Paula Surridge

The Scottish Parliament

In the run-up to the general election the Labour Party had promised Scotland a referendum on the establishment of a Parliament and, shortly after taking over government, passed legislation allowing the referendum to take place. Held on the 11 September 1997, the referendum asked people in Scotland to vote on two issues: whether or not a Parliament should be established and whether a Parliament should have tax varying powers. Scotland awoke on the 12 September to the news that the people had supported both propositions by impressive majorities.

Introduction: the Distinctiveness of Scottish Politics

‘There shall be a Scottish Parliament’. So began clause one of the 1997 Scotland Bill. The election of a Labour government in May 1997 with a record majority — after 18 years of Conservative rule — provided the opportunity for constitutional change which many political activists in Scotland had campaigned for over a long period of time. The White Paper on a Scottish Parliament published in July, soon after the election, corresponded very closely to the proposals for constitutional reform discussed and agreed during the years of the Scottish Constitutional Convention and contained in the Convention’s final report, Scotland’s Parliament, Scotland’s Right (SCC, 1995). Anxieties were allayed surrounding Labour’s decision in 1996 to hold a two-question referendum on a Scottish Parliament and on its proposed tax powers, if elected, as were fears that the party would not honour many of its pre-election promises on the issue (see Chapter Two). The results of the referendum which followed in September were, according to Donald Dewar, the Secretary of State for Scotland, beyond his wildest dreams. In accordance with the government’s planned timetable, the Scotland Bill was published in December 1997 before being presented to the House of Commons in January 1998. The first elections were scheduled for May 1999 so that the Scottish Parliament could be fully operational from the year 2000. The setting up of a Parliament in Scotland, almost 300 years since the Treaty of Union, marks an important turning point and the beginning of another and significant phase in the development of Scottish politics.

The 1997 General Election: Background, Campaign, Results, Consequences

The morning after the 1997 general election in Scotland stands in sharp contrast to that following the election in 1992. After a campaign that seemed to have lasted for the intervening five years, people in Scotland woke up to the news not just of a Labour victory and a record majority in the House of Commons, but to the fact that not one candidate from the Conservative Party had been elected to represent a Scottish constituency. While a Tory wipe-out was predicted by a few more foolhardy commentators in 1992, no such speculation was being made in 1997 in spite of evidence from the opinion polls showing the Conservatives in a very weak position and the fact that the party had performed badly in the European and local elections in 1995. Indeed there was a cautious air about the pre-election predictions in Scotland. The memory of 1992, when the Conservatives actually increased their percentage vote and number of seats in Scotland, still haunted those who had looked forward to a change of government. The reason for this caution can be explained partly by the central role of the constitutional question in Scottish politics and by the belief that so much was at stake. For political opponents of the Conservatives, the object was not just to replace the government but to have an opportunity to fulfil some of the hopes and aspirations for home rule in Scotland.

The Future of Scottish Politics

Speculation about the future of Scottish politics is easy; prediction is much more difficult. This final chapter attempts to predict on the basis of the speculations of the respondents to two surveys: the Scottish Election Survey and the Scottish Referendum Survey, both of 1997. These speculations are much more relevant to the future of Scottish politics now than they might have been in the past, because the new Scottish Parliament will allow popular views about the future to influence that future as never before. Nevertheless, even in a democracy the future is not determined by speculation, however representative; in particular, the imagination which people bring to bear on politics will itself change in response to the coming of the Parliament, whereas the views we summarise here have largely been formed by the existing constitutional structures and ways of making policy.

Social Structure, Identity and Voting Behaviour

In Chapters One and Two we outlined the background to the 1997 general election in Scotland. In this chapter we present the first of our results from the 1997 Scottish Election Survey, a nationally representative survey of 852 members of the Scottish electorate. (Further details of the survey are in the Appendix.) We begin by looking at how the behaviour and attitudes of the electorate in Scotland changed between the 1992 and 1997 general elections; we then go on to look at the reasons people in Scotland gave for their vote at the 1997 general election. In the second part of the chapter we focus on sociological explanations of voting behaviour (Barry, 1970). We focus first on the social structure of Scotland, to assess the extent to which voting behaviour in Scotland is explicable in terms of social location. In this section we look at the impact of a range of indicators of social location to assess their impact on voting behaviour. Second, we examine the contribution of identity to voting behaviour. In this section we are concerned to look at both the influence of identity on voting behaviour and the ways in which different social identities interact to either cross-cut or reinforce each other. In this as in the chapters which follow we try to set the position in Scotland within the comparative framework of the rest of Great Britain. Thus, not only are we concerned with the way these factors influence voting behavior in Scotland but we are also interested in whether these factors operate differently in Scotland from elsewhere in Great Britain. For example, is the effect of feeling a sense of working class identity the same in Scotland as in England and Wales, or is there a greater tendency for those in Scotland who feel working class to support Labour?