WI: No or Limited Devolution in Wales and Scotland

Devolution has changed the substance of Welsh and Scottish politics utterly, of that there is no doubt. But what if there had never been any devolution settlement? What impact would either avoiding the twin referendums in 1997 or watering down the settlement have on politics in the UK?

A Conservative victory in 1997 seems the surest way to stop any devolution settlement, but this seems very unlikely. Even if there was a Conservative victory in 1997 they can't keep winning forever.

It would require little for the 1997 referendum in Wales to fail with the result having been so close, but a failed referendum still produces interesting butterflies. What effect would the humiliation of a failure have on Labour in Wales and across the UK? In addition on Plaid Cyrmu's successes?

Stopping the Scottish referendum of 1997 is very hard. In fact, I suspect that our timeline is somewhat of an aberration for not having a degree of home rule come about sooner in Scotland. Perhaps it is easier to weaken the devolution settlement in Scotland rather than stop it entirely. Perhaps the Scottish Constitutional Convention could be weakened somehow? Or the second question, the question regarding tax-varying powers being devolved to the Scottish parliament, could be dropped from the ballot paper.

In any event, what PODs would you use to prevent or limit devolution and what do you think the consequences would be for politics in Wales, Scotland and the United Kingdom? Would Labour be weakened or strengthened without devolution? What would direct rule from London look like in 21st-century Britain?

Background Reading/Watching:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_devolution_referendum,_1997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Constitutional_Convention
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_devolution_referendum,_1997
The Fall of Scottish Labour (2015):
The Rise of the SNP (2015):
 
The POD would be no Thatcherism, basically.
There was pressure for devolution before then, as seen in the 1979 referendum. I think that you'd have to remove or at least radically change Wilson's government, since the Scottish and Welsh nationalists first started to make gains thanks to dissatisfaction with his government.
 
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You don't really need anything remotely dramatic to stop Welsh devolution, I mean the 1997 result was pretty much about 50-50, and it was starting from a much, much lower level of cultural/historical support than in Scotland. If the referendum fails in 1997, then I don't think we would have Welsh devolution by 2018 in that timeline, and possibly may not *ever* have it, if there is any kind of similar development of Scottish politics to OTL - it would put the political class, and particularly the Labour political class, totally off the idea. I guess Plaid might eventually force the issue, like the SNP did in Scotland, but I wouldn't bet on it given the much lower (and more milquetoast) residual level of nationalism in Wales.

To dilute Scottish devolution, you just need to get it implemented early enough. The Scottish Assembly proposed in the seventies was a much less powerful body than the eventual Scottish Parliament. And an early implementation would probably result in a strong position for the Scottish Conservatives, and potential problems for the SNP, particularly if there's a propositional element to the system of election, which would ease splits. Neither would augur well for particularly radical development of the powers of the thing.
 
There was pressure for devolution before then, as seen in the 1979 referendum. I think that you'd have to remove or at least radically change Wilson's government, since the Scottish and Welsh first started to make gains tanks to dissatisfaction with his government.

Though the 1979 election then resulted in the SNP being put back in its box.

The moment when devolution became unstoppable IMHO was when Scottish voting patterns became severely decoupled from English ones - which was Thatcher's doing. Once you hit 1987, when Labour wins fifty Scottish seats out of seventy-two, and losing badly in England, the "alien Westminster government" argument became irresistible. A moderate Tory Party that still had a respectable number of Scottish MPs, would be much less of a boogeyman.
 
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