Scottish devolution shaken by referendum

It wasn't meant to be like this

It wasn't meant to be like this. Scotland's politicians expected the new parliament to reflect the left-of-centre, social democratic agenda shared to some degree by all the main parties. Instead the country has found itself the test bed for a new and radical style of politics.

The factor no politician took into account was Brian Souter. With his sister, Anne Gloag, Souter founded Stagecoach, a bus company that began by offering cheap fares for overnight journeys between Edinburgh and London. Some 20 years later Souter is a multi-millionaire with companies across the globe. Despite the money he still lives in rural Scotland and attends the fundamentalist church he has always worshipped in.

Souter's political involvement before this year amounted to financial donations to the Scottish National Party, estimated to be somewhere between £50,000 and £100,000 a year.

His taste for politics suddenly developed when the Communities Minister in the devolved parliament, Wendy Alexander, announced that Section 28 was to be scrapped. For political hacks this was a one-day headline as most parties planned to scrap the measure restricting what teachers could tell pupils about homosexuality.

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For Souter it was a shock. With some justification he said the policy was not mentioned in the Labour manifesto so how were voters meant to know?

Told that the Scottish government was not going to back down on the policy, Souter then argued on another front. The process of devolution was meant to bring politics closer to the people. Scottish ministers repeatedly said it would allow "Scottish solutions to Scottish problems", echoing the sentiments of Irish Home Rule in the 19th century. Souter said that if "the people" mattered that much, then why not ask their opinion on Section 28?

For a million pounds, Souter held his own referendum. Ballot papers were sent out by an independent polling company to the 3.9 million names on the Scottish electoral register. He also paid for poster sites encouraging people to vote to retain the legislation. The ballot was a private enterprise with no constitutional validity. However, when over a million Scots voted to keep Section 28 it seemed Souter had a moral victory at least.

The government called the process "a jumped-up opinion poll", pointing out that only a third of Scots bothered to return the postal votes. With so many nonvotes it is impossible to tell what the population at large thinks. Ironically an opinion poll, based on the views of a few thousand voters, would have provided a more accurate picture of Scots opinion at a fraction of the price.

However, elected democratic politicians have never before been challenged on such a scale. To dismiss the views of one million people too easily smacks of arrogance or stupidity.

Worse is to come. Souter has promised to have his revenge on both the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party. The next election in Scotland is the UK general election that is most likely to be held next year. Labour MPs have already calculated that if Souter's million votes are spread evenly across every constituency it means each candidate could face 14,000 very angry people.

Meanwhile the leader of Scotland's Catholics, Cardinal Winning - no friend of practising homosexuals and the pro-choice lobby - also weighed in this week, saying the poll showed that Scotland's new parliament was failing because it was "ignoring" the will of the people.

A Labour government oversaw the constitutional upheaval that was devolution. In so doing it established that Westminster was not the only power in the land. It also gave new impetus to the idea that politics should be popular and express the broad view. Souter has taken both ideas and pushed them in a direction that leaves many ministers privately terrified of what might happen next.