“SCOTLAND must give a decisive answer today,” urged the Glasgow Herald on the morning of the referendum. The following morning, with the results still to be tallied, the headline was “Scotland’s day of destiny”. This was March 1979, when Scots were asked if they were in favour of a devolved Scottish Assembly.

Yes won by 51.6 per cent to 48.4% for No, but those voting in favour made up 32.9% of the total electorate – below the 40% stipulated in an amendment by George Cunningham, the Scots-born MP for Islington, when the Scotland Bill was being debated in the Commons.

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“The assembly is dead – killed by the Scots themselves who wrote it off yesterday as irrelevant to their immediate needs,” the Herald reported on Saturday, March 3, beneath the headline, Scots Assembly, RIP.

The “photo-finish” result split the country three ways, one-third voting yes, one-third no, and one-third not bothering to vote at all. The lesson for the prime minister at the time, Jim Callaghan, was clear – “devolution is not the popular issue he imagined it to be”.

As broadcaster Andrew Marr says in his book The Battle For Scotland, the result was a devastating blow for Labour and the SNP, which immediately launched a “Scotland Said Yes” campaign to seek to persuade Mr Callaghan to ignore the 40% rule and press ahead with devolution anyway.

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Books such as Marr’s, and Neal Ascherson’s Stone Voices trace the 1979 Yes and No campaigns in forensic detail amidst widespread industrial unrest and the 1979 winter of discontent.

Marr sums it up well: devolution that year, he writes, “carried the stigma of a failing government. It had been imposed on a doubtful [Labour] party by a London leadership for purely electoral reasons.

"It had been legislated for in a fog of internal dissent and confusion. It was campaigned for by divided parties at a time of economic chaos. In some ways it is surprising that so many Scots voted for it”.

On March 28, Mr Callaghan lost a parliamentary vote of confidence, forcing him to call an early general election for May 3, which Margaret Thatcher won.

“Certainly, at the end of 1979,” writes Professor Tom Devine in Independence Or Union, “the prospect for home rule in Scotland seemed as bleak as the future of the nation’s traditional industries.

“... After 1979, the torch for devolution had been kept alight by the Campaign For A Scottish Assembly (CSA), which aimed to deliver home rule by bringing together Labour, Liberal Democrats, the SNP and representatives of Scottish civil society to plan a way forward.”

After 1987, Mr Devine says, the CSA appointed a steering committee composed of notables from diverse fields to consider the setting-up of a Scottish Constitutional Convention to examine the case for an assembly and to outline the measures to be taken to achieve it. Labour was “increasingly sympathetic”.

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In July 1988 the CSA committee published A Claim Of Right For Scotland which, among other things, made the intellectual case for a Scottish Assembly, and described a Scotland that faced a crisis of identity and was being governed without consent.

The report said the setting up of a “Constitutional Convention and subsequently a Scottish Assembly cannot by themselves achieve the essential reforms of British government, but they are essential if any remnant of distinctive Scottish government is to be saved, and they could create the ground-swell necessary to set the British reform process on its way”. The convention issued a blueprint for a Scottish Parliament on St Andrews Day 1990.

Devolution had become a keen political topic in Scotland by the time of John Major’s general election victory in April 1992, after which, writes Mr Devine, the spirit of home rule was kept alive by such groups as Scotland United, Common Cause and Democracy For Scotland.

There was a further key moment that December when about 30,000 people marched in Edinburgh, demanding “Scottish democracy”, during a European Commission summit in the capital.

“After that December mobilisation,” writes Neal Ascherson, “the game was up. The Tories knew that they were doomed; Labour knew that they must deliver Scottish self-government as soon as they came to power.”

In 1993, John Smith, the then Labour leader, described a Scottish Parliament as “the settled will of the Scottish people”, adding that its creation would be the “cornerstone” of his party’s plan for “democratic renewal” in the UK.

Within the 1997 Labour manifesto there was a declaration that that power would be devolved to Scotland. And once in power, Tony Blair moved quickly to pave the way.

At a referendum on September 11, 1997, 74.3% of those who voted supported a Scottish parliament, with 63.5% in favour of it having tax-raising powers. Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar said with pride: “The result exceeded all my expectations. Scotland can look forward to a beginning for a new millennium.”

Elections to the Parliament were held in May 1999, and when the Queen opened it in Edinburgh’s Assembly Hall, on July 1, she said: “Today is a historic day for Scotland. It is our solemn duty in this chamber with the eyes of the country upon us to mark the point when this new Parliament assumes its full powers in the service of the Scottish people.”