Issues of Sovereignty: Redefining Politics in Scotland

Primary Author or Creator:
David McCrone
Additional Author(s) / Creators
Michael Keating
Publisher:
The Political Quarterly.
Alternative Published Date
2021
Category:
Type of Resource:
Article
Length (Pages, words, minutes etc...)
9pp
Fast Facts

The issue of sovereignty has never been resolved in Scotland. The 1998 Scotland Act, creating the Scottish Parliament affirmed that the Westminster Parliament is sovereign, but this is disputed. 

More details

Like it or not, devolution did raise the issue as to which institution, Westminster or Holyrood, has the most influence over how Scotland is governed, and, importantly, who people thought ought to have the most influence. By 2015, 42 per cent of people in Scotland thought that the Scottish Parliament had most influence over how Scotland is governed, but three quarters thought that it ought to have most influence.

We can see with hindsight that debates and arguments about where sovereignty and legitimacy were embedded in the bedrock of devolution, but they have become more salient as politics has been played out in the past decade. In 2019, one of us observed: ‘Simply asserting that in legal terms the Scottish Parliament is a creature of Westminster ignores the politics. Almost everything these days passes through the filter of self-government’. That filter is unlikely to disappear anytime soon

English