly fell victim to constituency irregularities; and then to Jack McConnell, who represented Labours west of Scotland fortresses but in terms of the divided party, clove to Blair rather than to Brown, who didnt communicate with him for a year.

At its worst, devolution offered joined-up-government and this was visible in Scotland s coordinated response to the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. By contrast, Whitehall New Labour looked vain and incompetent. Scotland was troubled by the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the costs of the war had yet to sink in and McConnell got a second term in May, though with high votes for minor parties. He then defied his own party to introduce PR for local elections, a non-negotiable demand of his LibDem partners. Labour was ultimately dependent on Brown, and during 2004-5 the gloss came off his achievements, revealed as perilously dependent on a housing-to-retail boom and dubious extended credit.

rown nevertheless believed the result of his postgraduate research that in difficult days electors voted right, not left, and as Blairs reputation ebbed away, the former Red Rector of Edinburgh (never much interested in Europe ) aligned himself more and more with neo-con USA. This was not a tune that played well back at home, shown in early 2006 when a rock-solid seat next to his own was lost to the Liberals. Within a year, everything would change.