ABSTRACT
Designing a suitable financial system for devolved government has been a recurring problem for constitutional reformers. Conservative opposition to the 1970s model was centred around the absence of the fiscal powers necessary to promote responsibility and accountability. Birch’s (1984) review of the Labour plan identified the lack of a serious fiscal power as a potential weakness, as it created the potential for the Scottish parliament to ‘transfer the blame to the British national exchequer for not giving Scotland enough money to do better’ (p 93). The current model has a little more fiscal autonomy than the block grant arrangements in the Scotland Act of 1979, but not much. The tax varying power is equivalent to 4.4% of the Parliament’s income.
