The Wisdom of the Ages

John Osmond at the Institute of Welsh Affairs relates that the Speaker’s Conference of 1920 was able to agree on the areas in which devolved legislatures should be established:

On this last point the crucial agreement was that the principle of nationality should be fundamental and so the Conference decided that England should not be divided. In short, therefore, the Conference opted for a British federation , made up of England, Scotland, Ulster and Wales.

It seems that Speaker Lowther himself favoured what is today UKIP's solution: Dual Mandate MPs.

...another explanation why the Speaker’s Conference led nowhere, was that it failed to agree on whether the devolved legislatures should be directly elected. Suggesting that the territories should be represented by Grand Committees of their MPs meeting in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, and London Speaker Lowther explained:

“The more I considered the proposal of one supreme and four independent legislatures, the less I liked it. The confusions that might arise, the multiplicity of elections, the novelty of five prime Ministers and Cabinets of probably divergent views, the enormous expense of building four new sets of Parliamentary buildings and Government offices and providing all the paraphernalia of administrations, frightened by economical soul.”

It's the dual mandate MP solution to the West Lothian Question that these days gets certain Tories the sack. The Conservative Party being smart enough to understand what UKIP cannot: There is no going back; the Scots will not abolish their MSPs.

Read on and comment here.