Scottish devolution in 1979?

  I suspect she would find some way to at least try, which could get pretty messy.  You might see a much stronger Scottish independence movement, especially since the Scots would be claiming their oil was paying for Thatcher's high unemployment and tax cuts for the rich. 

It’s an interesting counterfactual to explore. The question goes back a little further than I do, so I don’t know the issues inside out. But I would say that looking at what happened to the Greater London Council when it went against Thatcher’s government shows what Thatcher’s instincts were regarding opposition from devolved government.

I would say that Scotland would be able to go further than the Greater London Council did before getting shut down, though. Largely because when Ken Livingstone did a publicity stunt or brought in a policy clashing with the government, everyone could see it and the press made a lot out of it. The fact that the Greater London Council was physically based across the road from Westminster and that Margaret Thatcher had to walk past Livingstone’s giant unemployment count billboard every morning has a lot to do with what happened.

Of course, the Scottish Assembly would have been established with popular consent, putting it one up on the GLC. It would also have the advantage of not being right where Fleet Street could see it. However, the Scottish Assembly would have faced the same issue today’s Scottish Parliament does, which is that under the sad excuse for a constitutional arrangement the UK has, the devolved governments can be abolished at the whim of Westminster. The state itself is not constituted on the basis of popular sovereignty but rather the idea of the Crown-in-Parliament, and we don’t yet know how far that can be pushed against popular opinion.

I’d say that early Thatcher wouldn’t have tried to shut Scotland down over anything short of it trying to run a separate foreign policy. The relations between Westminster and wherever the Assembly would have sat would have been dominated by arguments over oil revenues, the block grant and tax raising powers for most of her time in office. But late Thatcher, believing her own propaganda and being willing to push any policy however unpopular over the objections of her own government? Perhaps in this alternate history, her government collapses amid pro-Scottish Assembly demonstrations north of the border rather than anti-poll tax riots.