Assess the extent to which Devolution has been successful and how likely is it to lead to the break up of the UK?

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Siobhan Kiely                 POLITICS

November 2003

Assess the extent to which Devolution has been successful and how likely is it to lead to the break up of the UK?

Before Devolution, both Wales and Scotland had support for independence from the UK. Scotland would easily be able to break away from the UK as it has always had a good industry and a history of research in science, medicine, transport and technology. It has a large population and a good supply of natural resources including North Sea Oil. Scotland had already seemed very different from England with its separate banknotes, its own church, its own health and education systems as well as its own bank. Independence would have been a reasonable goal for many nationalists at the time.

        Wales on the other hand, would not have been able to become independent from the rest of the UK and the support for nationalism and independence would be mainly due to cultural reasons and the hope of the people that the nationalists would be more able to solve the problems in Wales at the time. It had suffered many economic problems during the 1980’s and the levels of unemployment were high. The closure of coalmines in the 1980’s was one of the factors causing the problems, as thousands of jobs were lost. The support for nationalism was not very high but if the Welsh people saw that the Scottish people had been given their own parliament they would have been likely to want to be treated in a similar way.  

        Devolution has been successful in the way in which it has prevented any kind of surge towards independence. It has given both Scotland and Wales their own responsibility over their own local affairs so that the need for independence is less likely.

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        Scotland and Wales have been able to introduce new policies in order to do what is best for their people. Local issues are represented better and things can be done to solve them. They have been given responsibilities over local affairs like healthcare, education, housing and transport; this has two advantages, it helps to reduce the workload at Westminster so that more time can be spent on English affairs and the responsibilities that have been retained by Westminster like foreign affairs. The second advantage is that the local parliament would be able to focus on specific areas in order to ...

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