Scotland's Unfinished Constitutional Revolution

On 18 September 2014 a referendum took place in Scotland to decide the question of whether Scotland should be an independent country. The independence referendum was the culmination of decades of campaigning for statehood by the Scottish National Party (SNP). Between its first major electoral breakthrough in the Hamilton by-election of 1967 and the achievement of an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2011, the SNP had grown from a small fringe party with a (then rather far-fetched) commitment to Scottish independence, into a competent and professional party of government that was on the verge of achieving its founding aim.

In the event of a ‘Yes’ vote in the 2014 independence referendum, Scotland would have recovered the independent statehood that was lost by the Treaty of Union more than three centuries ago. According to the plans of the Scottish government, the new Scottish state would have been based upon a new constitutional foundation: a written constitution. The SNP has long advocated a written Constitution for an independent Scotland and from the late 1960s to the present day, the party has had plenty of time to develop its ‘constitutional prospectus’ for an independent Scotland. Moreover, it has supported a form of Constitution that, while still within the Westminster-derived ‘family’ of constitutions, differs in important matters of both substance and structure from the constitutional orthodoxies and traditional institutions of the United Kingdom.

This book tells the story of that constitution. It remains, of course, ‘a constitution that never was’, a constitution for a state which is not yet in existence. The Constitution of an independent Scotland, therefore, cannot be found in definitive form, but exists only in potentia, in various ‘drafts’, ‘proposals’ and ‘interim’ versions. Yet these constitutional proposals nevertheless reveal much about the Scottish national movement. They show that Scottish nationalism has long been concerned not only with a transfer of power from London to Edinburgh, but also committed to democratic constitutional change within Scotland. It has worked out a sustained – but not static – constitutional critique of the United Kingdom and mounted an ideological challenge, in the sphere of popular constitutional theory, to the institutions, practices and assumptions of the British State.