 | 'Labour are busy characterising the SNP as some fickle and reckless spouse whose behaviour will result in a messy and expensive divorce. This is rich from a party who recently advocated legal and social changes to make divorce less painful and more civilised.' Tom Shields in the Sunday Herald, 11 th April 1999. |  |
There is an old saw that you cannot know where you are going until you know where you have been. Like most old saws it is a dubious proposition. But there is enough truth in it for it to be worth considering. Now that we - Scotland and the Scots, that is - seem to be going somewhere, we should have a look at where we have been for the last 25 or so years.
If there is one thing we ought to have learned from the last quarter of a century it is that we are not very good at politics, and Westminster is a wily and occasionally ruthless old bird.
There is nothing new about Home Rule for Scotland. Westminster has been "handling" the Scots and their half-baked notions of home rule for more years than anyone can remember. But 1974 is as good a starting point as any, that annus mirabilis of two general elections when the Tory regime of Edward Heath was ousted by Labour and the Scottish National Party suddenly seemed a serious prospect, winning first six and then 11 Westminster seats. For the first time since 1707 it seemed that home rule and/or independence was seriously on the agenda.
It was also the year that I returned to Scotland after 10 years in London. Not that I was returning as some kind of grand, political specialist or pontificating columnist. I was simply the Scottish dogsbody for one of London's better Sunday newspapers, struggling to persuade an indifferent newsdesk that interesting things were happening north of the border. The work was never exalted, but I found it endlessly fascinating.
For a working journalist they were good times. There was a buzz in the air, an excitement the like of which I had never seen in Scotland before. Two intertwined processes were under way: support for the SNP seemed (seemed!) to be spreading like wildfire; and Big Oil had been discovered and was coming ashore. Every piece of flat land on the east coast of Scotland was being earmarked for yards on which to build production platforms or fabricate "accommodation modules".
Wild schemes were being floated for huge petrochemical works, international airports, whole new towns. Fortunes were made and fingers were burnt. It was the apocalyptic hour of the Dreamer and the Artful Dodger. But it was also a massive injection of optimism, energy and hard cash the like of which Scotland had never seen before and will probably never see again.
And which the SNP exploited brilliantly. Campaigning on the slogan "It's Scotland's Oil" - those stickers and posters seemed to be everywhere - by the end of 1974 the SNP had their 11 seats while the Scottish Tories continued their long slide into parliamentary oblivion. To many people - and I have to say I was one of them - it looked as if the SNP were unstoppable, and that Scotland was on its way to independence.
But nemesis had appeared in the wings in the form of Margaret Thatcher, the newly-elected Conservative leader. If there was one thing Thatcher detested it was talk of devolution and constitutional change. So when Harold Wilson launched his Devolution Bill to create elected Assemblies in Scotland and Wales, Thatcher imposed a three-line whip on the Tory troops. Edward Heath (who had promised a Scottish assembly) fumed on the back benches, and Malcolm Rifkind and the late Alick Buchanan-Smith resigned from the shadow cabinet.
I met a bruised and rueful Buchanan-Smith on a shuttle flight from London a few weeks after he had quit. He was always a polite and amiable man and he had no harsh words about the Leaderene. But his analysis was stark. I still have my note of our conversation. "Some kind of assembly, some kind of change, is what Scotland wants" he told me as we bumped our way north. "And I'm not just talking about the card-carrying nationalists. If we - the Tories - do everything we can to stop it happening, then some day we're going to pay a hefty price." I doubt if he ever dreamed quite how hefty that price would be - zero representation at Westminster.
