Exclusive interview: Tony Blair on the Scottish Parliament’s 20-year journey

It was a perfect spring morning that May in 1997 when the scale of New Labour’s victory became clear. And the comprehensive wipe-out of every single Conservative MP in Scotland, after 18 years of their party being in power, only added to the feeling that this truly was a new political dawn.

It’s hard to exaggerate now just how seismic it all felt. There was a sense of euphoria, a buzz of excitement, and a ripple of spine-chilling emotion as Tony Blair stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced that he had been elected as New Labour and he would govern as New Labour.

“For 18 years – for 18 long years – my party has been in opposition. It could only say, it could not do. Today we are charged with the deep responsibility of government. Today, enough of talking – it is time now to do.”

And with that national call to action, it did feel as if everything had fundamentally shifted. This was politics, but not as we knew it, and there was an anticipation about what would come next.

I was seven months pregnant, about to move to London, and the estate agent was already touting Blair’s Islington home to me, which was being sold privately off market as he and his family prepared to move into Number 10.

For me, that only added to the sense that this political earthquake couldn’t get more personal and it had the potential to change lives.

And Blair did change Britain. Literally, by devolving power to Scotland, Wales and London and by bringing peace to Northern Ireland. And while events of the last few days for the Labour Party only serve to highlight that New Labour was a product of its moment in time, history may yet judge Blair’s personal record in power more kindly than many do today.

Because regardless of how you feel about Iraq or the creeping sense of entitlement or the cosying up to big business or a certain flexibility over core principles, there is no disputing Blair helped carve out a new path for Scotland.

In a speech in 1993, the then leader of the UK Labour Party, John Smith, referred to a Scottish Parliament as “the settled will of the Scottish people”, the creation of which would form the “cornerstone” of his party’s plan for “democratic renewal” in the United Kingdom.

He died less than 12 months later and with Smith’s death came the feeling of unfinished business, that Scots, already nursing a longstanding grudge over a referendum in 1979 to create a Scottish Assembly which they believed had been rigged, wanted more.

Smith’s successor passionately believed he had to deliver on that devolution pledge and despite strong resistance from within his own shadow cabinet, Blair felt there was a momentum that he could not ignore.

The 1997 Labour manifesto pledged that power would be devolved to Scotland and within a matter of months of winning power, Blair, perhaps perversely, prepared to give some of it away as Scotland went back to the polls to vote for a Scottish parliament.

Three days before that historic vote in September 1997, Blair hit the campaign trail in Edinburgh. There was a carnival atmosphere, the streets of the capital were lined with flag-waving supporters and in an interview with the BBC, Blair said that the vote for Scottish devolution was one of “huge significance” to the UK as a whole.

He said it would “show the whole of the United Kingdom that there is a better way that Britain can be governed, that we can bring power closer to the people, closer to the people’s priorities and that we can give Scotland the ability to be a proud nation within the United Kingdom.”

The vote, a few days later, was overwhelmingly a ‘Yes, Yes’. Yes in favour of the creation of a Scottish Parliament and yes to one that would have tax-raising powers. Twelve months later the Scotland Bill was finished, and just two years on from the general election, on 6 May 1999, Blair’s 46th birthday, the first elections to the reconvened Scottish parliament were held.

And on 12 May, coincidentally five years to the day since John Smith’s untimely death, the new Scottish parliament sat for the very first time.

On the face of it, it had all happened in a relatively short time, but for some, the fight to see a Scottish parliament had been a long-fought one which dated back centuries.

Blair arrived back in Edinburgh the day after the referendum, where he was met off his helicopter by the Scottish secretary, Donald Dewar.

“Satisfactory, I think,” Dewar reportedly said to the PM in his characteristically understated fashion.

“Very satisfactory, and well done,” came the reply from Blair.

Twenty years later, Blair, like the country, has moved on. His reputation as the architect of a new kind of politics, who achieved landmark reforms such as the introduction of a minimum wage, has been all but subsumed by an anger over his decision to take us to war in Iraq. Even my mother texted me, as I walked into his anonymous office building which houses his ‘Institute for Global Change’ in central London, to say ‘don’t mention the war’.

So, with that elephant in the room, I ask Blair whether he still believes what he said back then about devolution showing the rest of the country how it can be done.

“Yes. I regard devolution essentially as a success, because although obviously there’s still strong pressures for independence, which have been heightened by Brexit, for sure, nonetheless Scotland remains inside the UK.

“Obviously, there was a great sort of euphoria at the end of the Conservative government and election of the Labour government, but I think if we had gone back on our commitment to devolution, it would have been a big problem for us and I never felt that was sensible, I never even contemplated it.

