Family recollection (Scottish Review 2001)
Come on, my lads and lasses, there’s so much work to do and we must all work even harder.
Orr addressing his staff in Washington, where he was director-general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation after the second world war
For the few readers who don’t know which mainland local authorities have no railway stations, they are: Midlothian and Scottish Borders.
The world of the children 1
Kenneth Roy
The world of the children 2
Angus Skinner and others
The world of the children 3
Maggie Mellon
I spend a lot of time looking at old copies of Scottish newspapers. This is depressing – for the quality of Scotland’s print media has palpably worsened even since the early 1990s – but also occasionally revelatory. I thought this while perusing a recent collection of the late Arnold Kemp’s erudite, and still pertinent, commentary, and again while digesting a 1989 book review by the late Liberal leader Jo Grimond.
Reviewing David Steel’s memoirs, Grimond mused that the politics of Scotland were ‘rather like those of the Liberal Party’. He explained:
Many of those active in the various movements for devolution or independence don’t want to achieve anything. They want to paddle their own small canoes and argue in the correspondence columns of the Scotsman. Like Liberals they endlessly debate their own affairs and latch onto bizarre schemes.
So far, so accurate, but it was the next section that really resonated, describing the likely dynamic of a devolved Scottish parliament should it actually exist:
Could anything be more peculiar than that a British government should decide what taxes are to be levied and that a Scottish government should spend them? The children are to be allowed to decide whether to spend the money which daddy gives them on lollipops or toy trains but daddy decides what money is available.
Grimond had foreseen the anomalous situation of a devolved parliament spending, but not raising, its own revenue. Since 1999 this has given rise to a lively and continuing debate about so-called fiscal autonomy, the idea being that in order to be truly fiscally ‘responsible’, then Holyrood ought to do both.
Lord Steel of Aikwood, of whom I’ve just published a biography, applied himself to these issues in a 2006 report called ‘Moving to Federalism: A New Settlement for Scotland’. Steel said it amounted to a ‘new, modern settlement for Scotland in the UK based on more federal principles’.
Although certainly a young man in a hurry when it came to Liberal politics, Steel realised such things took time, but remarkably, by the time a Scottish parliament was established in 1999, most of what he had proposed in 1968 – a Scottish affairs select committee and Scottish grand committee meeting in Edinburgh – had come to pass. A truly federal UK proved a more elusive goal.
Incremental reform, however, remains a hallmark of the British constitution. More powers continue to flow to Wales, Scotland and certain English cities, while last week Downing Street indicated it was open to the idea of a wide-ranging convention that might come up with a new constitutional settlement for not just Scotland or England, but the whole United Kingdom.
Steel, of course, chaired the Scottish Constitutional Convention (SCC) in the late 1980s and early 90s. He wasn’t to everyone’s taste. ‘He has not been identified with Scottish politics for 15 years – he has been a UK politician,’ sniffed the then SNP leader Gordon Wilson. ‘Now he wants to take up a Scottish job in his retirement.’
Nevertheless, Steel presided on 30 March 1989 when 150 people, including more than 50 Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs (though not, importantly, the SNP) queued up to sign the ‘Claim of Right’ at the end of the SCC’s first meeting at the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh. In retrospect, it was little more than political posturing, but then symbolism in politics has always been important. It was even echoed by the ‘yes’ campaign’s independence declaration earlier this year.
Steel, however, was not a details man. He saw himself as a figurehead rather than someone who would provide day-to-day stewardship of the convention. And although the SCC did come up with a unanimously agreed blueprint for Scottish self-government, it was inevitably rejected by John Major’s government and, when the Conservatives unexpectedly won the 1992 general election, the whole exercise appeared to have been a waste of time.
Few politicians, let alone leaders of small opposition parties, live to see anything for which they’ve spent a lifetime campaigning actually reach fruition. Nationalists – most of whom have long coveted independence rather than the reigns of devolved government – might not be as lucky.
David Torrance is the author of ‘David Steel: Rising Hope to Elder Statesman’, which has just been published by Biteback
