How Scotland is Governed Matters Just as Much as Who Governs It
Sunday National, 27 September 2026
Gerry Hassan
The past week saw several landmark moments in Scotland and its politics: the election of Scottish Labour’s eleventh leader, Michael Marra, since the advent of devolution; the Scottish Parliament vote affirming Scotland’s right to decide its future; the lamentable rise in the tragic number of Scottish drug-related deaths; and Glasgow City Council threatening to hire and refire 23,000 of its workforce.
The latter underlined if needed the perilous position and finances of local councils – one which has been cumulatively getting worse for years. This is the backdrop of Monday’s local government reorganisation on Monday which arrived with little warning.
Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth unveiled the Scottish Government’s proposals – the announcement dressed in the familiar, comforting vocabulary of modern democratic governance: “empowerment,” “frontline delivery,” and “the right balance” of decision making. The headline proposal – a radical redrawing of Scotland’s administrative map to replace the 32 unitary councils established in 1996 with a “twin-track” architecture of six to ten strategic regional authorities alongside 120 to 160 local community authorities – represents the most profound restructuring of local democracy in modern Scotland.
Yet, treating this blueprint merely as an exercise in technocratic optimisation or administrative streamlining is to miss the deeper currents of Scottish political history. In Scotland, the structural reorganisation of local government has rarely, if ever, been a neutral pursuit of managerial efficiency. Instead, it has historically functioned as a potent instrument of constitutional statecraft – a mechanism deployed by the centre to reshape political realities, neutralise electoral threats, and manage territorial alienation.
The current proposals arrive at a moment of profound systemic strain. Local government finance is trapped in a grinding cycle of declining real-terms autonomy and escalating ring-fencing, while a twenty-year counter-current of public sector centralisation under the SNP has systematically hollowed out municipal power.
By examining the 2026 blueprint through its historical precedents – the reorganisations of 1973 and 1996 – we can see the “twin-track” model is not a radical break from the past, but the latest chapter in a struggle over the locus of democratic authority. It forces a critical examination of how Holyrood views power, where public policy originates, and whether a system captured by institutional insiders can deliver local autonomy to the communities that sit beyond the orbital route of the Central Belt.
The 1973 Reorganisation: Attempting to Defuse Nationalism
To understand the contemporary debate, one must look back to the mid-1960s, a period when the post-war consensus governing British territorial politics began to fracture. The catalyst was not a sudden failure of municipal government, but an electoral earthquake: the 1967 Hamilton by-election, which saw Winnie Ewing win the seat from Labour for the SNP. For Harold Wilson’s Westminster government, Ewing’s breakthrough was an existential warning shot. The political elite diagnosed the phenomenon not merely as an outbreak of nationalism, but as a symptom of deep-seated Scottish alienation from a distant, centralised British state.
The state’s counter-offensive was institutional. Alongside the establishment of the Crowther-Hunt Commission on the Constitution to examine devolution, the government set up the Royal Commission on Local Government in Scotland, chaired by Lord Wheatley. The resulting Wheatley Report laid the groundwork for the landmark 1973 Local Government (Scotland) Act, which dismantled an intricate patchwork of burghs and county councils, replacing them with a two-tier system of nine regional councils and 53 district councils.
The political logic of the 1973 reorganisation was subtle and deliberate. By creating massive strategic bodies – notably Strathclyde Region, which eventually encompassed nearly half of Scotland’s total population – the Westminster establishment sought to build administrative structures large enough to achieve economies of scale and withstand political volatility. Critically, it was an attempt to anchor Scottish public life within a modernised, efficient, administrative framework and undercut the pressure for home rule and greater democracy.
The 1996 Reorganisation: Tory Fragmentation
By the early 1990s, the political polarity had completely reversed, yet the weaponisation of local government structures remained. John Major’s Conservative government found itself besieged north of the border, facing a nation of “restless natives,” mounting questions about the legitimacy of Tory Westminster rule, and an increasing demand for a Scottish Parliament.
