IN order to understand the importance of the 1979 referendum it has to be placed in the context of Scottish and British politics in the 1960s and 70s.
The rise of the SNP in the 60s had taken the two main Unionist parties, Labour and the Conservatives, by considerable surprise. Their reactions varied between outright horror and a clamour to placate the angry Scots with what they called devolution.
READ MORE: 40 years on: Never forget how Scotland was cheated out of devolution
As early as 1968, the then prime minister Ted Heath had made his famous declaration of Perth in which he promised that the Conservatives would commit to a devolved assembly.
It has to be said that vow stunned many of his own party.
When Labour responded by setting up the Kilbrandon Commission to look at the constitution, Harold Wilson no doubt thought he had kicked the can of devolution far down the road. In 1973 the commission recommended what were effectively subordinate parliaments for Scotland and Wales, and after Margo MacDonald’s famous Govan by-election win for the SNP in 1973, Wilson included a commitment to devolution in the Labour manifestos in the two elections in 1974.
When the SNP won 11 seats in the October election in 1974, devolution became a priority – the Scots simply had to be bought off and brought to heel as Labour depended on Scottish seats for power. We also now know, thanks to The National’s publication this week of the McCrone Report in full, that both major parties knew how fantastically rich an independent Scotland would be.
Wilson kept his word and prepared what became the Scotland Act 1978 which gave the go-ahead for devolution as long as the people of Scotland backed it.
Labour and the SNP split over the issue – Jim Sillars MP broke away and formed the Scottish Labour Party while the SNP was riven by the argument between those who wanted independence there and then, and those who wanted devolution as a gradual route to independence.
Nobody really cared about the Liberals as they were in agonies over the tral of former leader Jeremy Thorpe for attempted murder. The position of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party fluctuated.
Despite Ted Heath’s earlier promise to back devolution, the Unionist tendency won out but on the day before the referendum, former prime minister Alex Douglas-Home promised a better devolution deal if people voted No. There was fat chance of that happening.
READ MORE: 40 years after Scots were denied devolution – 40 things that happened in 1979
As historian Catriona M M MacDonald wrote in The Oxford Companion to Scottish History: “Such flexibility of approach was soon to be abandoned when, in government, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher challenged the party’s earlier commitment to distinctive Scottish interests promoted by its Scottish MPs.”
The referendum being won, and lost, and with the Tories in power, Thatcher duly killed all talk of devolution stone dead. On July 26, 1979, the Commons voted to repeal the Scotland Act.
Once again Scotland was cheated by the unholy Unionist alliance of Labour and the Tories. It would be 18 years until the next referendum.
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