Abstract
No issue preoccupied Dicey more during his life than the issue of devolution of power from Westminster to Scotland and Ireland (Wales was not considered), especially the question of whether Home Rule should be granted to Ireland. In his biography Cosgrove defends the emphasis on Dicey ’s engagement with the Irish question as being in accordance with the way Dicey himself apportioned his time, ‘defence of the Union counted for more than his scholarly work’.1 A central issue of British politics for most of his life, questions of the structure of the United Kingdom appeared largely to be settled in the year of his death with the coming into existence of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1922. For most of the next 70 years, bar the unsuccessful Scottish and Welsh devolution campaign of the early 1970s, and continuing doubts over the future of Northern Ireland from 1969, the issue slipped from prominence in British political debate. Ironically, some attribute this absence of territorial questions from British politics to the rise of collectivism Dicey elsewhere warned against.2 Labour politicians in particular advocated the need for a strong, centralised, state to deliver universal benefits and public services.3
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Notes
R. Cosgrove, The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian Jurist, Macmillan, London, 1980, p. xiii.
See V. Bogdanor, Devolution in the United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 166–70 for discussion of the opposition of Labour politicians, many of them from Scotland and Wales, to any form of devolution lest it dilute collective wage bargaining and universal public service delivery.
See, for example, R. Hazell, ‘The shape of things to come: What will the UK Constitution look like in the early 21st century’, in R. Hazell (ed.), Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 7, 8, quoting former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies.
A. V. Dicey, England’s Case Against Home Rule, John Murray, London, 1886 (hereinafter England’s Case).
See R. Hazell, ‘Introduction’, in R. Hazell (ed.), The State and the Nation: The First Year of Devolution in the United Kingdom, Imprint Academic, 2000, p. 1.
For a discussion of the financial arrangements, see R. Hazell and R. Cornes, ‘Financial devolution: The centre retains control’, in Hazell (ed.), Constitutional Futures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 196.
See C. McCrudden, ‘Northern Ireland’ in D. Oliver and J. Jowell (eds.), The Changing Constitution, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994.
See, for example, B. Selway, ‘The Constitution of the United Kingdom: A long distance perspective’, Common Law World Review, 30, 2001, 3;
S. O’Connor, ‘Altered states: federalism and devolution at the “Real” turn of the millennium’, Cambridge LJ, 60, 2001, p. 493.
On the role of devolution in leading to local elites identifying more with regional rather than United Kingdom institutions, see M. Evans, ‘The new constitutionalism and the impact of spill-over’, Public Policy and Administration, 15, 2000, p. 5.
See J. Curtice, ‘Hopes dashed and fears assuaged? What the public makes of it so far’, in A. Tench (ed.), The State of the Nations 2001: The Second Year of Devolution in the United Kingdom, Imprint Academic, 2001, pp. 236–40.
Beginning from the early years of the Union, when Irish and Scottish politicians played an important role in the development of Westminster parliamentary politics, see L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992.
See Y. Alibhai-Brown, True Colours: Public Attitudes to Multiculturalism and the Role of the Government, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1999.
See D. Miller, Citizenship and National Identity, Polity, Cambridge, 2000, p. 137.
For one example, see M. Leonard, Britain, TM: Renewing our Identity, Demos, London, 1997.
See A. Dummett, ‘Citizenship and national identity’, in R. Hazell (ed.), Constitutional Futures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 213.
See, generally, D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, Polity, Cambridge, 1995.
See R. Hazell and R. Cornes, ‘Financing devolution: The centre retains control’, in R. Hazell (ed.), Constitutional Futures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 196.
R. Rawlings, ‘Concordats of the Constitution’, Law Quarterly Review, 116, 2000, pp. 257, 279.
In Wales the Assembly itself exercises this function. For a discussion of devolution issues and their adjudication see N. Burrows, Devolution, Sweet and Maxwell, London, 2000, Chapter 6.
See, further, J. Pierre and G. Stoker, ‘Towards multi-level governance’, in P. Duleavy, A. Gamble, I. Holliday and G. Peele (eds.), Developments in British Politics 6, Macmillan, London, 2000, pp. 29, 39–44.
See N. Walker, ‘Beyond the unitary conception of the United Kingdom Constitution’, Public Law, 2000, 384, N. MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, Chapter 12,
and more generally J. Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.
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Livingstone, S. (2003). Dicey and the Celtic Nations: A Nightmare Come to Life?. In: Morgan, W.J., Livingstone, S. (eds) Law and Opinion in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504448_9
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