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meanwhile, mysteriously lost momentum.
The result was that by 1994, when Tony Blair was elected party leader, a commitment to
Scottish devolution was inevitable. "Tony had to do it" said one Labour politician from Scotland.
"If you had held a free vote anytime, a secret ballot in the Scottish Parliamentary Labour Party
you would not have had a majority for devolution, but none of them could admit it in public"
commented a then-senior Labour MP in 2002. No Labour leader could avoid supporting it, and
vocal Labour opposition to devolution was confined to party mavericks such as Tam Dalyell MP,
a habitual rebel and leader of the 1979 opposition to devolution. This time there was no oxygen
among regional organizations for anti-devolutionist sympathy within Labour. Blair, cautious as
always, determined that there would be a referendum (as against only legislation) and that it
would ask both if there should be a parliament and if it should have its tax-varying powers. This
created a storm– the Scottish party, forging ahead of its English leader (the reverse of 1979) was
outraged even if Blair’s tactic immunized the party against charges of breaking up the union and
raising taxes. The Scottish Labour executive, in a nice reversal of the 1970s, locked Blair into
three hours of personal debate over the decision and then only voted 16-12 to support the two-
question initial referendum (Harvie and Jones 2000:172-174).
This account focuses on the development of the devolutionist consensus within the
majority party-- Labour-- and among powerful social organizations. The analysis largely ignores
the SNP because the SNP only modified Labour strategy in these years-- it was an "agenda-
setter" (Newell 1998). The SNP had a goal that regional organizations would not sign up for and
as a party without their alliances was unstable and destabilizing. The 1988 Govan victory helped
Labour devolutionists push the debate up the agenda, but otherwise the SNP excluded itself in
these years (and in 1988, its subsequent by-election losses took the heat off Labour, even though
Labour continued with devolution). What was taking place within the SNP? In these years, as the
devolutionist coalition solidified, the SNP was pursuing a very different strategy summarized in
its disastrous 1992 electoral slogan “Free by ‘93" (Donald Dewar, joked that the slogan was a
good one because the SNP could recycle it every ten years) (Lynch 2002:198). The SNP’s
problem, as usual, was that its dependence on a mobilized activists base left it open to their
shifts. The intense frustration they felt throughout the Thatcher and Major governments and the
early-1990s sense, created by the fall of the Soviet bloc, that there was a “springtime of the
nations” led them to support a flatly secessionist strategy. Their pragmatic new leader (and
former early-1980s leftist schismatic) Alex Salmond opposed the strategy, since the SNP would
clearly not be the Scottish majority party, but his pragmatism was overruled by activist sentiment
(Lynch 2002:192-200).
Convention