David Milne (civil servant)

Sir David Milne, GCB (11 March 1896 – 4 February 1972) was a Scottish civil servant, who served as Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Scotland from 1946 to 1959.

[1][2] Milne was educated at Daniel Stewart's College and the University of Edinburgh,[1] although his studies at the latter were interrupted by the First World War (he served with the Royal Scots from 1915 to 1919).

[3] Milne had what Ian Levitt called in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography a "brand of comfortable unionism ... his administrative style and ability to select deputies of similar mind did much to ensure that Scottish opinion felt able to work and prosper with the United Kingdom government.

"[1] His obituary in The Times remarked that "Only those who were at Dover House in those days [the Scottish Office in London during the minority Labour government of 1929–31] can appreciate how much his sympathy, his tact, and his capacity for getting into the mind of Ministers and acting as an interpreter between them and their civil servants contributed to the smooth running of the administration".

This, Levitt argues, reflected Milne's desire to stem the growth of Scottish nationalism; the result was a series of concessions to Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s in the form of lower tax rates but equivalent spending to England.