Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access published online on February 1, 2008
Parliamentary Affairs, doi:10.1093/pa/gsn002
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© The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Devolution in Wales: Claims and Responses
John Gilbert EvansDevolution in Wales: Claims and Responses, 1937–1979, University of Wales Press, 2006
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‘Devolution is a process and not an event’, so said former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies. He had been referring to the political process after Wales voted ‘Yes’ for an Assembly in the 1997 devolution referendum. Davies could have also applied his comment to the century or so of devolutionary campaigning that led up to this referendum result. Part of this century and more of campaigning is covered in John Gilbert Evans' book Devolution in Wales: Claims and Responses, 1937–1979. The book examines the central part of the period of devolutionary campaigning prior to the arrival of the Welsh Assembly. It is based substantially on the author's own postgraduate thesis completed in 1987; it also has some additional updating from more contemporary texts covering that period.
The devolutionary debates that have occurred across Wales since they started in earnest in the 1880s have been the single most important factor linking Welsh