The Conservative commitment to devolution

Geoffrey Smith There is one particularly curious feature in the Conservative confusion over devolution : how lightly the party's commitment to the Principle of a Scottish assembly sits upon the shoulders of the average Conservative MP. The cynic will say that this is simply the Conservatives following Labour's course on Europe in objecting in Opposition to what they would have done in office. But while there is an element of truth in that, it is not the whole truth. Although the commitment was made nearly a decade ago, it has never really entered the party's bloodstream. It did not become part of the essential being of a Conservat ive. Why not ? Was the commitment itself equivocal ? Was it not made in the right Way? Was it not maintained as vigorously and faithfu 1 ly as might be supposed from Mr Heath's ringing tones of righteousness? How exactly did the Conservatives manage to Provide a declaration but to lack the faith ? The story begins with the appointment in June 1967 of the Government of Scotland ,,P°IleY Group under the chairmanship of Sir William McEwan Younger, then chairman and managing director of Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, later to be chairman of the Party in Scotland, a successful industrialist and for many years a pillar of the Scottish _ nservatives. This was not the first Conservative committee to consider how Scotland should be governed, but it was the first that mattered. The committee held itS first meeting on 14 December; and on 18 .,‘"tay 1968 Mr Heath as leader of the party delivered what has become known as his ueclaration of Perth to the Scottish Conservatives in which he came out in favour of a Scottish assembly. When any party leader is converted as cinicklY as that to major constitutional change it is not unreasonable to suspect that he May have made his mind up all the time, ;:t)retcl that the committee's function may have en simply to clothe the decision in a certain Procedural respectability. The suspicion

natural, but the facts in this instance are more complex. The best evidence that the

l'ontittee was not packed is that it did not ueSin its deliberations by favouring an assernbly. ,.0f the eleven members three were MPs— Mr Norman Wylie, now Lord Wylie, who n,...ad served for a few months as Solicitoreneral for Scotland before being elected to aarliament in 1964 and was later to be Lord dvocate; Mr Anthony Stodart, who had a en a junior minister at the Scottish Office And was later to be Minister of State for iligriculture; and Mr Esmond Wright, who IV won a by-election at Pollock in March 67 and was then something of a guru

among Scottish Conservatives. The committee was strong on the legal side, in addition to Mr Wylie; it was well balanced regionally and representative of the different sections of the party in Scotland, with the exception of what might be termed the hardcore Glasgow Tories—a costly omission, perhaps, as this element in the party has never been reconciled to devolution.

This was a committee that had obviously been put together with some care: on the parliamentary side by Mr Michael Noble, now Lord Glenkinglas, the Shadow Secretary of State, and by Mr George Younger, then deputy chairman of the party in Scotland; on the extra-parliamentary side by Sir Gilmour Menzies Anderson, chairman of the party in Scotland, Mr Robert Kernohan, then director-general of the party in Scotland, and by Mr Younger. The membership was approved by Mr Heath, but he did not make the selection. As Scottish Conservative committees go, this was an unusually powerful group. It was designed not to produce a particular answer but to examine all proposals for change with a constructive but realistic eye. Some of those setting it up were expecting the committee to take a hardheaded look at the idea of an assembly and then reject it.

Why, then, it might be asked, bother to set up such a committee at all ? In theory it was established in response to a resolution passed by the Conservative Central Council in Scotland earlier in the year. But the real reason was that the party felt in need of a new policy for Scotland without being sure what it should be. A number of those with ministerial experience of the Scottish Office were distressed by the failings of the existing system, in particular by how long it took to get legislation through the sluggish procedures of the Scottish Standing Committee. There was also a new popular mood developing in Scotland at that time. The Nationalists had polled surprisingly strongly in the Pollock by-election and then won at Hamilton in November after the McEwan Younger committee had been set up but before it had held its first meeting. They did very well in the Scottish local elections at the beginning of May 1968 just before the Declaration of Perth.

These SNP successes did not alarm the Scottish Tories because they still harboured the illusion that it would be Labour not themselves who would suffer. It was fashionable then to say that an SNP candidate took two votes from Labour to one from the Tory. But the rise of the Nationalists was part of a more general movement of Scottish opinion at that time which did not leave the Conservative ranks untouched. Private polls which the party had taken in the late 1960s showed that an overwhelming majority of Scottish Conservatives favoured some kind of devolution, though in a rather vague way. It was around this time that a number of younger Tories set up the Thistle Group rather than joining the Bow Group because they wanted a specifically Scottish organisation of their own. And the Thistle Group had actually published a pamphlet calling for a Scottish assembly before Mr Heath did so at Perth.

