There is something faintly absurd about a political movement which has spent the greater part of its existence denouncing the government of Scotland from Westminster, only to discover, upon acquiring power at Holyrood, the considerable advantages of governing Scotland from Edinburgh. The Scottish National Party has become rather accomplished at identifying the constitutional indignities of British centralisation, whilst displaying considerably less enthusiasm for examining those which might arise from its own administration. One is left with the impression that the objection to the concentration of political authority was never quite its concentration, but the unfortunate circumstance of its being concentrated in the wrong capital.

The difficulty extends beyond the peculiar contradictions of Scottish nationalism. The modern state possesses an extraordinary capacity to assimilate reforms originally intended to restrain its authority, transforming demands for greater autonomy into opportunities for further administrative consolidation. Devolution has proved susceptible to precisely this tendency. Scotland acquired its own Parliament, an executive, and an increasingly elaborate apparatus of public administration, without undergoing any comparable reconstruction of the relationship between political authority and the communities over which it is exercised. Government has become considerably more Scottish without necessarily becoming less centralised. The constitutional settlement, though indispensable, remains profoundly incomplete.

The Liberal claim for Scottish Home Rule considerably predates the SNP. Gladstone’s constitutional thinking developed towards a general reorganisation of government throughout the United Kingdom, whilst Scottish Liberals had organised around Home Rule during the nineteenth century. A Scottish Home Rule Bill passed its second reading in 1913, although the outbreak of war prevented its further progress. The principle survived the collapse of Liberal parliamentary ascendancy, finding determined advocates in Jo Grimond, Russell Johnston and the Scottish Liberals who continued to pursue constitutional reform when the question attracted considerably less enthusiasm than it does today. The eventual establishment of the Scottish Parliament owed much to this longer tradition, particularly the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention.

The significance of this history is rather more substantial than determining which political party may claim ownership of devolution. The older Liberal understanding belonged to a wider conception of political society in which authority was to be dispersed among institutions, associations and communities, none possessing an exclusive claim upon the whole. The Scottish Parliament was one element of a more extensive constitutional reconstruction, rather than the final destination of self-government. Indeed, the introduction of proportional representation to Holyrood reflected an understandable suspicion of the concentration of political authority within a single parliamentary majority. It would be a peculiar accomplishment to reject the supremacy of Westminster merely to reproduce its habits within a smaller legislature.

Scotland’s administrative centralisation was not, admittedly, invented by the SNP. The reorganisations of local government in 1975 and 1996 progressively displaced older municipal arrangements, eventually leaving thirty-two unitary authorities responsible for communities frequently possessing little in common beyond their incorporation within the same administrative boundary. The burghs and counties through which much of Scottish civic life had formerly been organised were replaced by institutions operating across territories of considerable geographical and social diversity. The nationalists inherited this arrangement, although their subsequent record demonstrates how readily a movement committed to self-government can accommodate itself to the centralising assumptions of the state once it acquires responsibility for directing them.

The financial relationship between Holyrood and local authorities is particularly instructive. According to the Scottish Government’s figures, council tax accounted for approximately eighteen per cent of councils’ general funding in 2024–25, whilst direct government grants supplied sixty-three per cent and non-domestic rates provided another nineteen per cent through the national system. Local authorities are therefore expected to exercise democratic responsibility whilst remaining overwhelmingly dependent upon financial arrangements determined elsewhere. The Accounts Commission identified a combined budget gap of approximately £529 million for 2026–27, notwithstanding a real-terms increase in revenue funding. The relationship between local choice and financial responsibility has become sufficiently confused that ministers can announce national priorities whilst councillors confront the practical consequences of their implementation.

The council tax freeze of 2024–25 illustrated this arrangement rather neatly. A national political commitment was pursued through financial inducements offered to supposedly autonomous councils, thereby subordinating local fiscal discretion to the priorities of Holyrood. The creation of Police Scotland in 2013 furnished another example, with eight territorial forces incorporated into a single national organisation. Common specialist services and coordinated investigations certainly possess advantages, but cooperation between institutions does not logically require their compulsory amalgamation. A uniform command structure may simplify the oversight of ministers whilst diminishing the independence of institutions acquainted with the particular circumstances of their communities.

