The Scottish Assembly referendum in 1979 took place in the context of intense political divisions. All sections of the labour movement were divided on the issue, and particularly in local government where many local councillors supported the ‘No’ campaign. The Scottish National Party was divided: although official policy was to support the Scotland Act, many of those in the more fundamentalist wing saw this as an unacceptable compromise. The Liberals gave support, but of a highly qualified nature because of the absence of electoral reform. The Conservative Party opposed an Assembly but with a number of prominent rebels in favour. Even those who supported the Act had great difficulty working together. In particular, the Labour Party resisted cooperation with other groups. The referendum result showed a small majority for the proposed Assembly and a respectable turnout, but it fell short of the requirement to gain more than 40 per cent of the total registered electorate.

The past decade has seen the development of a much stronger consensus in favour of constitutional change, and a greater maturity in the Scottish political community. Much of the credit for this must go to the Thatcherite Right. It may be the former prime minister’s most lasting achievement that she consolidated Scottish opinion in favour of reform. But even without the blatant exposure of Scotland’s political impotence, the Scottish constitutional dimension would probably have reasserted itself. It was, after all, a major issue in Scottish politics in the late 1940s and had re-emerged in the late 1960s. It subsequently dominated the political scene in Scotland in the 1970s. Despite the set-back of 1979, the issue was never likely to go permanently off the agenda.

The 1980s highlighted more sharply than ever before this century the Scottish democratic deficit. The Conservatives received only 28 per cent of the vote in 1983 and 24 per cent in 1987 when it held ten out of seventy-two seats. Yet they implemented highly controversial and unpopular policies with no concession to their questionable democratic legitimacy in Scotland. The poll tax, for example, was initially intended only for Scotland, and had Mrs Thatcher not made the mistake of extending it a year later to England it is doubtful whether any decision would have been made to repeal it. But it should be recalled that the Conservative vote in 1987 was similar to that in October 1974. Their low support in the 1980s has to be seen in a broader historical context. The exceptional period for the Conservatives was in the 1950s, when they did comparatively well. For the whole of the nineteenth century Scotland was overwhelmingly Liberal. So much so that in 1876 the English Conservatives set up an investigatory committee to explain why the Scottish party was reduced to only seven seats. It was the break-up of the Scottish Liberals over the Irish question and the influence of the orange-tinged Protestant vote which saved the Tories from oblivion. In many respects, then, the Tory decline over the past three decades represents a reversion to an earlier pattern of widespread anti-Conservatism rather than a radically new departure.

Certain factors in occupational structure explain part but by no means all of this anti-Conservatism. Importantly, there still exists in Scotland a collectivist culture that is not just characteristic of the urban working class. In much of rural Scotland the role of the public sector is recognized as crucial, notably in transport, employment, tourism and agriculture. (There is not a single Conservative seat in the Highlands and Islands, nor since the Kincardine and Deeside by-election in the Northeast.) Even positive developments in the 1980s like Glasgow’s city-centre renewal are recognized as the product of public action. The Health Service is, on the whole, better in Scotland; and in many respects so is education. Almost half of the housing stock is still in the public sector and this has helped cushion Scotland against the effect of high interest rates. Most of middle- and working-class Scotland has reason to view collective provision positively. If anything, the demand is for the public sector to do more rather than less, not out of spineless dependency but because it is recognized that collective action can achieve much more than individual initiatives.

The experience of a Conservative government presiding over radical deindustrialization, reducing the power of local authorities and trade unions, and dedicated to competitive individualism, produced a growing convergence in political positions in Scotland among all except the more committed Tories. Many of those in the labour movement who had opposed a Scottish legislature were to change their position during the early eighties. In particular, those in local government who had feared that an Assembly would take power away from local authorities saw that power being sharply eroded by British government decisions over which they had no influence. The prospect of a Scottish government seemed far preferable. At the same time, public support for a Scottish parliament increased. From the mid eighties, support for full independence rose in opinion polls to around a third and has remained at that level. Support for the status quo has seldom risen above 20 per cent. The shift in mood was not only expressed politically but also culturally. Most of those working in the arts were sympathetic to the Scottish national dimension, and in the highly successful popular-music scene there has been much explicit support for nationalism.

The political positions of the opposition parties had converged, then, and this reflected the public mood. The real dividing line in Scottish politics was that separating the Conservatives from everyone else. Not only were they differentiated by their social and economic policies, but also by their adoption of an entrenched, hard-line position against any form of Scottish constitutional change, despite the fact that such change was supported by around half of those who remained Conservative voters. However, although the policies of the opposition parties increasingly converged, the jostling for electoral advantage meant that much of the political debate was concerned with in-fighting among those parties favouring change.

The Campaign for a Scottish Assembly was set up after the 1979 election. It was a response to the problems that had emerged during the Referendum campaign, namely the failure to achieve concerted action and the need to address some of the substantive issues on which the Scotland Act had been less than satisfactory. The idea of a constitutional convention was discussed by the csa in the early eighties. It had the attraction of enabling the debate on change to be initiated and managed in Scotland, and of offering a way of producing a consensus around which all those supporting change could rally. After the 1987 election, it was decided that while cross-party cooperation would be difficult, there was unlikely to be a more opportune time. The csa invited a group of respected Scots from different backgrounds to state the case for a convention and present proposals for its establishment. This committee was chaired by Sir Robert Grieve, a distinguished regional planner and former chairman of the Highlands and Islands Development Board. Its secretary, Jim Ross, was a former senior Scottish Office civil servant. The report—A Claim of Right for Scotland— was a well-argued critique of the excessively centralized and undemocratic nature of the British state, as well as a committed statement on the need for a Scottish parliament. It recommended that the membership of a convention should include all Scottish mps and meps, representatives of local authorities and major interest groups. The democratic legitimacy of the convention would arise from the fact that the great majority of its members were elected representatives. The convention remit would be to produce proposals for a Scottish parliament and to campaign for their implementation.