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were run by old Tory matrons...the very picture of nice little Edinburgh ladies with old-fashioned
ideas" and "they were all Tory donors" griped two different health services managers, in 1998
and 2002, illustrating at least perceptions.
In these years, the activities of the central state directly challenged the autonomy and
environmental stability of key Scottish regional organizations– professions, the public sector,
unions, local government, and many quangos. It did this by making policy inimical to their
preferences and without consulting them. They were destabilized by the prospect of major
changes being made without their input, and they lost autonomy in the changes as the
government sought to control organizations better to push its preferences. They resisted with
individual campaigns, whether that of Strathclyde against water privatization, the British
Medical Association (BMA) against NHS reform, or local governments against restructuring and
the broad Scottish coalition against the poll tax. The Scottish press fulminated (the Herald, once
the organ of the West of Scotland Unionist business class, gave a weekly column in the 1990s to
Marxist-nationalist Tom Nairn).
From policy debate to constitutional debate
All these changes in the structure of Scottish governance elicited a reaction stronger than
individual campaigns– they swung regional organizations to support for formal devolution as a
guarantee against more such experiences. The climate in Scotland changed increasingly as the
legitimacy and infrastructure of a range of regional organizations became available to support
devolutionists. Thatcherism demonstated that informal autonomy in a formally centralized state
carried the one great drawback that when the central state decided to abrogate that informal
autonomy, there was no way to resist. So Scottish elites, subjected to central assaults, started to
seek formal autonomy to buttress their defenses. To some extent, this coincided with the revival
of the SNP, but the timing of SNP surges and their strength relate poorly to the development of
the Scottish consensus or its content, while the activities of the central state relate
chronologically and in the dramatis personae.
The process involved two rough groups of regional organizations. First there were the
directly participating, “political” organizations such as the Church of Scotland, local
government, newspapers, and the STUC. These organizations were already involved in politics,
accustomed to mounting public campaigns and deriving political force from them, and they had
little to lose by participating directly in a campaign. Second there were other Scottish regional
organizations not accustomed to taking public stances on major political issues; they might lobby
Convention