History
Following the Act of Union 1707 and the abolition of the old Scottish Parliament, the post of Secretary of State for Scotland was established within the government of Great Britain. The Secretary of State was entrusted with general responsibility for the government of Scotland, with the Lord Advocate acting as chief law officer in Scotland. The post of Secretary of State for Scotland was abolished in 1746, and the Lord Advocate assumed responsibility for government business in Scotland. In 1828 the Home Secretary was formally put "in charge of Scotland", but the Lord Advocate continued to be the voice of Scotland in the government and took the lead in Scottish debates.
During the nineteenth century, the functions of government increased, particularly at a local level dealing with issues such as public health, poor law relief, roads and education, and local authorities were active in providing water supplies, drainage, hospitals and town planning. To exercise control over these local activities, a number of supervisory boards such as the Board of Supervision for Poor Relief (1845 - 1894), the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy (1857 - 1913) and the Scotch Education Department (a committee of the Privy Council) were established. However the accountability of these Boards was not clear, they were staffed by amateurs and they increased the scope for government patronage. In 1869 Scottish MPs asked Gladstone to appoint a Scottish Secretary with responsibility for the boards, but the post of Secretary for Scotland, and with it the Scottish Office, were not created until 1885.
In 1928, the Scottish Board of Health, the Board of Agriculture for Scotland, and the Prison Commissioners for Scotland were abolished as semi-independent bodies and instead became departments, and were moved to Edinburgh.
In 1938, the Report of the Departmental Committee on Scottish Administration recommended that certain departments be merged, and in 1939 the Scottish Education Department, Department of Health for Scotland, Department of Agriculture for Scotland, Fishery Board for Scotland and the Prisons Department for Scotland were abolished as separate departments, and instead became departments of the Secretary of State (in practice, the Scottish Office). The Education and Health departments stayed relatively intact, but the Prisons Department, the Department of Agriculture for Scotland and the Fishery Board for Scotland merged with the remainder of the old Scottish Office to become the Scottish Home Department.
Read more about this topic: Scottish Office
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)