In this atmosphere the Conservatives had particular cause to try to assert their Scottish identity. They had lost ground north of the border at every election since the high point of 1955 when they had been the only party since the war to win a majority of both seats and votes in Scotland. There were a number of reasons for this fall from grace, but one of them was a sense that they were a party without deep roots in Scottish society as it was developing. Too many of their MPs struck the average Scot as Englishmen by adoption. So there was a natural desire to demonstrate that despite such appearances they were a truly Scottish party.

Mr Heath was often dissatisfied with the Conservative Party in Scotland, as indeed were many other Conservatives, but the impression he gave was of a man who had become alive to the difficulties of Scotland during his time in charge of regional policy as President of the Board of Trade in 1963 and 1964. He was not always sensitive to Scottish feelings—causing immense affront, for example, far beyond Nationalisi circles when he described the SNP as 'flower people with flower power'—but as party leader he spent an unusual amount of time north of the border. He appeared to become fascinated by the challenge presented by Scottish grievances and resentments, and to wish to respond constructively. He also hoped to pick up seats in Scotland.

But how ? He looked to the McEwan Younger committee to provide the answer. As the Scottish conference in Perth loomed closer so the pressure on the committee intensified. The party managers in Scotland felt it necessary for him to say something positive in the atmosphere engendered by Nationalist successes; and the impression Mr Heath himself gave at that time was of a man determined to come out firmly for or against an assembly. He had to be definite, he indicated to the committee. Which was it to be? The committee had decided at an early stage that some constitutional change was necessary, and after two of their members had visited Northern Ireland they concluded that a Stormont solution, with a separate executive and legislature, was not for Scotland. There were a few sympathisers with the Stormont idea on the committee, and one member remained in favour to the end, but the majority believed that the conditions which made it successful in Northern Ireland would not apply in Scotland. In any case, Stormont was beginning to have a bad name by then and the less radical the committee's proposals the better chance they seemed to stand of being accepted.

So when Sir William and Mr Esmond Wright explained their thinking to Mr Heath at a meeting in London, probably in late April or conceivably in early May, they proposed an assembly that would deal just with some stages of Scottish legislation. Mr Heath objected only to the suggestion that the assembly should be elected part directly and part indirectly. Such an assembly, he said, must be directly elected..

The proposals then went to the full Shadow Cabinet. At meetings on Wednesday 8 May, and the following Monday, 13 May, they had before them an interim report from the committee and a paper from Mr Noble analysing the report as well as summarising its conclusions. On the Wednesday, 15 May, Mr Heath presented a paper to the Shadow Cabinet giving the substance of what he intended to say at Perth, which was approved with a few minor amendments. The discussions on devolution took the greater part of all these meetings.

But all of them were held within ten days of the speech by the leader of the party committing the Conservatives to support a constitutional change of far-reaching implications. The discussions may have been intense, but they must have been hasty. Time was pressing and there was no opportunity for the period of reflection that is appropriate before a decision of such consequence.

Shadow Ministers knew, of course, of the existence of the McEwan Younger committee; but the committee itself was having to work against the calendar in order to produce its conclusions in time and there is no sign that most Shadow Ministers were sufficiently interested to keep in touch with its thinking before the interim report. They could still have rejected it. Why did they not ? Because some were positively convinced of the merits of the scheme and most failed to appreciate its full implications. They drifted casually into the commitment on the strength of three meetings within ten days.

It is remarkable how many of Mr Heath's colleagues at that time—by no means only those who regard him less than warmly now —either fail to recall the discussions at all or acknowledge that the issue made little impact upon them. If it seemed a good idea for Scotland, and Mr Heath wanted it, well then it would presumably be all right. It was another example both of the compartment

alised thinking of modern Cabinets and Shadow Cabinets and of the inattention with which English politicians tend to consider Scottish questions—and most of them seem to have seen this as simply another Scottish question, even though an important one.

