It’s 1997. Legislative devolution isn’t part of New Labour’s manifesto, so it never happens:

No Holyrood in Scotland. No £440 million spent on the ugliest building in Scotland. (That alone should have been enough to tell Scots where all this was going). No £100 million a year just running the assembly. No £770 million spent running the Scottish Parliament last year. No billions of pounds spent over the past 25 years, just to hear a bunch of non-entities, from all parties, flap their gums and make bad laws.

No renaming an assembly as a ‘Government’. No jumped-up job descriptions and huge salaries for people who could not find employment elsewhere. No slow pans of ‘ministers’ walking into Bute House to take up do-nothing positions.

No SNP rising to power at Holyrood in Scotland and abusing their devolved remit to falsely claim a mandate and push for separation from the rest of the UK. No constitutional power grabs. No danger to the UK’s constitutional, economic, social and military integrity. No lie that breaking up the UK is a noble endeavour. No blaming EVERY SINGLE THING on ‘Westminster’.

No divisive referenda: Salmond is unable to get a referendum on just 25% of the vote. None of the endless de facto referendum schemes that separatists have tried to use to game the system in their favour and still lose.

No 18 years of SNP misrule in which almost all areas of Scottish domestic policy have been ravaged by incompetence. Our children better educated; our businesses thriving because of no constitutional uncertainty; a police force that serves the population, rather than its political masters.

No Nicola Sturgeon and her husband. No criminal investigations nor embezzlement charges. No selfie tours.

No Humza Yousaf. No platform to promote the aims of Palestinian terrorists. No repressive Hate Crimes Bill.

No John Swinney.

Ferries delivered on time.

No misdirections about what is devolved and what is not. No grandstanding on international issues.

The same taxes as people in other parts of the UK.

No broken electoral system that put a tiny minority of extremist Greens in power. No Patrick Harvie or Maggie Chapman. No push to sexualise or mutilate school children. No Lorna Slater. No Bottle Deposit Return Scheme. Scots would be spared the disgusting sight of foreigners who come to the UK to take advantage of all its benefits and then try to break up our country.

No pandering to the EU and endless cherry-picked comparisons to .

No centralization of power in Edinburgh, away from local authorities.

No constant whining about ‘democracy denial’ from people who lost the referendum fair and square.

No venue for toxic separatism to promote itself, using the power, funding and prestige of government. No normalization of toxic separatism itself, an ideology based on greed and amplified grievance that attracts the worst lazy, incompetent, fact-challenged, economically-illiterate, divisive fanatics in Scottish society.

No abuse from these same toxic separatists claiming anyone against their failed plan is a ‘traitor’, ‘quisling’, ‘house jock’ or ‘should go back to England’. (Isn’t that enough of a reason to say no in its own right?)

Not to mention the appeasement of separatism from the media and opposition politicians.

All this has combined to create a parliament that is, to many Scots, more remote than Westminster ever was. A bloated, expensive and remote talking shop that spends inordinate amounts of time and money debating and enacting bad laws, while imposing higher taxes and continuously grandstanding on foreign affairs, when all Scots want is for local services to be carried out more effectively.
Scotland would be in a far, far better place if, back in 1997, The Labour Party had just said no and not indulged the soft nationalism of its Scottish MPs. They were warned.

No IRA/ Sinn Fein rising to power (First Minister and ruling party). at Stormont
and using this power as a justification and platform to claim a mandate for separating Ulster from the rest of the UK and placing it under Dublin’s control with vastly increased ability, something they wouldn’t have the ability to do at all without Stormont

No Plaid Cymru (Welsh separatists) pushing the ruling Labour Party towards separating Wales from the rest of the UK and using the increased public exposure legislative devolution has given them to push more aggressively for separation (as the SNP have done on Scotland).

A FAR, FAR BETTER WORLD.
WE CAN STILL ACHIEVE THIS HAPPY STATE BY PUSHING FOR THE ABOLITION OF LEGISLATIVE DEVOLUTION.

How?

Could we possibly try to persuade a UK political party to include the abolition of the devolved legislatures, Holyrood, the Welsh ‘parliament’ and Stormont (LEGISLATIVE devolution) and its replacement with administrative devolution in their manifesto for a future general election? If this party won an election on a manifesto pledge to abolish legislative devolution, then that would give them a cast-iron democratic mandate to do so. A referendum win would also provide a cast-iron democratic mandate for abolition of legislative devolution.

Once a future government has won a mandate for abolition through a general election victory based on a manifesto promise to do so, or a referendum win, the path to ending devolution is straightforward and clear. Under UK Constitutional Law, all that is required to end the existence of the devolved legislatures is to introduce an act into parliament that repeals the original acts that set up devolution in the first place and that would be it-no more Holyrood, Welsh ‘parliament’, or Stormont. It is important to note that there is absolutely no requirement under the Constitution to seek and receive the consent of the devolved legislatures beforehand.

ADMINISTRATIVE devolution keeps power and democracy localized to the constituent parts of the UK as they control their own purely local (i.e. Scottish, Welsh, and Ulster) matters. Anything that affects the entire UK would remain within the remit of the House of Commons. The Union is 100% guaranteed as there is no devolved legislature through which modern aggressive separatism, as personified by the SNP, can push for independence referenda, the fatal intrinsic flaw in LEGISLATIVE devolution and undeniably the case in Scotland.

Administrative devolution is the establishment of Government Offices for the Regions, or, pre-1999, the practice of transferring responsibilities from central government departments to territorial departments and their Ministers (i.e. Secretary of State for Scotland etc) of the same Government. It is a form of administrative decentralization. It has been going on since the 1880s, with the creation of the Scottish Office (in 1885) and the delegation of certain limited administrative functions of government to Wales. The Council for Wales and Monmouthshire was established in 1949 to advise the UK Government on matters of Welsh interest and in 1951 the post of Minister of Welsh Affairs was created. Ulster was the exception to this. A Parliament of Northern Ireland was set up in 1921 and given the power to legislate over almost all aspects of Ulster’s affairs, with only a few matters excluded from its remit, the most important of which were succession to the Crown, the declaration of war (and peace), the armed forces, honours, naturalization, some central taxes and postal services. It was abolished in 1972.

This process of gradually de-centralizing power away from Westminster out to organizations and individuals (like the Secretaries (of State) and Offices for the various parts of the Union) to constituent parts of the UK has been going on since the beginning of the Union (with Scotland) in 1707. This function was first created after the Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707. It was abolished in 1746, following the Jacobite rising of 1745. Scottish matters thereafter were managed by the Lord Advocate until 1827 when responsibility passed to the Home Office. In 1885, the post of Secretary for Scotland was re-created, with the incumbent usually a member of the Cabinet. In 1926, this post was upgraded to a full Secretary of State appointment.

There is no reason why this process of enabling the various parts of the UK (Scotland, Wales and Ulster) to control their own local matters whilst the national UK Parliament (Westminster) controls matters that affect the whole UK can’t be rolled out across Scotland, Wales and Ulster. It would enable the constituent parts of the UK (Scotland, Wales, and Ulster) to control their own purely local (i.e. Scottish, Welsh, and Ulster matters) whilst 100% guaranteeing the Union, as there is no devolved legislature through which anti-UK separatism can rise to power and push for separation with greatly enhanced ability, the major intrinsic fatal flaw in LEGISLATIVE devolution (the type that exists now). Thus, ADMINISTRATIVE devolution does not pose any threat to the unitary (single) constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom.

This is real autonomy within the UK and 100% guarantees the unitary constitutional integrity of the UK, as described above.

(Does not represent the view of Scotland Matters)