In 1976 Wilson's devolution bill made its way through the Commons with a majority of 45 (all the Tories were opposed) only to founder in Committee in 1977. It was replaced by two separate Bills, one for Scotland and one for Wales. Meanwhile the nationalist-inclined part of the Labour Party in Scotland was growing restive over the Scottish Bill's limited powers. In 1975 two of their more outspoken MPs - Jim Sillars and John Robertson - jumped ship to form their own Scottish Labour Party (SLP). They had support from some intellectual heavyweights, notably Tom Nairn, Joe Farrell and Neal Ascherson (then working for The Scotsman). But the kind of Socialist Scotland dreamed of by the SLP was to remain a dream. The party was no sooner set up than it was infiltrated by the Trotskyists of the International Marxist Group. Which meant that Sillars & Co spent much of their time and energy trying to purge their ranks of such unwelcome and unelectable "entryists". Meanwhile Keir Hardie House was dogging the SLP's every step and pouring vitriol on the SLP's every utterance. Within a very few years the SLP was to fall apart and Sillars was to find his way into the ranks of the SNP.
But it was from within the Labour Party itself that the 1970s version of home rule was to meet its downfall. In January 1978 George Cunningham, the Scots-born MP for Islington South, came up with a wheeze to scupper the planned referendum. With the support of five Labour MPs (including Robin Cook and Tam Dalyell) he managed to insert into the devolution bill the reservation that unless 40% of the total electorate voted "yes", then the measure would fall. Not 40% of the vote, but 40% of the electorate. Which was something that no political party had ever achieved. Westminster had moved the goalposts, big time.
It was around then, it seemed to me, that Labour's whole project began to unravel. In February 1978 the "Labour Vote No" campaign was formed. At a by-election in Hamilton the arch-unionist George Robertson beat off the feisty and famous Margo Macdonald. At Glasgow Garscadden a gangling Glasgow lawyer called Donald Dewar held off another nationalist. In 1978 John P Mackintosh MP, one of the party's most able and eneregtic proponents of devolution died suddenly at the age of 43 and in the by-election that followed Labour easily held his seat at Berwick and East Lothian. It was plain that after more than a decade of year-on-year progress the SNP were fading fast.
The weeks running up the Devolution Referendum of March 1979 were a nightmare, albeit an intriguing one. We all watched, open-mouthed, as the Labour Party in Scotland fell out with itself. Brian Wilson, Robin Cook and Tam Dalyell stomped the land denouncing devolution as the work of the devil. The "Labour Movement Yes" campaign (half-heartedly masterminded by Gordon Brown) ploughed its own furrow instead of joining with the cross-party "Yes for Scotland" campaign. "We will not be soiling our hands," pronounced Helen Liddell (then full-time secretary of the party in Scotland), "by joining any umbrella 'Yes' group."
Meanwhile, the Scottish Tories were adamantine in their opposition although one of their grandees, Sir Alex Douglas-Home, did suggest that the Scots should vote "no" until the Tories came up with something much better. The Liberals, of course, were advocating a federal Britain. Even the SNP were split. Half of them seemed to want what the Government were offering as a measure from which to move on; the rest wanted to press for outright independence. That "gradualists' versus "radicals" aggravation was to plague the party for years.
Not surprisingly, with so many currents running, the electorate was confused. When referendum day arrived (March 1, 1979) the turnout was a lowish 63.8% (less than for a general election but a lot higher than most local elections). While 1.23 million Scots had voted "yes" another 1.15 had voted "no". In effect, Scotland had split three ways; one third said yes, one third said no, and the other third either did not know or did not care.
And while the majority of 100,000 or so was clear it was not clear enough. The proportion of the electorate who had voted "yes" was 33% - well short of George Cunningham's 40% rule. As it was intended to, the 40% rule derailed the bandwagon. For the first time in British political history, one vote was not enough.
One vote was enough, however, to rid Britain of the Labour Government. In the post-referendum chaos the SNP put down a motion of censure in the Commons which was eagerly grasped by Margaret Thatcher. Nine of the SNP's parliamentarians (dubbed the "suicide squad" by one of their number) lined up behind the Tories and Jim Callaghan's government fell - by one vote. In May a general election swept Labour out - and ushered in 18 years of Toryism. Most of them were to be dominated by the shrill voice of Margaret Thatcher. Within weeks the Scotland Act - whose begetting had been long, tortuous and painful - was dumped by the triumphant Thatcher. Once again, home rule was off the agenda.