The original proposals for a National Care Service proceeded from comparable assumptions, contemplating the transfer of substantial responsibilities from local government towards a nationally organised structure. Their eventual abandonment in 2025 was instructive. Social care undoubtedly requires enforceable standards and common guarantees, particularly where unequal provision threatens the dignity of vulnerable individuals. Nevertheless, the universality of an entitlement does not require the uniformity of its administration. There is a considerable difference between establishing rights which every institution must respect and prescribing the particular institutional arrangements through which those rights must be satisfied.

The Scottish Government has made some movement towards recognising these difficulties. The Verity House Agreement and the incorporation of the European Charter of Local Self-Government into Scots law in October 2026 represent important developments, although their practical significance will depend upon the independence they secure. Consultation, partnership and statutory recognition cannot substitute indefinitely for the actual possession of political and financial authority. A council whose responsibilities remain dependent upon the continuing discretion of ministers has acquired a more agreeable relationship with central government without necessarily acquiring genuine autonomy.

The intellectual difficulty underlying these arrangements was understood rather better by the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Ferguson recognised that many of the institutions through which human beings organise their common existence emerge from activities whose wider consequences were neither anticipated nor deliberately designed. Adam Smith developed a comparable account of economic cooperation, demonstrating how dispersed interests and knowledge might be reconciled through exchange and the institutions of commercial society. Their significance extends considerably beyond economics. Social organisation depends upon forms of knowledge embedded within particular circumstances, relationships and experiences, which cannot simply be collected by an administrative authority and reproduced through central direction.

The progressive enlargement of governmental institutions consequently encounters limitations which are not merely financial or managerial. A central authority may possess considerable resources without possessing the practical knowledge necessary to determine how those resources should invariably be employed. Institutional diversity allows different communities to develop different arrangements, discover their limitations, and alter their practices accordingly. Uniformity, however attractive to those responsible for administration, can extinguish precisely the opportunities for experimentation through which improvement becomes possible. Jo Grimond’s suspicion of excessive institutional scale arose from a similar understanding of the relationship between independence and responsibility. The advantages of size were too frequently exaggerated, whilst the capacities of smaller institutions were systematically underestimated.

A reconstruction of Scottish government must therefore begin with the constitutional settlement of the United Kingdom itself. The perpetual negotiation of additional powers between Westminster and Holyrood has left unresolved the fundamental question of how political responsibilities ought to be distributed and protected. A written federal constitution would establish the competences of the constituent nations and common federal institutions, replacing the discretionary character of devolution with constitutionally secured Home Rule. Scotland would possess authority over its domestic responsibilities as a constituent part of a federal United Kingdom, whilst matters requiring collective action, including defence, foreign affairs and common economic arrangements, would remain within the competence of the federal government.

Such a constitution would necessarily entail reform beyond Scotland. England’s excessive administrative centralisation is no less deserving of correction, and the representation of the constituent nations and regions within common institutions would require reconsideration of Westminster’s existing arrangements. An elected federal chamber, appropriately constituted to protect territorial interests without reproducing the supremacy of the Commons, could form part of that reconstruction. Constitutional adjudication would provide a means of resolving disputes over competence, whilst common guarantees of civil and political rights would establish limits which neither federal nor national governments could disregard. Financial equalisation would remain necessary to preserve solidarity between places possessing unequal economic resources, but its operation should be predictable and sufficiently independent to prevent its use as an instrument of political discipline.

The federal principle cannot, however, be permitted to terminate at Holyrood. It would be a curious achievement to restrain Westminster through constitutional guarantees whilst leaving the Scottish Parliament free to reproduce the same centralising arrangements beneath it. Local government should possess legally protected responsibilities, powers of general competence and a meaningful degree of fiscal independence. The restoration of burgh and island councils would allow communities presently submerged within large unitary authorities to recover a measure of institutional autonomy. Their purpose would not be the creation of another administrative tier for its own sake, but the recovery of responsibilities which need not be exercised by larger institutions.

The financial foundation of such an arrangement is indispensable. A system of land-value taxation could return part of the value created through collective economic activity to the communities responsible for it, whilst reducing the fiscal penalties placed upon improvements to property and productive enterprise. Greater local retention of revenues derived from renewable energy, housing and commercial development would strengthen the relationship between economic activity and the places affected by it. Equalisation would protect poorer communities against disparities beyond their control, without reducing every local authority to permanent dependence upon a centrally negotiated settlement. The essential principle is that responsibility for public decisions should remain as closely connected as possible to responsibility for their consequences.

