The 1997 to 1998 settlements were not designed from a single blueprint. Each one reflected the different history, legal system and political pressures of the nation concerned.
- Scotland has always had its own legal system, its own national church and its own education system, protected since the Acts of Union of 1706 to 1707. It also had a strong, long-running movement for self-government (the SNP had already been winning seats at Westminster since the 1970s). In the 1997 referendum, 74.3% of Scottish voters said yes to a Scottish Parliament with tax-varying powers. Because of this clear result, the Scotland Act 1998 gave the new Scottish Parliament full primary law-making powers right from the start.
- Wales does not have its own legal system, it shares one with England, and it had a much weaker tradition of nationalist politics. The 1997 referendum in Wales passed by only 50.3% to 49.7%, on a turnout of just 50.1%, a majority of fewer than 7,000 votes. Because the result was so close, the Government of Wales Act 1998 gave the new Welsh Assembly only secondary powers: it could put Westminster’s laws into practice, but it could not make brand new laws of its own. It took the Government of Wales Act 2006, a further referendum in 2011, and finally the Wales Act 2017 for Wales to catch up with Scotland’s level of powers.
- Northern Ireland’s devolution was not really about a referendum campaign at all. It was about ending the Troubles, a violent conflict that ran from 1968 to 1998 between mostly Protestant unionists, who wanted Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK, and mostly Catholic nationalists, who wanted a united Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was a peace deal, and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 turned it into law. Because the aim was to keep both communities on board, the Act built in mandatory power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties, rather than simply letting whichever party won the most seats govern alone, as happens in Scotland and Wales.
- England was not given a devolved government of its own. England’s population, over 55 million people, is far bigger than Scotland’s (about 5.5 million), Wales’s (about 3.1 million) and Northern Ireland’s (about 1.9 million) put together. It would be strange to have a separate English parliament sitting alongside a UK Parliament that is already dominated by English MPs. Because of this, devolution in England has instead grown city by city and region by region, rather than through one single settlement.
| Analysis | The size of each settlement in 1998 depended on how strong the demand for self-government was, and how urgent the problem being solved was. Scotland’s clear national identity, and the need to end violence in Northern Ireland, both justified bigger changes than Wales’s narrow, less certain referendum result. |
| Evaluation | This explains why the four nations started with different amounts of power, but it also caused a problem. A settlement built to fit 1998, especially Wales’s uncertain, narrow result, has needed to be redesigned repeatedly, and Wales did not reach a reserved powers model like Scotland’s until 2017, almost twenty years later. |
| Check your understanding 1. Explain two reasons why Scotland was given a stronger devolution settlement than Wales in 1998. You could: point to the different 1997 referendum results and to Scotland’s separate legal system as two distinct, named reasons. 2. To what extent was Northern Ireland’s devolution settlement shaped by different considerations from Scotland’s and Wales’s? You should: structure your answer around the Good Friday Agreement and cross-community power-sharing as the distinctive feature, then reach a judgement on how far this makes Northern Ireland a genuinely different type of devolution rather than just a different amount of it. |