The post-referendum period was a bitter time. The steam went out of Scotland and Scottish affairs. Confidence collapsed. It seemed that all energy was being sucked back into London. Among the country's political classes there grew up a new (and often quite disturbing) disillusionment with Westminster. The referendum of 1979 was a brutal reminder that politics was a serious business.
And if push came to shove, Westminster could change the rules to suit itself. March 1979 was a scar on the Scottish body politic which has not yet healed. But I sensed that the hard core of home rulers had grown bigger and harder. But hope never died. Quite quickly, people began to pick up the pieces. I attended what I think was the first-ever public meeting of the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly (CSA) in a bare, draughty room at the Workers Educational Association just down from Edinburgh Castle. The turnout was good, the debate was brisk and a handy sum of cash was collected.
But the CSA was the only straw in the wind. It was the late John Mackintosh who had warned that if the Scots failed to seize an assembly when they had the chance, after so many years of arguing and pleading then Scotland would never be taken seriously again. "Jock", he said, "would get his comeuppance." For the first five years of Thatcher's regime it looked as if he had been right. In the economic blizzard of the early 1980s Scotland was helpless as company after company, industry after industry collapsed and died. And many of those that were left were sold off to English and foreign buyers.
My own memory of the early 1980s is of the times I spent hanging around outside factory gates. Usually I was waiting for confirmation that the plant was to be closed. My job then was to ask some of the the workforce how they felt about it. Usually they were "gutted" or "devastated' or "shattered". Occasionally they were tearful; more often they were bitter and angry. Once (outside the Chrysler plant at Linwood) I was left gasping on the ground from a blow to the stomach for asking "daft bloody questions". But for the most part people were remarkably polite and forbearing.
Fifteen or so years on we are inclined to forget how much Scotland lost during these early Tory years. The list is long: the car plant at Linwood; the lorry plant at Bathgate; the aluminium smelter at Invergordon; the shipbuilding yards at Dundee and Leith; the electronics plants at Bathgate and Stirling; the steelworks at Gartcosh and Ravenscraig; the pulp mill at Corpach; almost every deep coal mine in the Scottish coalfield. Thatcher's iron determination to let the market do what it had to was often (perhaps usually) interpreted as spite against the Scots.
It is hard to quantify the political effect of these industrial calamities. But that there was an effect there is no doubt. The stridency of Thatcherism was counterproductive. Every time she opened her mouth she lost more votes. So far as most Scots were concerned, she could do no right. At her third electoral triumph - the general election of 1987 - the Tory vote in Scotland slumped to 24% giving the party only 11 MPs. But she did not care. Constitutional change was anathema to her. "This government believes in devolution to the individual citizen," she told a conference in Glasgow in 1989, "a devolution now being practised in the United Kingdom."
But what was good enough for Thatcher was not good enough for most of Scotland. After 10 years of Thatcherite economics home rulery began to stir again. In 1987 the dogged folk who comprised the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly (CSA) came up with the idea of presenting a "practicable blueprint' for a Scottish assembly and putting together a cross-party, non-party group to back the plan. Chaired by Sir Robert Grieve (the eminent gris of Scottish planners) the committee comprised academics, businessmen, churchmen (and David Steel's wife Judy). The secretary was a retired civil servant called Jim Ross.
Ross is an interesting and quietly influential figure. As Under Secretary at the Scottish Office he had been responsible for overseeing the Labour Government's devolution legistlation between 1975 and 1979, a job that left him with a sour taste. It was Ross who penned the Claim of Right which was published by the CSA in July 1988 and which eloquently lays out the case for home rule. Ross's document was a historic one. Around it formed the Constitutional Convention an alliance of pro-home rule interests which seemed to include almost every political and quasi-political organisation in Scotland.