Yet the redistribution of authority between governments would scarcely exhaust the possibilities of reform. A local council can become every bit as monopolistic as a national ministry, particularly where planning restrictions, established commercial interests and protected property owners combine to exclude newcomers. The concentration of political authority and the concentration of economic privilege have frequently developed together, each providing the other with protection against competition. Decentralisation must consequently extend beyond the machinery of public administration towards the removal of privileges which restrict access to land, capital, enterprise and independent livelihoods.

This is especially important when considering the organisation of public services and economic development. There is no particular reason to suppose that an institution becomes more responsive merely because its employees are transferred from a national bureaucracy to a municipal one. Nor does private provision necessarily produce competition where access to contracts, funding or premises remains controlled by incumbent interests. Mutual societies, cooperatives, charitable organisations, independent enterprises and community associations provide alternative means through which individuals can pursue common purposes. Their significance lies in preserving the possibility of institutional choice, rather than establishing the supposed superiority of any particular form of ownership. Common entitlements can coexist with considerable diversity in the arrangements through which they are fulfilled.

Scotland’s future economic development would benefit from precisely this dispersal of initiative. The Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026 recognises the importance of retaining economic benefits within localities, yet approaches that objective through centrally prescribed institutional duties. Communities cannot become economically independent simply because public bodies are required to produce plans describing their intended independence. Their capacity to create and retain wealth depends upon accessible ownership, competitive markets, independent financial institutions and the freedom to establish enterprises without seeking perpetual administrative permission. Public authority has an important responsibility to remove entrenched privilege and secure the conditions of fair participation, but the actual organisation of economic life belongs principally to those engaged in it.

There is, nevertheless, a difficulty in imagining that the independence of civil society can be restored through governmental withdrawal alone. The capacities upon which an autonomous society depends have themselves been shaped, restricted and occasionally extinguished by successive concentrations of political and economic authority. A community deprived of meaningful institutions cannot simply be instructed to recover its independence, any more than an individual excluded from productive resources can exercise economic freedom through the formal recognition of rights alone. The recovery of self-government therefore requires deliberate constitutional and economic reform, through which the institutions of society acquire both the freedom and the material means to undertake responsibilities previously absorbed by the state.

This gives the Liberal tradition of Home Rule a significance extending beyond the familiar dispute over the powers of the Scottish Parliament. Its purpose is not exhausted by the establishment of Scottish political institutions, however necessary those institutions remain. Nor can the deficiencies of the present arrangement be corrected through the restoration of Westminster’s former authority. A federal constitution, protected local government, fiscal responsibility and the independence of civil society are different expressions of the same constitutional undertaking: the progressive dispersal of authority throughout a political community whose institutions exist to serve, rather than embody, its members.

The central contradiction of the SNP’s constitutional position is that its understanding of self-government remains so closely attached to the conception of sovereignty inherited from Westminster. Power is treated as a possession to be recovered and accumulated, rather than a responsibility whose concentration must continually be justified. The resulting political imagination can accommodate the removal of Westminster’s authority over Scotland more readily than the removal of unnecessary authority from the Scottish Government itself. This is a limitation shared, to varying degrees, by the wider British administrative tradition, but one rendered especially conspicuous by the nationalist insistence upon self-government as its principal political purpose.

A radical federal settlement offers a different account of constitutional progress. The independence of political institutions is valuable partly because it prevents any single authority from acquiring an exclusive claim upon the organisation of society. Yet constitutional limitations acquire their fullest significance only where individuals possess the practical means to exercise the freedoms they protect. The dispersal of political power and the diffusion of economic opportunity must therefore develop together, each correcting the tendency of the other to reproduce entrenched forms of dependence.

The completion of Scottish Home Rule would, in this understanding, be neither the final transfer of powers between competing capitals nor the establishment of another sovereign political authority. It would be the gradual reconstruction of the relationships through which Scotland participates in the common institutions of Britain whilst recovering the independence of its own communities. Its achievement would be measured not simply by the authority exercised at Holyrood, but by the extent to which that authority enabled individuals and associations to act without its continual intervention.

There is a certain paradox in employing the powers of government to establish the conditions under which government becomes less necessary. Yet the resolution of that paradox lies at the heart of constitutional liberalism. Political authority justifies itself not through the indefinite enlargement of its responsibilities, but through its capacity to secure a society increasingly capable of undertaking responsibilities of its own. The proper fulfilment of Home Rule would consequently be found not in the supremacy of Edinburgh over London, but in a federal United Kingdom whose constitutional arrangements ensured that neither could claim an authority which properly belonged elsewhere.