Government Social Research
Anthony Heath, Alison Park, Richard Wyn Jones, Roger MacGinty and John Curtice
In the 1990s the debate about devolution polarised around two very different perspectives. On the one hand there were those that argued that by demonstrating the ability of the United Kingdom state to reflect the diverse aspirations and identities of those in its component territories, the Union would be strengthened. On the other hand there were those that feared or hoped that devolution, and in Northern Ireland the wider framework of the Good Friday agreement, would be the thin end of the wedge and lead to the break-up of Britain as distinct non-British identities were affirmed and territorial tensions between England and its neighbours were inflamed.
Central to these arguments were key assumptions about the likely trajectory of public opinion. The Union would strengthened if the public were to come to regard devolved government as better government and thereby reckoned the United Kingdom's constitutional arrangements were working. But it would be weakened if people in England were to come to resent the fact that they did not enjoy the privileges granted to the rest of the UK or if the incidence of British identity were to decline. And of course it was perfectly possible that neither set of arguments were correct and that the growth in the demand for some form of self-government and the decline in adherence to British identity in some parts of the UK was simply a reflection of social changes that devolution would not touch.
So the success or failure of devolution cannot be assessed without some understanding of how public opinion across all four parts of the United Kingdom has reacted to its introduction. And this is the task that four co-ordinated survey projects funded by the ESRC Devolution and Constitutional Change Research Programme have set themselves. Surveys of attitudes towards devolution together with measures of national identity were conducted in 2001 and 2003 in each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Apart from in Wales, these surveys were conducted as part of existing survey platforms, that is the British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys and the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey. In Wales special surveys were conducted. We were fortunate in some cases in being able to bring additional funding to the surveys, not least from the Leverhulme Trust's research programme on 'Nations and Regions' and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, while the projects bring together researchers from a large number of institutions, viz. the universities of Aberystwyth, Edinburgh, Oxford, Strathclyde, Ulster and York together with the National Centre for Social Research.
One important feature of the four surveys is that while they all attempt to address those aspects of the devolution debate that are particular to their part of the United Kingdom, wherever possible they have asked the same or functionally equivalent questions. This means we can compare how, for example, national identity has changed across the four parts of the United Kingdom. We can chart how the introduction of devolution in Scotland has been greeted with the reception it has received in Wales. Or we can assess how far opinion in England diverges from that in rest of the United Kingdom on some of the logical anomalies that a system of asymmetric devolution has produced. One important consequence of this is that we will be able to establish how far there are general statements about the impact of devolution that can be made or whether its impact has depended on the particular political events and circumstances that accompanied its birth and early life in each territory.
We are now in the process of bringing together our second round of results. But it already appears clear that our findings will not simply endorse either side of the debate about the likely impact of devolution. In Scotland and Wales there has been neither an increase nor a fall in the level of support for independence. While the experience of devolution has not always met people's expectations, especially in Scotland and amongst Northern Ireland's Protestants, it appears that support for the principle of devolution is at least as strong as ever. Yet at the same time there is still little sign of much enthusiasm in England for any form of devolution there. It may well be that both sides of the argument did indeed exaggerate the impact that creating a new set of political institutions alone would make on public opinion.