“I think if I had any regret, I would have looked at more ways to keep Scotland and the UK feeling more culturally aligned, but having said that, I think people forget that there was a huge amount of pressure for devolution as an alternative to independence and if we hadn’t offered that alternative, you might have had an independent Scotland by now.”

Surely, if it has proved anything, it proved that a Scottish Parliament per se was not, as John Smith had described it, the “settled will” of the Scottish people, given we have seen one independence referendum and a parliamentary agreement for another, in its time?

“Yes, but you know, in all of these situations if you look round the world, the cause of independence doesn’t go away and the case keeps still being made, but as a matter of fact, Scotland is still within the UK, so it’s one of these classic things which is probably a pointless thing to do, which is trying to suppose what would be if you hadn’t had devolution, what would have been the outcome.

“I think at the time, when I looked back and I thought of devolution/home rule, how it upended UK politics for years and years from the late 19th century onwards, how the failure to deliver home rule made a split in Ireland inevitable, how the cause for devolution, I mean it ebbed and flowed a bit, but it was nonetheless still a very strong cause, and then in the 1970s when it wasn’t delivered, I think it did have a sense of unfinished business. And I felt, and by the way, I was born in Scotland myself and spent a lot of my childhood there, people like John Smith and Donald Dewar and Gordon [Brown], Henry McLeish, people I was close to politically, they were very, very clearly of the view that this should be done, and had to be done, so it would have been quite adverse to have gone against that.

“I became convinced over time that devolution was necessary, and remember, we were also doing other things, people forget this now, but there was no mayor of London, and we created the mayor of London, we changed the law of local government in the UK as well.

“I would say that now the mood of the time, politically, is probably towards greater devolution of power, more generally. I think there’s a strong case for greater devolution in England too.”

But back then, Blair had George Robertson, then shadow Scottish secretary, telling him that devolution would kill nationalism stone dead and conversely, Tam Dalyell saying it would be a motorway to independence with no exits. Who could he trust?

“I think generally, the Labour politicians genuinely believed that devolution was the right thing, because I had this conversation a lot with John Smith and Donald [Dewar] and those are the two people whose judgement I really trusted, and they were the ultimate, sane, rational guys. 

“Ultimately, I think we overestimated, for sure, the degree to which devolution would quash independence, that’s correct, but then I think, as I say, if you look round the world and you look at Canada, you look at Spain, you look at all of the classic disputes over devolution vs independence, they all followed the same pattern, but I think were it not for Brexit now, probably the mood in Scotland would be less in favour of independence than for some time.

“Look, I don’t want to offend people who are great supporters of independence, but independence, it has a little bit of the Brexit spirit in it in this sense that you end up thinking the answer to your problems is to have a different form of constitution, whereas I think the answer to most of your problems lies in policy.

“Now, if changes to the constitution are necessary to bring about changes of policy, then that is justifiable but in itself, [it] doesn’t give you a better education system, a better healthcare system, more jobs, a better run economy, see what I mean? It’s a really important thing, this is what I always say to people, in the end government – and it doesn’t matter what form of government, UK, Scotland, whatever it is – government ultimately is about the quality of the policymaking and always, what happens, classically – and as I say, I don’t want to take this analogy too far – but if you look at what’s happening with Brexit, a lot of people supporting Brexit are doing so because they think it’s the answer to their problems. It’s not actually the answer to anything. And that’s the truth.

“Now, if you believe that getting out of Europe is necessary to take the decisions that make your life better, then that’s a reason for Brexit. Likewise, if you believe that there are things that you can’t do, that if only you were able to do, it would transform Scotland, that makes the case for independence strong, but I struggle to see what these are.

“The experience of devolution so far with different parties in power, first with a Labour-Lib Dem government, then with an SNP-led government, the truth is, if you look at the basic issues for people, law and order, education, healthcare, etc, etc, devolution, OK, it gives you the ability to make policy, but it doesn’t tell you what is the right policy.

“And by the way, one of the most powerful arguments for devolution was that Scotland already had a measure, a substantial measure, of difference in terms of education, health, the law. But all I’m saying is that if one of the reasons that support for independence until Brexit somewhat ebbed was because you had an SNP government, and people might like the government, not like the government, but independence itself was obviously not going to be the answer, because when they [the SNP] had control over education and healthcare, were there massive improvements, was there a big different way of doing things? No, I mean you basically had the same policy issues you had before.”

There is some suggestion that Blair wasn’t a great enthusiast for devolution – Jim Wallace recently described him as daydreaming during meetings of the devolved administrations – but that he felt he needed to deliver it on principle. Can he see any parallels there with Theresa May and Brexit?

