THE Scottish Tories descended into acrimony yesterday after a senior leadership figure suggested the Holyrood parliament could be scrapped.

Bill Walker, the party’s deputy chairman, said an internal policy group’s call to give the Scottish parliament more powers should be put to a referendum, along with the option of abolishing devolution.

On Friday a policy review team led by Douglas Osler, the former schools inspector, concluded that taxes raised in Scotland should stay in Scotland and be distributed by a Scottish treasury.

However, Walker warned that changing the Scotland Act to give MSPs more powers would have to be put to voters, who he said were deeply sceptical about the Scottish parliament after seven years of devolution.

“I believe a referendum is the only way that constitutional change can take place. We can’t have change of any kind, particularly to do with fiscal autonomy, unless the people are properly consulted,” he said.

“I have no objection in principle to a referendum (but) if you were going to have a referendum then that would also have to ask the question: do you want the Scottish parliament to continue in being? “Judging by the comments I get everywhere I go, I have not found anyone yet, other than the odd Liberal, who seemed to think the Scottish parliament works well. I have the completely opposite view and so do the vast majority of people who speak to me.”

Walker’s intervention is a setback for Annabel Goldie, the Tory leader who has been at pains to fend off accusations that the party is anti-Scottish by emphasising her support for devolution after campaigning against it before 1999.

Labour is now the only mainstream party not calling for further powers for Holyrood. The Liberal Democrats want MSPs to be given wide-ranging tax raising powers, an idea also backed last week by the policy review team appointed to advise the Scottish Tories.

Meanwhile, in a coup for the SNP, it has emerged that Magnus Magnusson, the TV presenter, has said he believes self-determination is inevitable.

In Deadline, a new book about the Scottish press, the former Mastermind presenter writes: “In 20 years’ time I expect to see an independent Scotland.”

Times Recommends

• Donor organ allowed child’s own heart to heal
• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Sacha Baron Cohen forced to tone down Brüno