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In the decades since the Conference on Devolution's proceedings concluded in stalemate in April 1920, the Conference has been consigned to the margins of political and constitutional history. However, within this limited literature, one interpretation of the Conference's proceedings has been universally held: that the subject of the powers the devolved legislatures should enjoy was a rare source of consensus. This article challenges this orthodoxy, using archival evidence from the Conference to demonstrate that while a consensus on powers may have existed on paper, such agreement certainly did not exist in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Conference on Devolution, 1919–1920 has been a little studied event in Britain’s constitutional history. However, recent analysis has shed new light on this little studied moment in British constitutional history. Building on Evans (2015), this article focuses on the Conference’s deliberations on the units that would be represented by devolution (i.e. whether devolution would be on national or regional lines) to provide further evidence that the division between intra-parliamentary and directly elected devolution was a cleavage that cut through the entirety of the Conference’s work, as opposed to simply being a source of disagreement at the end of its proceedings. As this debate essentially focused on how England should be governed post-devolution, this article also sheds further light on the history of ‘the English Question’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]