Almost, but not quite. The Tories and, surprisingly, the SNP stayed out of the Convention: the Tories because they wanted nothing to do with home rule; the SNP because they feared that sitting down with other parties (or at least Labour) would besmirch the clarity of the "Independence Now" message. To that sage commentator Tom Nairn the SNP's walk-out from the Constitutional Convention evoked all those qualities "which has, over the centuries, made the Scots a people of gallant losers and political imbeciles".
It was round about then that Les Wilson and I made a programme for Scottish Television which we called The Englishing of Scotland. It looked at the way in which so many key positions in Scottish life had been occupied by people who were educated outside of Scotland. It seemed to us that this was an issue that went to the heart of Scotland's ambivalent position within the union. On the one hand it seemed odd to fret about people taking jobs in their own country, ie Britain. On the other hand it seemed wrong that so much of the Scottish establishment was being run by people from another educational system, another, half-different culture.
Wilson and I were frankly taken aback by the way the programme resonated around Scotland. When we were not being accused of trying to drum up a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" we were being congratulated on highlighting something that was threatening the imminent demise of Scotland. Both arguments seemed plain daft. But what was clear was that we had plugged into a deep and growing unease, a feeling that Thatcher's Britain was undermining Scotland and its institutions. And that the process was resented, often powerfully.
For the home rulers there have been any number of false dawns. One of the brightest was early in 1992 when the Scotsman ran an ICM Research poll which suggested that 50% of Scots now wanted independence. Not home rule, but outright independence. It was a startling result. Even London sat up and took notice; the poll made the national news. Naturally, the SNP picked it up and ran with it. Alex Salmond declared that the forthcoming general election would be the "independence" election. "Scotland Free by '93" became one of the SNP's jauntier slogans.
But when polling day rolled around for the fourth time, the English voted Tory. By then Thatcher had been toppled and the Tory support in Scotland crept up from 24% to 25.7%. Far from sweeping the board as they had predicted (or at least hoped) the SNP managed only 21% and three Westminister MPs. Labour, of course, won hands down; 39% of the vote, 49 MPs. But it was political hegemony but without power. home rule for Scotland seemed as far away as ever.
And then a strange thing happened. Scotland seemed to run out of patience. A feeling of exasperation was in the air. In December 1992 - while the European Council of Ministers were meeting in Holyrood House - the home rule movement staged a street demonstration. The day before it happened one of the organisers told me that he expected "maybe a few thousand" to turn out. In the event more than 25,000 people of all ages and all sorts gathered under the Calton Hill. I saw people on that march that I never thought to see in such circumstances.
Everyone has his or her own idea of what is the turning point. For me that bright, blustery December day marked the start of a process which reinstated home rule at the centre of the argument and, most importantly, at the heart of Labour Party policy. Within a few years John Major's government was falling apart to be swept aside in May 1997 by the Blair-Brown machine. The revenge of the Scots was complete; not one Tory MP north of the border. And the home rule referendum of September 1997 delivered the decisive vote for which so many Scots had worked for quarter of a century.
I can never read the opening six words of the Scotland Act 1998 without a slight frisson. It reads: "There shall be a Scottish parliament". Now and again I find myself checking the front cover just to remind myself that this is not some party policy statement or a discussion document or even a Government white paper but an Act of Parliament. Debated, examined in committee, voted on and signed by the Queen (on November 19, 1998). I still grumble about it, particularly Schedule 5 with its 17 pages of "reserved powers" but it is a piece of work that I occasionally feared I would never see.
I am not religious but there is a passage in the Old Testament which has always seemed appropriate to the last 25 years of Scottish politics. It is the Book of Proverbs, chapter 13, verse 12 which proclaims "hope deferred maketh the heart sick". There were times in the mid-1980s when Scotland was in danger of becoming a heart-sick land.
But there are two parts to the verse. The second part reads "but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life".
Apr 4 1999
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