Devolution
Devolution is the process of transferring power from central government to a
lower or regional level; among the reasons given for doing so are that it will
increase the efficiency of government and meet demands from special sections
of the community for a degree of control over their own affairs. The word
gained great currency in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, when
proposals were made to establish separate assemblies for Scotland and Wales,
each with a range of powers over its own internal affairs. However, a
referendum held on the proposals revealed that the majority of voters in Wales
were opposed to any such transfer of powers. In Scotland, a majority of those
who voted were in favour of the proposals, but this represented less than the
40% of the total electorate which had been stipulated, and the proposed
legislation was therefore abandoned. Serious devolution was not to come until
the very end of the 20th century, when the 1997 Labour government gave
Scotland its own parliament with restricted powers, and gave Wales an
assembly with what amounted to glorified local government authority. The
Welsh demonstrated hardly more enthusiasm for devolution in the second
referendum than in the first, but the Scots were clearly eager for a measure of
independence from London.
The question had arisen much earlier in the 20th century when the Irish
issue had led to calls for ‘home rule all round’. The establishment in 1921 of a
separate parliament for Ulster with considerable powers over domestic matters
was controversial because the administration was accused of discriminating
against the Roman Catholic community. The devolved Ulster parliament was
abolished in 1973, and numerous efforts to re-establish it on a power-sharing
basis failed. Although Northern Ireland has again had a power sharing assembly
since the late 1990s, it is severely hampered by the still irreconcilable differ-
ences between the Catholic and Protestant communities. Likedecentraliza-
tion, devolution has tended to be attractive to centrist parties which doubt
their ability to win and hold power at the central level for long, and campaign
for constitutional reform on issues outside the normal ambit of debate between
major right- and left-wing parties.
Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism, which is sometimes abbreviated as ‘diamat’, is a
shorthand description ofMarxisttheory officially propagated in the Soviet
Union, and developed in particular byEngels. It stresses the two main
methodological points of Marx’s own writings. The first was an insistence
on a version of the logical form known as dialectical argument, which Marx
had taken over and modified from Hegel. The second was the assumption that
the world is entirelymaterialist, that is, the argument that ideas, beliefs,
Devolution