The Conservative response, engineered by Scottish Secretary Ian Lang through the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994, was a pre-emptive strike on the institutional architecture of the devolution movement. Effective from 1996, the two-tier Wheatley system was summarily abolished. In its place, the Tories installed the 32 single-tier unitary authorities that exist today.
The primary target of this demolition was Strathclyde Region. Strathclyde had evolved into a formidable political fortress; it was a progressive municipal superpower with the financial muscle, administrative capacity, and democratic legitimacy to challenge the Scottish Office. By balkanising Strathclyde into a fragmented landscape of smaller unitary councils like East Renfrewshire, North Lanarkshire, and Glasgow City, the Major government sought to dismantle the institutional base of its political opponents.
The explicit ideological justification was that smaller, single-tier councils would bring governance closer to the people. The unstated constitutional objective, however, was to fracture the administrative coherence of power centres beyond the Scottish Office. By creating a hyper-fragmented local government landscape, policymakers aimed to undermine the logistical case for a Scottish Parliament, making an additional national tier appear redundant and overly bureaucratic.
The strategy backfired being too obvious and too late. Instead of killing devolution, the destruction of strategic regional governance stripped away the country’s macro-level administrative shock absorbers, inadvertently strengthening the democratic argument that Scotland required a Parliament in Edinburgh to provide the oversight, strategy, and cohesion that the fractured councils could no longer deliver.
The 2026 Proposals
It is against this historical backdrop that the Scottish Government’s new consultation must be assessed. The proposals acknowledge a structural tension that has plagued Scottish civic administration since the dawn of devolution: the current 32-council framework leaves individual authorities caught in a permanent structural limbo, trapped in an administrative zone where they are frequently deemed either too small to operate strategically and far too large to remain authentically local.
On a superficial level, the twin-track terrain offers an elegant symmetry. It attempts to decouple the macro-regional planning requirements of a modern economy from the hyper-local requirements of community life. By allowing existing councillors to sit concurrently on both the community board and the parent regional authority, the executive claims it can bypass the accusation of creating another expensive layer of elected politicians or top-heavy bureaucracy.
However, beneath this neat structural taxonomy lies an acute point of friction. The twin-track model implicitly introduces a sharp hierarchy of democratic value. By stripping local councils of their strategic portfolios – the macro-levers of housing, infrastructure, and economic development – and aggregating them into a single-digit handful of super-regions, the centre is effectively reducing the proposed 120 to 160 community authorities to minor administrative committees.
These community boards risk becoming highly localised buffer zones, tasked with managing minor civic friction like local licensing disputes and park maintenance, while the genuine financial levers and structural decisions are insulated within remote regional boards. The architecture creates a dangerous democratic paradox: it expands the sheer number of local decision-making bodies while simultaneously shrinking the actual scope of what those bodies are legally and financially empowered to decide.
The Problem with Holyrood: System Capture and Insider Class Politics
This operational paradox points directly toward a deeper sociological shift within the Scottish state: the emergence of “system capture” within the modern Holyrood political machine. In the years following the 1999 re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament, devolution was celebrated for its accessibility, its short lines of communication, and its contrast with the remote, adversarial culture of Westminster.
However, a quarter-century later, that very proximity has catalysed a different institutional pathology. Modern Scottish public policy is increasingly generated within an insular, self-referential ecosystem of Holyrood insiders. This class is comprised of a highly fluid network of special advisers, national agency executives, public sector union leaders, and professional lobby groups. Within this closed loop, policy is frequently formulated through a homogenised corporate language that prioritises compliance, national standardisation, and structural conformity over delivery, outcomes and the diversity of Scotland.
In this environment local government is often viewed not as a distinct, legitimate sphere of democratic expression, but as an administrative obstacle – an unpredictable, inefficient collection of fiefdoms that threatens the flawless execution of national ministerial strategies. Policy innovation in this emerges from the top down, designed in the committee rooms of Edinburgh and handed down to the peripheries via national outcomes frameworks and performance metrics.
