The Scottish Government

Making History - new Scottish Parliament

On July 1, 1999, the Scottish Parliament met for the first time in almost 300 years and the Queen performed the opening ceremony in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on The Mound in Edinburgh.

The Parliament began its modern life in temporary premises while a new building was constructed at the foot of the Royal Mile beside Holyrood Palace in the lee of Salisbury Crags.

That building, designed by the late Catalan architect Enric Miralles, is now ready to be the Parliament's permanent home. MSPs held their first debate in the main chamber on Tuesday, September 7 and it has been regularly used since then. The Queen will perform the official opening ceremony on Saturday, October 9.

First Minister Jack McConnell and other Scottish Ministers will be in attendance alongside MSPs and invited guests from Scotland and overseas.

The Scottish Executive is the devolved Government for Scotland, led by a First Minister who is nominated by Parliament and appointed by the Queen as Head of State.

Latest details on the opening ceremony

A SHORT HISTORY

Scotland's original parliament was known as the Community of the Realm, made up of the Three Estates - secular lords, senior clergy, and commoner burgh representatives.

The Scottish parliament was mostly an itinerant body, meeting at places like Perth or Stirling or Haddington at the Sovereign's convenience. It was 1632 before it found a fixed location in Edinburgh.

The process of Union had really begun more than 100 years before in 1603 when James VI of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth to become James I of England. The Royal court moved south with him. James was keen to formally integrate his two kingdoms at that time but was prevented by the mutual hostility of both English and Scottish subjects.

Times changed rapidly. In the middle of the 17th century civil war engulfed England. The republican-minded Cromwell seized power, had Charles I executed, declared England a Republic, and outlawed the Scottish parliament after occupying the country where Charles' son Charles II had been crowned king at Scone.

Cromwell died in 1660, Charles II was restored to the joint throne of England and Scotland and the Scottish Parliament was revived. But it was a time of religious intolerance and power struggles between Protestants and Catholics.

Scotland was a Presbyterian country and Charles' successor, James VII and II, although born a Protestant converted to Catholicism and was viewed with suspicion by Scots Covenanters who put their faith in a National Covenant that stated parliament, not royalty, was the ultimate source of authority.

When James difficult position result in him leaving the throne his daughter Mary, married to the Protestant William of Orange, was invited back from Holland to take the throne and in 1690, the Scottish parliament declared Presbyterianism to be the national religion, enshrining legal discrimination against other faiths.

By the beginning of the 18th century the Anglo-Scottish relationship had deteriorated badly. The collapse of the Darien Scheme, conceived as a means of establishing an overseas colony and reducing reliance on English markets, meant a lot of very important people in Scotland lost a lot of money just as a series of poor harvests were causing economic and social distress.

In 1702 Queen Anne inherited the Crown from her sister Mary who had died childless. All 17 of Anne's children also failed to reach adulthood. This meant a successor would have to be found from another branch of the Stewart family raising the possibility that Scotland and England would back competing candidates. A formal Union of the two countries was perceived as the solution to this dilemma.

THE ACT OF UNION

The idea of Union was not unanimously welcomed at the time, neither in Scotland or England. There were political and economic arguments on both sides

Union was ultimately achieved on January 16, 1707, when the Act of Union was ratified by the parliament in Edinburgh by 110 votes to 67.

The Act came into force on May 1 that year and Scotland and England became the single kingdom of Great Britain.

It was not all plain sailing after that. The abortive Jacobite rebellion of 1715 was led by Queen Anne's brother, James, a Catholic, in an attempt to win back the Crown that the new unified parliament had bestowed on the Hanoverian line of the family, George I, after Anne's death in 1714.

Thirty years later Charles Edward Stewart - Bonnie Prince Charlie - followed in his father's footsteps, trying his luck in 1745 by raising his standard at Glenfinnan. The Battle of Culloden in 1746 was not a purely English-Scottish confrontation, but the climax of a British civil war that pitched as many Scots against their fellow countrymen as it did against Englishmen. Charles had marched as far south as Derby before his courage failed him. If the rebellion had been successful it was far from certain that Charles would have ended or modified the terms of Union.

By the second half of the 18th century, Scots had more or less accepted the Union and set their minds to making it work to their advantage. The intellectual flowering of the great names of the Scottish Enlightenment - David Hume, Adam Smith - spread outwards from Edinburgh to influence the whole of Europe and the world beyond. The city of Glasgow grew and flourished on the tobacco trade with former English colonies in America. Scots played a leading role in building the British Empire.

MODERN TIMES

Pressure for some kind of legislative devolution to Scotland came and went during the course of the 20th century. In 1979 a referendum returned a small majority in favour of a Scottish Assembly but not enough people took part in the vote to translate this into action.

In the late 1980s the British Labour Party adopted devolution for Scotland as its policy and went on to win the 1997 UK general election. By coincidence the 1997 election was held on the 290th anniversary of the Treaty of Union.

One of the first acts of the new government was to hold a devolution referendum on September 11 of the same year. It returned a clear majority in favour of setting up a Scottish Parliament with discretionary tax-raising powers.

The first elections to the Scottish Parliament were held in May 7, 1999, and the Parliament of 129 MSPs reconvened on The Mound on July 1.

The new Parliament at Holyrood, which will be opened on October 9, has been built at an estimated cost of £431 million.