That was true not just of the Shadow Cabinet but of the parliamentary party as a whole. The 1922 Committee was not consulted before the decision—though, in the way that policy was made those days, there was nothing remarkable about that—but even afterwards there was no volume of protest to the Whips, except from the minority of Scottish MPs, approximately a third, who remained adamantly opposed. From the English there was a rather distant acquiescence, with the striking exception of Mr Enoch Powell who in a speech at Prestatyn in September 1968 declared that unless Scotland or Wales wished to be separate nations Great Britain must be governed and administered as one nation.

At Perth on 18 May 1968, Mr Heath declared that the Labour Government should set up a small Constitutional Committee to examine proposals for the reorganisation of Scottish government. The Conservative Party would propose to such a Constitutional Committee the creation of an elected Scottish assembly—he did not specify whether elected directly or indirectly—to sit in Edinburgh as a single chamber and take part in legislation in conjunction with Parliament.

When the Government failed to act on his advice Mr Heath announced in July that he was himself setting up a committee under Sir Alec Douglas-Home of distinguished men and women, not all of them Conservative and not all of them Scots. There was a certain peculiarity, however, about this sequence of events. Was the committee to determine whether there should be an assembly, or simply what kind of assembly there should be? This point caused some difficulty before some members of the committee could be persuaded to serve. The committee got round this difficulty by the subtle formulation that it was open to it to reject the idea of an assembly altogether, but that its primary task was to recommend how it could work. That was a form of words that made it easy for doubters to serve, though it did not prevent Sir Charles Wilson and Professor J. D. B. Mitchell from expressing their disagreement early on and their dissent in the report.

Was Mr Heath's commitment to an assembly conditional upon the approval of the Douglas-Home committee? It• was the possibility of uncertainty on this score that forced the quiet withdrawal of a pamphlet produced by Conservative Central Office in Edinburgh explaining the Declaration of Perth, with lavish quotations from Mr Heath's speech. Lord Strathclyde, a former Minister of State for Scotland, and his son, Mr Tam Galbraith, MP, maintained that it was an open question until the committee had reported.

Much of the difficulty was that Mr Heath had not one but two purposes: to reform the system of government for Scotland and to make a political impact with proposals for doing so. Yet the methods appropriate for the one purpose were counter-productive for the other. To bring about a constitutional change of that consequence it is desirable to prepare the ground in advance so as to secure the requisite basis of consent. That means moving gradually, with the commitment not simply following the reports of whatever committees are deemed necessary but appearing to grow out of those reports as if it were an almost inevitable consequence. Yet in order to make a political impact it was necessary to say something definite at Perth. Hence the rush, which enabled opponents to attack the procedure as well as the substance. Hence the statement of principle on the basis of a party policY group's report which had not been published and whose proposals were acknowledged by Mr Heath in his speech to be at, that stage only tentative. Hence the need for another committee to take further both the examination of the issues and the preparation of public opinion.

The general topic of devolution was discussed at the famous Selsdon Park meeting of the Shadow Cabinet in JanuarY 1970. Then on 16 March Sir Alec presented his report to the full Shadow Cabinet, with the proposal for a directly elected Scottish Convention in Edinburgh that would take the second reading, committee and report stages of those Scottish Bills referred to it by Parliament.

The fact that it had been Sir Alec chairing this committee had made it all the easier for other Shadow Ministers not to bother too much about the Scottish issue themselves. It would be all right in his safe hands, wouldn't it ? Now, when he reported, there was not much time to pause for thought before the election was upon them. The report was published on 19 March and discussed again by the Shadow Cabinet on 8 April, when the chairman of the party in Scotland, Sir Gilmour Menzies Anderson. was present—as he had been at Selsdon Park. On 23 March and 27 April the ShadoIA' Cabinet examined drafts of the manifesto for the election that was to be held in June' The full manifesto, including the commit' ment on a Scottish assembly, was then considered by the party's Advisory Committee On Policy on 6 May. Later that month the Scottish Conservative conference accepted the Douglas-Home report by a large majority 'as a basis for implementing the policy of devolution.' So the manifesto commitment to Pot proposals before Parliament on the basis of the Douglas-Home report was Made' but made without positive enthusiasm frorn the party in England or the Shadow Cabinet as a whole. How the incoming Conservative Government then failed tn implement it will be examined in a further article next week.