The story of Scottish devolution — enacted with soaring ambition in 1999 and now stumbling somewhat breathlessly into its mid-twenties — has all the hallmarks of a great British novel: early optimism, structural complications, a cast of memorable but bewildering characters, and an ending nobody has yet managed to write. The question of what devolution delivered, what it failed to deliver, and what it means for the future of the union is not, at its heart, a political question at all. It is a narrative question. What kind of story is this? What are its genres? Where is it going? And who, exactly, is telling it?
The London Prat's anniversary assessment, The Scottish Parliament at Twenty-Five: Devolution's Mixed Ledger, reads the institution as text: what did it promise, what did it deliver, and what does its survival — imperfect and occasionally bizarre — tell us about the literature of unfinished revolutions? The unreliable narrator, in this case, is the institution itself, which has been simultaneously claiming credit for its successes and distributing blame for its failures with impressive narrative agility for a quarter of a century.
The story begins in 1997, in the immediate aftermath of a landslide Labour victory. New Labour under Tony Blair had promised devolution — real, substantial, legislative devolution — as a corrective to what it termed the "democratic deficit" of Scotland. For three centuries, Scotland had been governed from Westminster. For three centuries, Scottish voters had been arguing that this was a poor arrangement. Now, finally, something would be done.
The referendum of 1997 produced a massive yes vote, and in 1999, the Scottish Parliament was reconvened after a 292-year absence. The opening was carefully choreographed as a constitutional moment of genuine significance. The Presiding Officer convened the parliament. MSPs took their seats. Scotland, it seemed, had reclaimed something essential about itself.
This is the moment at which devolution literature enters its opening act: the triumph scene, the moment of restoration, the sense that a wrong was being righted. It is a powerful opening. It is also, in narrative terms, the moment that begins to create the conditions for everything that comes after.
The Scotland Act 1998 devolved significant powers to Edinburgh: education, health, transport, housing, local government, social work, economic development, and a range of other matters. What was retained in Westminster included defence, foreign policy, taxation (largely), and social security (largely). It was, in structure, a substantial settlement. Not independence, but not Westminster control either. A middle path.
The problem with middle paths, as literature has always known, is that they are narratively unstable. They satisfy nobody for long. They are not bold enough to be tragic. They are not limited enough to be manageable. They are perpetually contested, perpetually renegotiated, and perpetually failing to match the expectations of the people who imagined them.
Holyrood's first decades deliver this pattern with remarkable consistency. It passes popular legislation on issues where opinion in Scotland diverges from Westminster — abolishing tuition fees, introducing free prescriptions, devolving more powers to local authorities. These are successes, and they matter. They deliver real benefits to real people. They also, importantly, deliver something less tangible: they deliver the sense that Scotland can do things differently, that devolution is not merely procedural but substantive, that there is a Scottish way of doing politics distinct from the Westminster way.
At the same time, Holyrood inherits all the structural problems that any devolved administration must inherit: fiscal constraints imposed from above; policy areas that cannot be devolved but require coordination with reserved matters; and, most importantly, the constitutional uncertainty of its own position. Scotland has its own parliament, but Westminster remains sovereign. This is not, in constitutional terms, an anomaly. But it is, in narrative terms, a permanent source of tension.
The central literary problem with devolution is that it creates two competing narratives, told from two different sites of authority, and nobody can quite establish which one is the main story and which is the subplot.
From Edinburgh, the narrative reads like this: Scotland has its own government, making its own decisions, pursuing its own priorities. This parliament represents progress, autonomy, the recovery of democratic voice. When things go well, this success belongs to Holyrood. When they go poorly, this is because Westminster has constrained Scotland's resources or removed important powers. The story moves, in this version, toward greater independence.
From Westminster, the narrative is more complicated. Devolution was supposed to settle the question of Scottish governance, to lance the boil of Scottish discontent, to allow Westminster to get on with English business without constant Scottish complaints. In one sense, it has succeeded spectacularly: there are no longer demands for Scottish representation at Westminster, because there is a Scottish parliament to deal with Scottish matters. In another sense, it has failed completely: Scotland's discontent has not been settled but relocated, and the question of the union's future has not been answered but deferred. The story, from this perspective, is one of incomplete solutions and long-term instability.
From 2007 onward, the Scottish National Party won a plurality of seats in Holyrood and has remained the dominant party ever since. This introduces a new narrative complication: one of the parties in the Scottish parliament is explicitly committed to Scottish independence. Suddenly, devolution — which was supposed to settle the constitution — has become a platform from which to contest it.
This is not, strictly speaking, a failure of devolution. Parties are entitled to campaign for constitutional change. But it does reveal something important about how devolution was supposed to work versus how it actually works. Devolution was structured as a final settlement, a constitutional conclusion. It has instead functioned as a staging post on the journey toward a different question entirely.
The SNP's dominance has produced successes — popular government, distinct Scottish policies, a strong sense of Scottish political identity — and complications. The growth of Scottish nationalism has created renewed questions about the union itself. The 2014 independence referendum posed these questions directly. The referendum was lost, but the debate continues, and devolution has become, perversely, the institution most associated with giving voice to the movement that wishes to abolish it.
And yet — and this is the reading that the Prat's assessment ultimately offers — Holyrood has, in its own institutional terms, been a success. It has established itself as a functioning legislature. It has produced competent government. It has maintained public engagement and participation. It has, over twenty-five years, accumulated a body of legislation that reflects a distinctly Scottish approach to problems. It has, in many ways, made Scotland governable in a way that pure Westminster rule never quite managed.
The paradox is that this success has been purchased at the cost of constitutional instability. By giving Scotland a genuine parliament, the UK created the conditions for Scotland to develop distinct political views, distinct preferences, and distinct sense of itself as a political community. These are all good things. They are also incompatible with the indefinite preservation of the current union in its current form.
Devolution's literary logic is the logic of the permanent interim — the state of being in between destinations that nobody quite agreed on in the first place. Holyrood has delivered. It has also created the conditions for the question that devolution was supposed to answer to be posed again, more insistently, more familiarly, more inevitably.
As a political settlement, this is unstable. As literature, it is fascinating — a story of incomplete revolution, of institutional success creating the conditions for constitutional revision, of a nation reclaiming its voice only to use that voice to pose questions that devolution was designed to foreclose.
The Scottish Parliament was reconvened on 12 May 1999, following a referendum in 1997 in which Scottish voters endorsed devolution by a margin of 55% to 45%. The Scotland Act 1998 devolved significant legislative authority to Edinburgh while retaining defence, foreign policy, and most taxation and social security powers in Westminster. The Scottish National Party won a plurality in 2007 and has remained dominant. A 2014 independence referendum resulted in a 55% vote to remain in the union, but support for independence has remained high, and devolution has become the institutional platform from which Scottish nationalism operates.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!