The Outward Impact of Devolution

Quotations from the Red Paper , above all from its foreword by Gordon Brown, may be all too deconstructable today. But it is the job of critics, 25 years on, to use these quotations for a work of reconstruction trying to empathise a way back to that very distant political context in which Gordon Brown's words were so liberating. The recent history of Scotland, looked at in one way, has been a succession of moments in which men and women read something, or heard someone, and exclaimed to themselves: 'Yes, that's just what I always privately felt. But I assumed it was a forbidden thought. I never expected to hear somebody say it out loud. And I never expected to hear so many thousands of other people exclaim: Yes, that's what I always felt ... * At such moments, a locked mental door swings open. These are epiphanies, and the 24-year-old Gordon Brown was responsible for one of them

Context (archaeology · Devolution (biology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Work (physics · History · Irish and British Studies · Law

• The ‘Scotland is British’ Campaign, 1976-8

  Open Access•Graham Walker•Scottish Affairs•2007

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