Dancing with Dogma (Ian Gilmour)

The document under study here is extracted from Dancing with Dogma. Britain under Thatcherism, a book by Ian Gilmour, a Scottish leading figure on the liberal, or “wet”, left-wing of the Conservative party, essentially under the governments of Heath and Thatcher. The piece of writing concentrates on the debate over devolution –that is to say, the delegation of power from a superior organ to an inferior one, in our perspective, from Westminster to the Scottish Parliament– as it took place under Thatcherism. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence of still greater pro-devolution movements in Scotland, with the 1988 Claim of Rights for Scotland and the creation of a Constitutional Convention, which gathered for the first time in March 1989, in response to Margaret Thatcher’s lack of concern for devolution. The most striking feature of the text lays in the fact that Gilmour fiercely opposes some–namely, the traditional, unionist, right wing of the party– of the members of his own broad political faction, through a skilful rationale where he exposes some of the arguments set forth against devolution, before systematically criticizing and refuting those wobbly viewpoints, building in the meantime his own outlook upon the acute question of devolution and the creation of a Scottish Parliament. We will therefore aim at pointing out the right-wing Conservatives’ arguments against devolution as they show up throughout the excerpt, this very logic being thoroughly criticized and dismantled by the author as we shall see in a second section, which will allow us to come up to Ian Gilmour’s own pro-devolution position.

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