By restructuring local government into massive super-regions alongside a fragmented army of micro-community boards, the 2026 proposals may inadvertently complete this process of “system capture”. The super-regions, by virtue of their massive geographic and demographic scales, will naturally mirror the corporate, executive-led culture of Holyrood’s national agencies. They will be staffed by professional chief executives and managed by senior administrators who are culturally aligned with the Edinburgh civil service.
Meanwhile, the authentic local politicians, isolated within tiny community authorities with minimal statutory power and zero fiscal leverage, will lack the structural weight to challenge the national policy consensus. Structure, once again, is deployed to manage and limit democracy rather than liberate it.
Scotland Beyond the Central Belt
The most acute test of local government reorganisation in Scotland lies in its geographic equity. The unique challenge of the Scottish polity is its radical territorial diversity. The administrative and social realities of the dense urban corridors of the Central Belt bear little relation to the spatial challenges of the rural mainland and the maritime peripheries. It is in the Highlands, Borders, and Dumfries and Galloway that the potential consequences of the twin-track model appear most volatile.
Consider the spatial scale of the proposed super-regions. If the current 32 councils are condensed into six to ten strategic authorities, a single regional body could easily find itself administering an area stretching from the Atlantic coast of Argyll to the northern tips of Inverness-shire. In such a vast geographic construct, the concept of “local” democracy collapses entirely. Strategic decisions regarding regional economic development, housing investment, and transport infrastructure will inevitably be pulled toward the gravitational centre of the region’s most populous urban hub. Small towns and rural villages risk being structurally marginalised, their unique needs subordinated to the macro-priorities of dominant regional centres.
The government’s proposal attempts to mitigate this by promising “bespoke solutions for island communities,” hinting at a continuation of the single-authority models explored for Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles. However, this focus on the islands creates a stark landscape of asymmetric autonomy that leaves mainland rural communities profoundly vulnerable. A small town in the Borders or a rural village in Dumfries and Galloway faces isolation, demographic decline, and infrastructure deficits that are every bit as acute as those faced by an island community.
Yet, under the 2026 framework, these mainland communities will not receive a bespoke single-authority model. Instead, they will see their strategic powers absorbed by a remote regional authority, while their immediate civic identity is confined to a community authority that lacks the legal authority to tackle systemic economic decline.
The implications for rural civic society are severe. When a local community loses control over its schools, its strategic housing allocations, and its economic development budgets, the local democratic arena is drained of its vital purpose.
Civic-minded individuals in small towns will increasingly see little incentive to stand for election to community boards that function essentially as talking shops with a civic chain of office. The fragmentation of local governance into 160 micro-units does not empower the rural periphery; it divides it, ensuring that non-Central Belt communities lack the unified institutional weight to contest the top-down distributions of resource and power dictated by the centre.
The cumulative effect of centralisation across Scottish public life has damaging long-term consequences. I know this personally, having for the past five years lived in Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway. The town had its own town council until 1975 and was the county town of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbrightshire until 1996, when it became part of Dumfries and Galloway.
Kirkcudbright still has a muscle memory of its days as a county town and spirit of self-government. Across the region of Dumfries and Galloway, many people have a dislike of the scale of centralisation in Dumfries – especially in such a disparate area – as well as a growing suspicion of Holyrood. The current proposals would see the dilution and virtual if not actual abolition of a separate Dumfries and Galloway, instead making it part of a nebulous South of Scotland region which would stretch from the Irish Sea to the North Sea.
Just over fifty years ago, when the Wheatley Commission recommendations were published, the good citizens of the kingdom of Fife took exception to its suggested abolition and being divided up between Tayside and what was then going to be called Forth. Their determination and campaigning zeal saw them win and retain Fife as a regional council with its proud history, status, and distinctiveness. This raises the question: who will now speak for and champion Fife? Who will speak for Dumfries and Galloway? And who will champion Clackmannanshire against the Holyrood Leviathan?
