Kenyon Wright was an unlikely political radical, but in March 1989 he issued the rallying cry that caught the pro-devolutionary zeitgeist. Referring to a likely Thatcherite veto of Scottish aspirations, he wondered what would happen when that “voice we know so well” inevitably said, “We say no and we are the state.”
“Well,” he responded rhetorically, “We say yes and we are the people.”
Wright was deliberately riffing on the then prime minister’s recent “we have become a grandmother” statement and in the process produced what the journalist Iain Macwhirter praised as “a marvellously crafted soundbite”, one that even found its way on to news bulletins in the United States. An even more succinct version, “We say yes”, later featured on paraphernalia produced by the Scottish Constitutional Convention (SCC).
As executive chairman, Wright became the public face of the body tasked with producing a blueprint for a then hypothetical Scottish parliament, rising above the fractious world of Scottish politics. Alongside figures such as the Labour politicians Donald Dewar and John Smith, the softly-spoken clergyman came to be regarded as one of the founding fathers of devolution.
Kenyon Wright was born to a family of textile dyers in Paisley in August 1932 but when his father was appointed chief chemist for J&P Coats in eastern and central Europe, he found himself growing up in a region menaced by Nazi Germany. Based in the Polish city of Lodz, Wright retained dim memories of being dragged around grand cities and of a local composer he called “Uncle” who later died in a concentration camp.
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As the Second World War approached, Wright returned to Paisley with his mother (his father, who his son suspected was working with British intelligence, remained a while longer). He attended Paisley Grammar School, regularly taking the lead in the school play.
In 1945 Wright became both a “committed Christian and a convinced socialist”, the former during a Scripture Union camp near Turnberry and the latter having contested a mock school election on behalf of the Labour Party. He went on to chair the Labour Club at Glasgow University before moving to Cambridge for theological training having decided to become a Methodist.
By that point he had met Betty Robinson, who he married on graduating from Cambridge in 1955. A trip to China had already given him wanderlust and soon they were bound for Bombay, where Wright served as a missionary before becoming director of the Ecumenical, Social and Industrial Institute, Durgapur. (He had also returned to Glasgow University in 1960 to do a masters in theology.)
For more than a decade he immersed himself in Indian religion, culture and politics and in 1970 he returned to the UK with his wife and three daughters to join the staff of Coventry Cathedral. He stayed for 11 years, including seven as director of Coventry’s international ministry.
“His vision for a Scottish Assembly was one based upon “a new moral order both within the nation and among the nations”
In 1981 he returned to a Scotland undergoing what he called a “perceptible recovery of national cohesion and consciousness”, something that consolidated his support for a devolved Scottish Assembly. He became general-secretary of the Scottish Churches Council, devoting the next decade to environmental and ecumenical work.
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Appalled by Thatcherism (“something like an alien ideology”), Wright’s support for devolution went beyond constitutional considerations. His vision for a Scottish Assembly was one based upon “a new moral order both within the nation and among the nations”, although as executive chairman of the cross-party SCC, translating that aspiration into political action took up much of the 1990s.
Despite Tory cynicism and the early withdrawal of the SNP, the SCC produced its first report, recommending a legislature elected by proportional representation (PR), on St Andrew’s Day 1990, and was then responsible for a myriad of reports, meetings and declarations. Most famous was the symbolic, rather than legally binding, Claim of Right demanding that Scots determine their own constitutional future.
There were successes and failures. A commitment to PR was groundbreaking in a UK context, as was persuading Labour and the Liberal Democrats to work together, but there was also a degree of naivety that members of the new parliament would somehow rise above party politics while ridding Scotland of poverty, educational inequality and industrial decline.
After the frustration of the 1992 general election at which the anti-devolution Conservatives unexpectedly won a fourth term, the 1997 Labour landslide brought a new administration and an early referendum on a Scottish parliament based largely on the SCC scheme published in 1995. Wright was a prominent campaigner for a double “yes” vote that September, subsequently publishing his memoir The People Say Yes: The Making of Scotland’s Parliament.
In 2001 he contested the Banff and Buchan by-election for the Liberal Democrats, having joined the previous year. Two years later in Stirling he tried again, unsuccessfully, to join the Scottish parliament he had helped to create. In retirement he moved to England where he supported calls for a devolved English parliament and in 2014 urged Scots to vote “yes” to independence.
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He is survived by his wife and three daughters, Lindsay, Shona and Shelagh.
Canon Kenyon Wright, priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church and a political campaigner, was born on August 31, 1932. He died peacefully at home on January 11, 2017, aged 84