A Parliament for Scotland
Self-confessed Scottish Nationalist John Buchan warned Scots that there was more to democratic prosperity than having a Parliament.
1932
King George V 1910-1936
Self-confessed Scottish Nationalist John Buchan warned Scots that there was more to democratic prosperity than having a Parliament.
1932
King George V 1910-1936
In November 1932, John Buchan MP told the House of Commons that he supported Home Rule for Scotland in principle, but warned that no Parliament has a magic wand, and that an over-mighty and bitterly anti-English Parliament might leave Scots as much a race without a country as no Parliament at all.
abridged
I BELIEVE that every Scotsman should be a Scottish Nationalist. If it could be proved that a separate Scottish Parliament were desirable, if it could be proved to be desired by any substantial majority of the Scottish people, then Scotland should be allowed to make the experiment.*
The main force in the movement is the desire that Scotland shall not lose her historic personality. I am afraid that people in cultural movements are always apt to run to machinery for a solution. Machinery will never effect a cultural revival. We have seen, in many parts of the globe, Parliamentary institutions falling into disrepute.* I have not lost my faith in Parliament; I have not lost my faith in democracy; but we realise to-day as never before that there is no magical efficacy in a Parliament — that it all depends on how it is handled, and what conditions we desire to meet. A Parliament mishandled, a Parliament which is more than the conditions require, would not be a sedative for our troubles; it would be an irritant.
‘We are told sometimes’ said Buchan ‘that a Scottish Parliament would be a fiasco and that it would be a kind of enlarged, noisy, incompetent town council. What earthly warrant is there for that view? The Scottish people, with a long tradition of democracy in their bones, are at least as capable of running a parliament successfully as any other race.’ A referendum in 1997 opened the way to re-establish a Scottish Parliament, and it met for the first time in 1999.
A few months later, on March 23rd 1933, the German Parliament voted to let Chancellor Adolf Hitler introduce any law he wished without consulting them, for four years. Clearly, having a Parliament does not make a Government democratic — at least not in the British sense of that word. Buchan was a stickler for the principle that Parliamentary majority alone makes the laws, and neither cliques nor committees nor the civil service nor the Prime Minister and his cabinet can do so without it.