Next time it will be different. Or so almost everyone in Scotland now believes, as they look forward to another election and back over the long trail of wreckage from 1979 to the present. The Conservative regime began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major's Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as 'defence of the Union'. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue movement, which can hardly fail to bring about parliaments in Wales and Scotland, as well as more European integration.

LRB 24 August 1995 | PDF Download