Scottish devolution: Two decades on, confusion still reigns – Alastair Stewart

If you go on YouTube, there are some fantastic old videos of the debates around the devolution referendum in 1997. It’s a spotter’s guide for politicians you remember and those around today.

What no one could predict would be the utter misunderstanding that surrounds devolution today. Even the term itself is redundant, implying something taken from a centre and given away. Scottish political power is here to stay and it would be political suicide to even flirt with its withdrawal.

And yet ‘Bordergate’ and the backlash to the suggestion of a Scottish cordon sanitaire show the utter confusion around it. Most people can tell you what Edinburgh council is responsible for, but the competencies of the Scottish Parliament and Westminster are now a blur. The big beasts of the last five years – Brexit, the EU and now Covid – throw that notion out of the window.

Even the most seasoned politico must confess that there is nothing clear cut anymore about where the demarcation lines are. Has anyone stopped to think Brexit might have won the day because the EU is a mesmerisingly confusing behemoth making laws from afar? No one explained clearly what it actually did.

Even anecdotally it looks as if Brexit was a backlash against a feeling of loss when everyone else gained democratically. The failure of the last 20 years is the absence of an English Parliament for English issues. What’s clear is people often don’t know who to trust, they assume ‘oh, it’s political’. Expectations are always sky high for elections and ‘so and so’s going to get that done’, but it might be the wrong parliament.

Nearly all of the Covid-19 UK government briefings and even the official government statements from Number 10, have said ‘we’ or ‘our’ or ‘you’. Mostly this only meant England and Wales and yet we expect the public to do the work themselves and figure out which briefing applies to them at a time of national and global uncertainty.

Devolution is the tip of a confusing iceberg. Political parties with the same name but devolved parts result in head-scratching. Manifestos and political promises are always tainted with a preferred outcome. Brexit showed what happens when there’s confusion and now more than ever we need clear explanations as to who does what before asking for votes.

Ahead of the 2021 Scottish election, a significant investment should be made not only to explain the electoral system but reaffirm where decision-making is made. More than ever, the population has to be politically literate – it cannot weigh manifesto promises if it doesn’t understand how government works.

There is a huge amount of information available on YouTube and Wikipedia and government sites if you know where and how to look for it. But people need to be pre-emptively reached. We can do better than Noam Chomsky’s facetious bon mot: “The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”

A message from the Editor

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

In order for us to continue to provide high quality and trusted local news on this free-to-read site, I am asking you to also please purchase a copy of our newspaper.

Our journalists are highly trained and our content is independently regulated by IPSO to some of the most rigorous standards in the world. But being your eyes and ears comes at a price. So we need your support more than ever to buy our newspapers during this crisis.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our local valued advertisers - and consequently the advertising that we receive - we are more reliant than ever on you helping us to provide you with news and information by buying a copy of our newspaper.

Thank you

Joy Yates

Editorial Director