The Illusion of Progress and Meaning of Real Self-Government
The Scottish Government’s 2026 local government reform proposal presents itself as an enlightened leap forward – a visionary attempt to resolve the structural contradictions of the 1996 settlement by balancing macro-efficiency with micro-participation. But a rigorous analysis of Scotland’s institutional history reveals a much more cynical reality. Structural reorganisation has consistently been the preferred strategy of a central state seeking to manage political space and neutralise structural challenges to its own authority.
The twin-track framework proposed risks introducing a dangerous democratic illusion. By creating a large network of community authorities, the government can claim it is radicalising local democracy and decentralising power to the streets and market towns of Scotland. But by stripping those very communities of their strategic economic, financial, and infrastructural levers – and insulating those powers within corporate super-regions or hoarding them via national ring-fencing at Holyrood – the centre is executing a classic manoeuvre of administrative statecraft. It is fragmenting the capacity for organised municipal resistance while centralising the genuine mechanics of state power.
For local democracy in Scotland to be truly revitalised, reform must begin not with the redrawing of administrative boundaries or the creation of two-tier taxonomies, but with the constitutional protection of local government finance and the decentralisation of fiscal power. Councils and communities do not need new boundaries; they require the independent statutory authority to raise revenue, set local priorities, and challenge the national executive without the threat of financial retaliation. Without a fundamental shift in how the Holyrood insider class views the legitimacy of local power, the 2026 reforms will not deliver an era of democratic renewal. Instead, they will simply construct a more complex, fragmented labyrinth of bureaucratic management – a sophisticated structural smokescreen that leaves the reality of central control entrenched.
One defence of the suggested changes comes from Nationalists seeing a threat everywhere – one telling me: “We need to strengthen Holyrood and make it into a fortress against the threat of Westminster and Burnham.” It is not a great logic, putting the whole world upside down – with the people of Scotland here to serve the greater good of Holyrood.
As damning is the self-interest of the consultancy class, who, shark-like, sail around the waters of Holyrood looking for offcuts and contracts. One told me that it was ridiculous to call the intended proposals “centralisation” and that it instead offered the prospect for “greater partnership, joined-up working and efficiency savings.” The world from Holyrood and the consultancy class offices is a very different one from that which the rest of us inhabit: we are there merely to be organised, regimented, and standardised.
“These proposals are potentially the greatest act of centralisation in the devolution era and arguably in modern Scotland,” one public policy authority told me. Not only that, but “there has been no detailed preparation, evidence gathered or consultation with people or key agencies.” An SNP insider and previous adviser to ministers confirmed this, noting: “There has been no prep work on this. No making the case for these dramatic changes. This is the political centre at the apex judging what is best for Scotland.”
After the reorganisation of police and fire services and the proposed slashing of health boards from fifteen to two, the Scottish Government’s direction is clear. It aims to concentrate power, resources, and authority in Edinburgh and Holyrood, administering Scotland as a single national unit to build up the political centre. However, James Mitchell from Edinburgh University warns that it would produce “a dysfunctional system of governance.”
This is not self-government. It is not democracy. It is not about good governance or outcomes. And it is not aiding the wider cause of empowering the Scottish people. To add to things, it reflects badly on the SNP’s system capture and harms the cause of independence – associating it with centralisation and diminishing local autonomy.
There is a decent chance that these proposals will be defeated. But they point to a wider truth: about a Scottish Government, SNP, and political class who have lost their way and touch. These plans need to be shelved, and a new approach taken – one which trusts the people of Scotland, not mandarins and the managerial classes; which disperses power and decision making; and which builds self-government and self-determination from the bottom-up.
The proposals reflect a flawed approach to viewing and governing Scotland. Instead, how the country is governed matters just as much as who governs it. Without addressing this fundamental principle, there is little prospect of advancing the ultimate question of self-government: why the people should take power into their own hands. If this is not corrected, this week’s vote in the Scottish Parliament becomes entirely meaningless.
