John Roughan: Power of a minority

The darkest hour, they say, is just before dawn. In Britain the darkest hour for national minorities arrived on the night of a general election 13 years ago.

The Labour Party had been expected to win. The Conservatives had replaced the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher with the tepid John Major but still looked like a government on borrowed time.

Labour was led by Neil Kinnock, the loudest Welsh opponent of "devolution', the limited self-government offered to Scotland and Wales at referendums in 1979 and rejected at that time by both.

But Labour was spooked by the loss of a 1988 by-election to the Scottish nationalists and it went to the 1992 election committed to offering Scotland and Wales another chance. This time the separatists were confident they could carry the day.

Their hopes were to be dashed when Labour lost the election largely on an issue of tax. That night was a disappointment to rank with the near miss of 1979, a result followed by a decade of despair.

"The 1980s were just awful for Scotland," recalled John Swinney, former leader of the SNP, when I interviewed him a few months ago in the course of research on how states might accommodate minority nationhood.

Thatcherism was hard on old industrial regions that steadily lost employment and population to the new service economy of the southeast. Economic depression on top of the referendum, Swinney said, nearly destroyed Scotland's spirit.

But after the 1992 disappointment "something important happened", he said.

"Instead of falling into despondency again, the Scots got mad. The day after the election there was a big rally in Glasgow against the loss of the referendum.

"The three pro-devolution parties, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and ourselves, got together on the same platform and resolved to drive for it. From then on there was a sense that devolution was not a matter of if but when."

By contrast with the 1980s, he said, "the 1990s became a great decade for Scotland. There was a cultural revival in literature, arts, music. Young men began getting married in kilts - that would never have happened in the 1980s."

When the next election arrived Tony Blair was leading the Labour Party and referendums in Scotland and Wales were scheduled within months of Labour taking office. The result, in Scotland at least, was a foregone conclusion.

The Scots now have a Parliament of 131 members, accommodated at controversial expense in a new glass edifice in Edinburgh. The Parliament elects an "executive" of 20 ministers served by a sizeable bureaucracy that runs Scotland's health, education, courts, police, transport, social work and anything else that was not specifically retained at Westminster.

Wales has a National Assembly also with a list of devolved activities but without the right to roam into areas not specified.

Those "grey areas" are being keenly exploited, according to Swinney. While foreign relations, for example, is one of the roles reserved for Westminster, the Scots can determine their own foreign aid programmes and they are using that to project their own international presence.

Taxation also remains with Westminster, though the Scottish Parliament can vary national income tax on its citizens up or down by 3 per cent. Even members of the Parliament concede their spending decisions could do with the discipline that comes from having to raise their own revenue.

Constitutionally the Parliament is not sovereign; its founding law, an act of the British Parliament, stipulates that in the event of conflict the will of Westminster will prevail. However, as a Scottish constitutionalist, Professor Neil MacCormick, puts it: "We shall see."

Westminster's ability to overrule a decision of the Scottish Parliament may depend on circumstances, he suggests. If Scottish opinion is clearly behind its Parliament, the British Government might hesitate to override it. Sovereignty is established in action as much as law.

So far, this prescription for limited self-government seems to be satisfying the national aspirations of this minority, 70 per cent of whom voted for devolution at the 1997 referendum. Only about a third of Scots want the full independence advocated by the Scottish Nationalist Party.

The SNP has run a distant second to Labour in the two general elections to the Scottish Parliament, losing seats at the second, in 2003. It finished third, behind Labour and the Liberal Democrat Party, in the number of Scottish seats in the House of Commons won at the elections this year.

The nationalists believe devolution was granted to take the heat out of demands for full independence and they take heart from the fact that the support for it in polls is no lower than it was 10 years ago.

Quite why any Scots feel the need for a separate political presence remains a mystery to me. They are five million people in a population of 60 million. Ethnically, their origins overlap those of the English and Scots are not visibly distinguishable from the rest of the British population. They speak the same language, albeit with their own accent - as do all other regions.

Unlike Wales, Scotland does not have an ancient language to call its own. Gaelic was never universally spoken. Like Wales, it has a distinct church but religion has not been a strong national glue for a century.

Within the 300-year-old partnership called the United Kingdom, Scotland has been able to preserve its own education system and its own legal procedures. It has its own literature, music, dress. Those could hardly be more distinctive or more well-known to the world if it were a sovereign nation.

But there is no denying national identity to people who feel themselves distinct and want to govern themselves. The Scottish experience is encouraging for national minorities elsewhere and has lessons, I think, for majorities everywhere who are tempted to ignore them.