How Devolution Has Shaped Young Scottish People’s Views on the UK Union
Written by Stephen Bailey.
There’s now a generation of young UK citizens who have grown up and had their formative experiences and influences entirely since the introduction of legislative devolution in the late 1990s.
They have lived their entire lives under the current constitutional arrangements and the subsequent constitutional crisis they have provoked, never knowing anything different.
This can have a negative effect on their outlook as regards constitutional matters. After all, they haven’t lived through the experiences that shaped previous generations’ outlook on constitutional matters such as a desire to maintain the UK.
Neither have they been made aware of the real issues that lie behind the UK Constitution and a desire to keep the UK together. They have had separatist extremists bombard them with skewed propaganda that manipulates them into a distorted, historically-inaccurate view that to be patriotic they have to hate the UK.
They are being forced and manipulated down a path that could eventually lead to them erroneously backing ‘independence’ and they are being deprived of any kind of balanced outlook.
The increasingly cultish and authoritarian SNP seem pathologically intent on acting like the totalitarian regimes of 1930s and 40s Europe. They are indoctrinating the young, so they are incapable of thinking independently so that the SNP can control them and manipulate them into backing and voting for ‘independence’.
This situation should greatly concern anybody who wants to maintain the UK.
It is an urgent task to counter this undemocratic, sinister manipulation by the SNP (and the anti-UK separatists in other parts of the UK, Wales and Ulster) and educate the young in the real issues surrounding constitutional matters.
A STABLE UK UNION
During the period before the introduction of legislative devolution in the late 1990s, the whole of UK culture and politics was, in the main, reflective of a pan-UK ethos.
Anybody over forty years of age will have been brought up in an era when the concept of a unitary (single) UK with the House of Commons as the national legislature and the House of Lords as the revising chamber was fairly solid – with perhaps the exception of Ulster (‘Northern Ireland’), where a minority of the population wanted control by the Dublin Government.
On the mainland UK, there was occasional constitutional uncertainty and danger.
For example, the debates on devolution in the mid to late 70s, during the Callaghan Labour administration, provided an occasional moment of uncertainty over the status of the UK Constitution. There had also been some committees set up in Parliament in the 1960s to look into constitutional change, which were not acted on. But, by and large, the constitutional question was settled.
In schools, colleges, and universities, young UK citizens were taught about the UK’s millennia-old history and traditions. Even though there are local differences within the Anglo-Celtic story of the British Isles, generally speaking, there was a homogeneous UK culture and historical narrative that the vast majority of UK citizens subscribed to, in varying degrees and, perhaps, with a few caveats here and there.
There were other versions of UK history and of course, since the 1960s, some elements had been increasingly active in their attempts to demolish what they sneeringly dismissed as the ‘Whig version’ of UK history. But the majority of her citizens saw the UK as a single unitary entity with a common UK-wide culture, some regional variations notwithstanding.
Importantly, this belief in a pan-UK culture was transmitted from the older generations down to the young, and so in this way, the UK remained a unified political entity as the young learnt what it meant to be a UK citizen and were imbued with a sense of, and a healthy (but not excessive or disproportionate) pride in, concept of a unified United Kingdom, rather than just their own particular part of it.
THE FRINGE MOVES TO THE MAINSTREAM
Some people weren’t satisfied with the UK’s constitutional make-up like the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales and IRA/Sinn Fein plus the SDLP in Ulster, but they were mostly composed of fringe eccentrics and student ideologues with no experience of how the real world works.
Consequently, these people enjoyed risible levels of support from the UK public and were no more credible than the Monster Raving Loony Party. They were rightly consigned to the margins of UK politics.
The vast majority of people in the UK either believed, or went along with, the concept of a unitary United Kingdom (i.e. a single country) with legislative sovereignty invested in the UK National Parliament at Westminster (and ultimate political sovereignty (or the ability to decide who governs the country) residing with the electorate across the entire UK).
So it can be said that up to the late 1990s, the UK’s Constitutional arrangements were stable and whilst some minority dissent existed, the vast majority of the public were either happy with, or went along with, these arrangements. They worked well, with perhaps a few caveats here and there, but nothing was seriously wrong with the UK’s Constitution.
Except for a few minority extremists, eccentrics and cranks, this situation persisted until the late 1990s.
THE RISE OF ANTI-UK SEPARATISM
Anti-UK separatism has existed since the Union’s inception, but before the advent of legislative devolution in the late 1990s it was a tiny, extremely unimportant group of extremists and eccentrics, and was perceived as such by the vast majority of people in the UK.
They made attempts to get their ideas across, but got more or less nowhere as people in the UK were generally far too sensible to believe what were (and still are), unrealistic theories with no practicable viability.
They had limited electoral success (extremely limited in Plaid Cymru’s case in Wales) and were prevented from forcing their unwanted ideas on an unwilling UK public by the nature of the UK’s legislature; the Houses of Commons and Lords were the only law-making and revising chambers and the few nationalists that got elected to office in the Commons were contained by the overwhelming majority of Unionist MPs in the Chamber.
LEGISLATIVE DEVOLUTION
It was the introduction of legislative devolution by Tony Blair’s New Labour in the late 1990s that signalled the end of this era of stability.
New Labour ushered in a period of unparalleled instability and ill-considered constitutional change that was to have an extremely negative effect on the UK’s politics and society.
The New Labour government, which came into power after the General Election of 1997, was under the severely mistaken impression that the constitution of the UK was broken and needed fixing, a view that was not shared by the vast majority of the public.
Overall, they wanted to gerrymander elections by giving Scotland its own devolved legislature, so ensuring that she would vote Labour in perpetuity. Scotland’s voting power in the UK Union is decisive – like California’s in the USA. It can decide who will govern the entire UK.
They quickly set about putting their plans into action.
After a softening up campaign in which the real issues behind legislative devolution were either fudged or omitted completely – the most obvious of which was one Labour politician promising that legislative devolution would ‘kill nationalism stone dead’ – referendums were held in Scotland and Wales in 1997 and in Northern Ireland in 1998, which, not surprisingly, considering the preceding propaganda and misinformation campaign, returned ‘yes’ results.
All three constituent parts of the UK were then given their own devolved executives. Scotland received a Parliament and Wales and Northern Ireland got Assemblies. (The Welsh Assembly was later renamed to ‘Parliament’, then the ‘Senedd’).
This plan to secure perpetual political hegemony backfired on Labour as they were displaced as the dominant force in UK politics by the anti-UK SNP in the Holyrood election of 2007, as well as being all but wiped out in the House of Commons (though they later revived at the 2024 UK General Election).
It’s at this juncture that the UK’s traditions of unitary government, began to become eroded by separatist forces that deliberately set out to destroy the UK identity among the young because they desired to loosen the bonds of Union, and eventually destroy the UK as a single nation altogether.
These separatists adopted an extremely aggressive approach towards their goal of independence.
EDUCATING THE YOUNG
One method they employed to achieve their objective was to indoctrinate the young with biased propaganda that distorts the truth behind UK history and pushes a synthetic sense of grievance that Scotland was the victim of English imperialism-the Braveheart myth.
This bodes poorly for the future of a unitary UK and is extremely worrying for all who want to maintain the UK.
Inaction, complacency and apathy on this issue are just not an option and are extremely dangerous at this juncture. It’s the urgent task of all who want to maintain the UK Union to stand up and challenge this pernicious, cultish attempt by modern aggressive anti-UK separatism to subvert our country by undermining belief in its future among younger generations.
Let us teach the young the real narrative of the shared values that shape our nation and help create a truly united pan-UK that will exist into the future.
© 2017-2026 Stephen Bailey
