Scotland and Wales: The Evolution of Devolution

This chapter is about the future of devolution in Scotland and Wales, the two parts of Great Britain that have experienced devolution to elected substate institutions since 1999. Less than a decade on, it is easy to forget quite how significant a development that was, so quickly has devolution become an accepted part of the political and constitutional framework of the United Kingdom. Yet the achievement of that model of devolution followed many years of debate and struggle on the part of supporters of institutional autonomy or ‘home rule’ for those nations and took many aspects of British government into uncharted territory. It is little wonder that a large part of the first Constitutional Futures (Hazell 1999) was devoted to considering the immediate and longer-term implications of that form of devolution, for the United Kingdom as a whole as much as for Scotland and Wales themselves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.