Contents Abbreviations Introduction 1 1. The politics of the 1880s 17

599 Pages·2007·2.38 MB·English

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction 1

1. The politics of the 1880s 17
2. Social developments, 1880-1914 59
3. Edwardian Politics 96
4. The Great War 130
5. Inter-war politics 163
6. The economy, 1880-1939 199
7. Society in the depression 245
8. The Second World War 286
9. A social revolution 322
10. Economic problems and opportunities since 1945. 381
11. Politics in the age of unionism, 1945-1970 413
12. A decade of Scottish politics, the 1970s 447
13. Mothering devolution, politics 1979-1997 487
14. Devolved politics, 1997-2007 520

Bibliography 560
Abbreviations

A.P.R.S. Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland
A.S.E. Amalgamated Society of Engineers
B.L. British Library
C.B.H. Contemporary British History
C.P.G.B. Communist Party of Great Britain
C.S.A. Campaign for a Scottish Assembly
C.W.C. Clyde Workers Committee
D.S.B.B. A. Slaven & S. Checkland (eds), Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography, 1860-
1960, 2 vols (Aberdeen, 1986-90)
E.C.B.C. Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company
Econ. H.R. Economic History Review
Eng. H.R. English Historical Review
H.J. Historical Journal
H.R. Historical Research
H.L.R.O. House of Lords Record Office
I.L.P. Independent Labour Party
I.M.R. Infant Mortality Rate
I.R. Innes Review
J.B.S. Journal of British Studies
J.S.H.S. Journal of Scottish Historical Studies
J.S.L.H.S Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society
L.R.C. Labour Representation Committee
M.O.H. Medical Officer of Health
N.A.S. National Archives of Scotland
N.A.V.S.R. National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights
N.L.S. National Library of Scotland
N.P.S. National Party of Scotland
N.S.H.E.B North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board
N.S.S National Shipbuilders’ Security Ltd
N.T.S. National Trust for Scotland
N.U.W.M. National Unemployed Workers’ Movement
O.B.L. Oxford, Bodleian Library
O.C.S.H. M. Lynch (ed.), Oxford companion to Scottish history (Oxford, 2001)
O.D.N.B. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
P.D. Parliamentary Debates
P.P. Parliamentary Papers
R.S.C.H.S Records of the Scottish Church History Society
S.A. Scottish Affairs
S.C.U.A. Scottish Conservative and Unionist Association
S.D.F. Social Democratic Federation
S.D.P. Social Democratic Party (1981)
S.E.C. Scottish Economic Committee
S.E.D. Scottish Education Department
S.E.R. Scottish Educational Review
S.E.S.H. Scottish Economic and Social History
S.G.M. Scottish Geographical Magazine
S.G.Y. Scottish Government Yearbook
S.H.R. Scottish Historical Review
S.H.R.A. Scottish Home Rule Association
S.L.L. W. Knox (ed.), Scottish labour leaders, 1918-39: a biographical dictionary
S.J.A. Scottish Journal of Agriculture
S.N.D.C. Scottish National Development Council
S.N.P. Scottish National Party
S.N.W.M. Scottish National War Memorial
S.S.H.A. Scottish Special Housing Association
S.W.R.C. Scottish Workers’ Representation Committee
T.C.B.H. Twentieth Century British History
T.H.A.S.S. Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland
T.N.A.: P.R.O. The National Archives: Public Records Office
U.F.C. United Free Church of Scotland
Introduction

A Scottish poet maun assume
The burden o’ his people’s doom,
And dee to brak’ their livin tomb.

Mony ha’e tried, but a’ ha’e failed.
Their sacrifice has nocht availed
Upon the thistle they’re impaled1

The reflections of Hugh MacDiarmid’s protagonist in his epic ‘A Drunk Man Looks
at the Thistle’ on the difficulties posed by cultural contradictions are relevant to the
historian of modern Scotland. The modern Scottish historian—a relatively new
species, since in the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century it was assumed that
Scottish history stopped in 17072—should avoid merely asserting that Scottish history
is exclusively represented by Scottish distinctiveness. Equally, however, one should
not lurch to the opposite extreme and attempt to fit Scotland into an artificial ‘British’
framework. It has been suggested that there have been few Scottish events which
‘mattered vitally to the history of mainland Britain during the last hundred years or
so’.3 It is not the intention of this book to indulge in the parlour game of refuting this
suggestion by locating events which meet this false, even contradictory, test.
Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that it makes a contribution to the notion that the
‘history of mainland Britain’, itself a problematic phrase, includes the history of

1 Taken from the text in Grieve and Aitken, Complete poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, i, 165
2 A notion only finally consigned to the dustbin of history in the late 1960s by Ferguson, Scotland since
1689 and Smout, History of the Scottish people.
3 Stevenson, ‘Writing Scotland’s history’, 111.
Scotland, and not only when Scottish history seems to take a different turn from
England, whether in the rent strikes of the Great War, the demand for devolution or
opposition to the ‘poll tax in the 1980s. A monoculture of thistles is as problematic as
a savage eradication of their persistent growth.

