In the week prior to the March 1979 devolution referendum, the novelist William McIlvanney, a convinced supporter of a devolved assembly, offered a gloomy prediction of the likely outcome of the poll. Sensing a prevailing mood of ‘indifference’ and ‘virile apathy’ among the Scottish electorate, McIlvanney wondered whether this attitude of ‘hesitancy’ towards the constitutional question masked a deeper crisis of confidence, whether Scots were, in fact, too ‘feart’ to vote for devolution. McIlvanney concluded by confessing his own ‘wee fear’: ’what’, he speculated, ‘if we get a bare majority in favour of the assembly but fall well short of the 40% limit’? He accepted that such a result, which he likened to a ‘hung jury’, might ‘be a peculiarly Scottish response’; it was, all the same, one he hoped would be avoided. Of course, as we have seen in the previous chapter, McIlvanney’s forecast of the dread scenario of an inconclusive outcome came to pass, and the Labour government’s devolution proposals collapsed. Vindicated by subsequent events, McIlvanney’s evocation of the atmosphere surrounding the devolution referendum has been of lasting influence, not least because of the cartoon that accompanied it, drawn by James Turnbull and frequently referenced thereafter, which depicted a timid, thumb sucking, indecisive Scottish lion, chained to a ball marked ‘apathy’ and announcing bluntly ‘I’m feart’. The 1979 devolution referendum, and the ambiguous verdict it produced, has, as a consequence, come to symbolise the uncertainty and doubts of a Scottish public yet to be fully convinced that constitutional reform was worth the associated risks. It would, in this reading, require the experience of the lengthy period of Conservative government that followed the 1979 general election, and the unpopular economic policies imposed during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, to convince a decisive majority of Scottish voters of the merits of devolution. By early 1994, it was possible for John Smith, by then the leader of the Labour Party but a veteran of the constitutional debates of the 1970s, to describe devolution as ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. Smith’s assessment was seemingly confirmed by the overwhelming support recorded in a referendum for the devolved Scottish Parliament legislated for by Labour after the party’s return to office in 1997.

The 1997 referendum certainly revealed the extent to which devolution enjoyed a broader base of support across Scotland than had been the case in the 1970s.