“Ha, I sincerely hope not,” he laughs. “Look, if I didn’t believe in devolution, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it. I wouldn’t have done it. I believed in it, it’s just that I’ve always had this view that constitutional change per se has a limit. I was determined to deliver it and I was determined to get the right strategy for delivering it, so I studied a lot of what failed in the past because people had been trying to deliver forms of devolution for decades.

“Henry [McLeish] was also a great support and help because he knew it very well and I could have a very frank conversation with him about it, and in these situations you need to have people you can have a really sensible and open conversation with.

“When I decided to have the referendum on devolution, before we presented the bill I was absolutely clear this was the only way of delivering devolution – and by the way, I absolutely believe it was the only way to deliver it, because otherwise we would have run into huge problems in the House of Lords.”

But in his haste to deliver, was he blind to the obvious dangers in terms of a clamour for more, a demand for independence?

“I mean, I saw them, but as I say, and you’ve got to be honest about this, I think we overestimated the degree to which once you had devolution, independence would fall away. When you look at it, was it the road to independence or the end of independence, it turns out it was neither. So, there we are.”

One of the built-in fault lines for the future of Labour was probably that none of the really big Scottish beasts, bar Donald Dewar, left Westminster for Holyrood. Was that a mistake and did Blair try and persuade some to take the high road?

“Yeah, I did. I was annoyed. I won’t say who, because that wouldn’t be fair on them now, but I was very conscious of it [that some saw it as a lesser institution], particularly when Donald so tragically died. I was very, very conscious of that. And by the way, I think that will rectify itself over time. It is rectifying itself, because you have the likes of Ruth Davidson talked of as a future leader of the Conservative Party and she has made her name in Scotland. Whether she does that or doesn’t do that, you would still have to say in today’s Conservative Party she’s a significant figure and you know, the role of the mayor of London has now definitely become a potential stepping stone too, so I think this will sort itself out in time.”

Is that how he sees the Scottish Parliament, as a training ground for Westminster?

“No, what I mean is that if you end up talking about ‘the big beasts’, ultimately, those are people who are capable, I’m not saying they will, of becoming the UK prime minister. Are they capable of doing that? Is it politically conceivable? If the answer to that is yes, then that shows that it’s working. It doesn’t mean to say they’ll go and do it, they may well decide, and many people do decide, that actually, they would prefer to be running Scotland, but the fact you could conceive of them going and running the UK, that would be a reflection of their quality.”

Aside from Dewar, Blair was surrounded by Scottish political big beasts in his first cabinet: Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Derry Irvine, George Robertson, Alistair Darling, John Reid and Gavin Strang. Does he think politics is in our DNA or that we just like an argument?

He laughs: “I think certainly at that time as these guys were growing up, the quality of Scottish education contributed to a sort of political and philosophical development. But you are right, there were a remarkable number of very talented Scots at that time.

“And I mean, even though I was seen as English, I was born in Scotland and I actually felt, growing up, very Scottish. I’ve always felt very strong ties to Scotland. It was just that, when I became leader, because I was also representing an English seat and I’d spent the largest portion of my time in the north of England when I was younger, I was seen very much as the answer to what was at that point a problem which was Labour couldn’t win in the south.”

And yet it is now Scotland that Labour has lost. Why?

Blair shakes his head. “They’ve taken the wrong decisions.”

So, can it come back?

“What is the obvious thing for the Labour Party to do in Scotland right now? The absolute obvious thing, it’s just sitting there, like a great big prize. You become the party that believes in the union, but with max devolution within it. You are pro Europe, so you fight Brexit. Absolutely, you don’t go along with it. And you’re the party of economic and social reform where, frankly, around public services and other things, the SNP are vulnerable. If you put those three things together, then you could win.

“The question the Labour Party should ask itself in Scotland is how do you get beaten by the Tories? Why is that happening? It’s happening because it’s the politics that Ruth Davidson represents. That’s why it’s happening. You gave up the middle ground.

“That was always the thing, the myth about Scotland, it was seen as this great leftist territory, but it’s always been much more complicated than that. People forget that, I think in the 1950s, actually, you had a majority of Tory MPs in Scotland.

“To me, it’s obvious what Labour should do.

“I know, it’s been hard for the Labour Party in Scotland to find its niche and, you know, it is always difficult when a party loses power, it ends up thinking, what are all the things that we did wrong, and that’s a very sensible discussion to have, but if you’ve been in power a long time, you’ve also got to reflect on this, that over time, and after time, you do lose power. So, you’ve got to be careful of misunderstanding and thinking you therefore need to lurch off in a totally new direction because you’ve lost power.

“When people say Labour lost power in 2010, or that in 2005 we had a tougher time than in 1997, this is political life. No one comes in and doesn’t over time lose power, but that Labour government was in power twice as long as any previous Labour government. We had never won two full terms before.

