ABSTRACT
For the late UK Labour Party leader John Smith (1938-94), the achievement of political devolution, or ‘home rule’, in Scotland was ‘unfinished business’ left over from the rancorous failure of the 1979 referendum, and this phrase of his entered folk vocabulary in the run-up to the new referendum on devolution in 1997. The complex political backdrop to the ensuing mobilisation of a yes/yes vote on, first, establishing a Scottish Parliament and, second, allotting it tax-raising powers, need not concern us here.1 But the negotiation of religious, ethnic and civic identities in Scotland under its restored Parliament of 1999 cannot be divorced from a diffuse cultural nationalism that at all levels – intellectual, artistic, sport, media – and across a spectrum of strengths and voices, kept John Smith’s ‘unfinished business’ on the road, from Edward Heath’s ‘Declaration of Perth’ in 1968 to the Scotland Act 1998, to cite just the latest stages in a veteran campaign for some measure of ‘home rule’ within (or without) the UK.2
