John Lloyd book review: ‘What marks the book out is Lloyd’s personal transition to virtually self-hating Scot. This is not just the regular Unionist assertion that Scotland is too wee, too weak, to cut it as an independent country but a visceral assault on “Scotland’s self-serving, self-pitying, self-obsessed keening about others, mainly the English, stealing their birthright and smashing their culture” and/or continuous “moral superiority.”‘
Federalism
Radical challenges for the SNP
‘To say that the SNP should now revisit its economic plan for independence is therefore in keeping with the times we are in. My call for a radical rethink is not a challenge for the leadership, nor is it a challenge to the leadership. This new situation is a challenge for all of us and a challenge for our party as a whole.’
A new strategy for the Union
‘The Sewel convention will need to be revived and reformed, with stronger guarantees that Westminster will not rewrite the rules of devolution without agreement.’
Boris’s pork-barrel politics
‘Westminster is also extending its reach to some detailed local policies that are clearly devolved and local. It is not clear, for example, why UK ministers should have a say in the decision about a new concert hall in Edinburgh…’
Triumph of rhetoric over reality
‘Education policy as made by the Scottish parliament has certainly been distinctive. But it has not been obviously successful, and it is not, in any historical sense, particularly Scottish.’
‘Children of the Devolution’: really?
‘What is missing is any dynamic between insider and outsider Scotland, or an understanding that politics is about power, contested ideas and different social constituencies.’
Popular sovereignty and written constitution
‘Perhaps, therefore, Brexit might prove a constitutional moment for the UK, leading to the creation and adoption of a codified constitution so aligning Britain with almost every other democracy.’
Will Brexit destroy the UK?
‘There is a saying among global trade negotiators that the world is divided between cannibals and lunch. The UK may be finding painfully that leaving the protection of the cannibals has condemned it to become lunch. It was certainly Stephen (Haseler)’s view that the English superstate was just as incapable of responding to new challenges internationally as it was domestically.’
Devolution settlement is at risk
‘The territorial politics of Brexit is a bewildering mix of ignorance, apparent disdain, confrontation, cooperation and collaboration. Rarely have the so-called devolution ‘settlements’ appeared more unsettled.’
Devo, federalism and the UK constitution
‘The UK could, therefore, be in the process of a fundamental constitutional reconfiguration that partially reverses devolutionary patterns of development of the preceding two decades. This project is taking place in a fashion that is not wholly consensual, and involves the UK government deploying, or at least threatening to deploy, parliamentary sovereignty for purposes of legal coercion.’