“We did it by being in the centre. My view is in 2010, we weren’t quite in the centre, so that was the problem, but in any event, when you come up to your fourth election, you’re going to struggle. That doesn’t mean to say that everything you’ve done before is wrong. This kind of common sense has gone out the window a bit.

“I think when we then lost power, very narrowly, to the SNP in Scotland in 2007, we kind of waved them on a journey and we started to think we have to be more, or as, Scottish as the SNP, and we are never going to win that battle, so that is a pointless battle to have.

“I think what the Brexit thing really does offer us is a huge opportunity because, by the way, the vulnerability of Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives is that they are tied to Theresa May. That is a vulnerability, but it’s only a vulnerability you can exploit if you’re prepared to say, ‘We’d stop the thing’. So, you’ve literally got those votes just lying on the table waiting to be taken, you just need to say it.”

Blair’s frustration with Brexit is palpable. It is what has brought him back out onto the front line, and while he says he could no longer make a return to elected politics, he is making no secret of the fact that he hopes to influence.

“It’s frustrating at the moment because I wake up with this Brexit thing and I am alternating between rage and despair and finally determination that we’ve got to do something to stop it. It’s an extraordinary thing for a modern developed country to do to itself and, as I say to people, who are serious people, saying, you know, no deal, you crash out the EU with WTO rules, I mean, anybody who has ever studied these things knows the effect of that on the economy. And by the way, we are already suffering as an economy. This idea that it’s all been fine, OK, the unemployment figures are still good in percentage terms in the employment figures, but our currency took a straight hit of devaluation, 10-15 per cent, it hasn’t shifted, investment, people are not investing in Britain in the same way, car industry investment is down 50 per cent, you know, economic growth is probably 1.5 per cent down now, that is a massive amount, so we are harming ourselves by this and it’s frustrating.”

As a former prime minister, does he understand May’s position?

“I understand her thinking. She believes that the country, having voted to leave, that she’s got to deliver Brexit, but she’s now really in a position of saying I don’t care what form it takes. And by the way, it shows you the measure of desperation that it can be thought that when I’m arguing that Brexit is against the national interest, people say that demeans the office I once held – well, not if I’m right!

 “The cabinet is profoundly divided, so her view is that if the people have voted for it, you’ve got to do it. I just think, OK, but if when you actually conduct the reality of the negotiation and you end up with this mess and now we know what the alternatives are, isn’t it sensible to ask the people whether they want to proceed in these circumstances?

“I don’t see how it’s undemocratic. It’s undemocratic to proceed when our knowledge is vastly enlarged as to what Brexit means from where it was in June 2016.

“I say to people that June 2016 was like having a general election in which the question was ‘do you like the government?’ Few governments would win a re-election in those circumstances.

“The insanity of the present situation is that we’re being offered a deal that is a truly bad deal and being told if we don’t embrace it then we’re just going to crash out the EU with no deal, which would be really economically serious. I find it almost extraordinary that you’ve got politicians in positions of leadership who are prepared to countenance that.”

And what of Scotland, does he understand why Scotland voted so overwhelmingly differently from the rest of the UK in the EU referendum?

“Yes, because I think the degree to which this was driven by a sense of English nationalism, it’s obviously going to be more powerful in England than Scotland, and also because I think Scotland is quite comfortable with a European identity as well.”

Does that now make independence more likely?

“I think independence will become an easier cause to make. I mean, I’m not saying it will happen, because I still think there are very strong arguments against it, and obviously I’m not in favour of it, even after Brexit, if we do Brexit, but you know, I think when I said this before people criticised it, but it seems to me absolutely bloody obvious, if Scotland is in favour of staying in Europe, and you wrench the UK out of Europe, then yep, people who are arguing for independence are going to have another dimension to their argument. It doesn’t mean to say I agree with it, but it’s bound to have an impact.

 “The thing that’s most frustrating to me about politics today is that we’re not arguing about the right things,” he says. “We’re arguing about national identity when it really isn’t the answer to anything, it really isn’t.”

Blair was charming, relaxed and thoughtful, but it was also within the safety of the confines of the interview being about the 20th anniversary of the Scottish Parliament. He says he couldn’t come back into elected politics, for obvious reasons, but he is still influencing it and people are prepared to listen.

And I’m not saying they are in any way linked – in fact he says he knew nothing about the formation of the breakaway ‘Independent Group’ – but as I left his offices, Stephen Kinnock MP, the son of Blair’s predecessor as Labour leader, was sitting in the lobby like a schoolboy waiting to go into see the headmaster. Four days later seven Labour MPs left Labour. Kinnock wasn’t one of them.