Very much a mixture of practical politicians and left-leaning eccentrics, such as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, in 1934 it merged with the right-wing Scottish Party to create the Scottish National Party. The SNP, after years in the political wilderness, achieved its electoral breakthrough in 1967 when Winnie Ewing won Hamilton from Labour in a by-election. The following year the SNP won 34% of the vote in local government elections and gained control of Cumbernauld, successes that had repercussions within both the Labour and Conservative parties. Both parties, wishing to head off the Nationalists, began to work on schemes to give Scotland a measure of self-government, and the term 'devolution' became common currency in Scottish politics. However, when the Conservatives came to power in 1970, Edward Heath, the prime minister, shelved plans for devolution because the SNP had secured only a 12% share of the Scottish vote.

The situation changed dramatically in 1974, when Labour were returned to power with a wafer-thin majority. The SNP held seven seats, which gave them considerable political leverage, and devolution was back on the agenda. The SNP had also run an excellent election campaign, concentrating on North Sea oil, which was now being piped ashore in significant quantities. Their two most popular slogans, 'England expects... Scotland's oil' and 'Rich Scots or Poor Britons', seemed to have caught the mood of Scotland.

In 1979, the Labour government, struggling to hold onto office after its 'winter of discontent' of strikes had decimated public services, put its devolution proposals before the Scottish people in a referendum. The 'yes' vote gained 33%, the 'no' vote 31%, but the required 40% threshold had not been reached.

Not for the first time, Scottish opinion had shifted away from home rule; the reluctance to embrace it was based on uncertainty about what might follow, a concern about too many layers of government and, in some areas, a fear that the resulting assembly might be dominated by the Clydeside conurbation. The incoming Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher set its face against any form of devolution. It argued that the majority of Scots had voted for parties committed to the Union - namely Labour, the Liberal Democrats and themselves - and that only a minority supported the separation advocated by the SNP. At the same time, the government asserted that any form of devolution would lead inevitably to the break-up of the United Kingdom and, therefore, that the devolution solutions put forward by other parties could not be what the Scottish people wanted, because the inescapable result would be separation.

As the Thatcher years rolled on, growing evidence from opinion polls and central and local government elections suggested that few Scottish voters accepted either this reasoning or the implication that Scots did not know what was good for them. The Conservatives' support in Scotland was further eroded by their introduction of the deeply unpopular Community Charge - universally nicknamed the Poll Tax - a form of local taxation that was charged per head and took little account of income. The fact that it had been imposed in Scotland a year earlier than in England and Wales was the source of further resentment.
In 1992, having largely rejected Conservative ideology and all but a few of the party's candidates, Scots found themselves still under a Tory government, this time with John Major at the helm. Though some Scottish Conservatives quietly supported devolution, their limited influence in the party as a whole was evident in the appointment of Michael Forsyth, one of the most articulate advocates of Thatcherite policy, as Secretary of State for Scotland.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the case for devolution had been made consistently by both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. In 1989, they, together with a cross-section of Scottish organizations, including local government, churches and trade unions, co-operated in the establishment of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, a standing conference which developed detailed proposals for the introduction of a devolved Scottish legislature. Initially, the SNP saw the Convention as a diversion from their aim of an independent Scotland firmly attached to the European Union and did not join. Later, however, nationalists began to argue that devolution might after all offer a stepping stone to independence.

By the mid-1990s the promise of change was in the air, but without their hands directly on the levers of power, none of the main players could make it happen. Scotland's new political era began with the general election of May 1997, won by Tony Blair's Labour Party; the Conservatives were routed across the UK, losing every seat in Scotland. Under the stewardship of Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar, the new Labour government moved swiftly to publish its proposals for devolution and a referendum was organized for that September. The electorate responded with a clear endorsement: 75% of voters were in favour of establishing a separate Scottish Parliament.

The excitement generated in Scotland by the referendum helped imbue the subsequent establishment of the parliament with a palpable sense of destiny, something it had to cling to as many of the fears voiced in 1979 again resurfaced. By and large, however, the optimistic mood was carried through to Scotland's general election in May 1999 - the first-ever, given that the last elected Scottish parliament in 1707 had not been under universal suffrage. The form of proportional representation adopted for the election made it unlikely that any one party would achieve an overall majority in the 129-seat assembly, and indeed the final result left Labour needing to enter into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats (or LibDems) to achieve a governing majority.

The leader of the Labour group, Donald Dewar, became Scotland's First Minister, with Jim Wallace, leader of the Scottish LibDems, his deputy. The SNP won just under thirty percent of the vote, making them the second largest party, while proportional representation ensured that the Conservatives regained a presence in Scottish politics once more. Joining the main parties in the assembly were the first Green politician to be elected in a national vote in the UK and a left-wing socialist, Tommy Sheridan, whose vocal and principalled support for Scotland's underclass brought him both attention and admiration. The new MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) voted Sir David Steel, former leader of the British Liberal Party and one of the elder statesmen of Scottish politics, to be the Presiding Officer.

In a ceremony deliberately mixing pomp with down-to-earth, populist touches, the Queen came to the Parliament's temporary home in the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall in Edinburgh to officially open the Parliament on July 1, 1999. This marked the official transfer of power to the new assembly in matters of education, health, law and order, social work, local government, planning and the environment, economic development, agriculture and fisheries, sport and the arts (Westminster retains control over defence, foreign affairs, major economic and tax issues and social security). The new parliament has the power to initiate new legislation, and to pass bills without the endorsement of Westminster.

The delicate balancing act that the Labour-LibDem coalition faced in the first few years of the parliament was to prove that devolved government could still offer distinctive Scottish solutions without breaking from policies being pursued by the Labour government in Westminster. It made its mark with important decisions abolishing tuition fees for Scottish university students, repealing a law banning the promotion of homosexuality in school classrooms, and granting state support for the elderly in care, all policies notably to the left of the Labour programme elsewhere in the UK. While the parliament has had to work hard to earn respect from a broadly cynical and demanding media, the general consensus is that the increased scrutiny under which Scottish affairs are now being conducted has brought a greater sense of realism and responsibility to the political scene.