Interestingly, compared to writing about the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, there
does not seem to be an extensive explicit or self conscious ‘British’ history, or even
an especially prominent discussion of the theme of Britishness, in the tradition of
Conrad Russell or Linda Colley, despite the attempts of Scottish historian turned
Prime Minister Dr Gordon Brown.1 Equally, it is too simplistic to write off all
historians writing from a mainly English perspective as ‘Anglocentric’—a word
mostly used in a pejorative way by Scottish historians—and offering nothing to the
historian of Scotland since 1880. It has been one of the most interesting and
rewarding features of the reading undertaken in the course of writing this book that
there is much to be gained by the Scottish historian from works which have England
as their primary focus.

Further, in this historiographical context, it seems surprising that there has been a
recent trend by modern Scottish historians to virtually deny the existence, or at least
the vibrancy, of a historiography of twentieth century Scotland. In the introduction to
his recent accessible survey of Scotland since 1914 Professor Richard Finlay implied
that gaps in the literature meant that it was impossible to write a ‘synoptic’ history of
modern Scotland.2 Even more authoritative was the opinion of Professor T.M.
Devine, who, in a recent interview, damned research and writing on twentieth century

1 Colley, Britons; although Ward, Britishness and Weight, Patriots should be noted in this context.
2 Finlay, Modern Scotland, vii
Scotland with faint praise.1 If this book is not quite the ‘synoptic’ history of which
Professor Finlay wrote, neither can it be claimed that it is entirely, or even mainly,
based on primary sources. The traditional sources of the political historian of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century—personal correspondence and newspapers—
do not exist in the same bulk or, in the case of newspapers, offer such voluminous
data, in the period after 1945. Political communication is undertaken on the telephone
or, more recently, conducted by email and this presents huge problems for the task of
archiving and for historical research.2 Although it provides an attractive prop in the
absence, or failing vitality, of other sources the government archive contains hidden,
or perhaps obvious, dangers. Since 1945 the expansion of government, both in
Whitehall and on Calton Hill, has been very rapid and has produced a voluminous and
many-sided archive that is difficult to make much sense of beyond the scope of highly
specialised studies. Although recent freedom of information legislation and the
wonderful electronic efficiency of The National Archives [of the United Kingdom],
not yet matched by the National Archives of Scotland, have made this material more
accessible than ever before, the historian needs to guard against dependency.
Although the government archive, like all archives, contains many voices it can also
envelop the unwary researcher with the agenda of civil servants. A variant of the same
problem arises from the blizzard of information and publication which is contained on
the website of the Scottish Executive (or self-styled ‘Government’ since 2007).3 This
vast outpouring cannot hide Scottish statistical deficiency in many areas, especially in
matters relating to the economy. Although Scottish Economic Statistics provides a
great deal of contemporary information, it is difficult for the historian to use since it

1 In History Scotland, May/June, 2006, 50
2 This point is dicussed by Finlay, ‘Scotland in the twentieth century’, 103-12; Hutchison, ‘Response’,
113-16; see also Moss, ‘Hutton inquiry’, 577-92.
3 Scotland.gov.uk
seems to eschew presentation of long runs of data. This may be partly responsible for
the relative paucity of Scottish economic history in recent years, and a real dearth of
writing based on an econometric approach.1 One exception to this problem is the
wonderful information available on Scottish demography over the past century and a
half since the foundation of the Office of the Registrar General for Scotland. The
150th edition of the Registrar General’s annual review of demographic trends
contained an excellent overview of these trends over the period since the mid-
nineteenth century.2

If the value of a wider British historiography has been one of the main pillars of this
account, another has been the extraordinary outpouring of scholarly literature on
modern Scotland which has appeared in the last twenty years or so. Not all of this is
traditional ‘historiography’, much of it has been produced by social scientists,
especially that which relates to the period since 1945 and, to an even greater extent,
the years since 1980. Practitioners of these disciplines may well feel that their work
has been used in a particularly simplistic way in this account, but no historian of
modern Scotland can afford to ignore it. Even if, at times, this corpus tends towards
the ahistorical, this literature is the principal source for the final third of this book, and
without reference to it meaningful discussion of recent years would not be possible.
Indeed, the existence of this body of work almost makes the study of Scottish history
since 1945 an entirely different discipline from research on the period prior to the

1 Smout, ‘Scottish History in the Universities’, 50; whatever the strengths of Devine et. al., The
transformation of Scotland it is relatively ‘lite’ economic history, the chapter on agriculture since 1918
being an especially egregious example.
2 Scotland’s population, 2004, esp. 42-95; see also Cameron, ‘Establishment of civil registration’, 377-
95
Second World War.1 Perhaps in an ideal world where publishers had unlimited
resources, a separate volume might have been devoted to it. This period is also
remarkable for the pace of social and economic change in Scotland. One would have
to return to the years between 1760 and 1830 to find a time of such revolutionary
change. Although it might be possible to find continuities hidden beneath the veneer
of apparent change in the political sphere, this is not mirrored in recent social and
economic history. The final chapters of this book attempt to make some sense of this
maelstrom, but it is difficult to see much of the social structure of 1945, 1970 or even
later, still standing today. The long-term consequences of these changes in both public
and everyday life are likely to cast a much important shadow over Scottish history
than that of constitutional change. If the consequences of recent political change seem
to have emphasised the distinctiveness of Scotland, the social and economic
upheavals have had the opposite effect and have left Scotland with a society whose
features tend towards the generic. This is not to predict the ‘death’ or the ‘end’ of
Scotland, in the manner of soothsayers of many political hues in the inter-war period.
Sociologists report that expressions of Scottish identity have become stronger in the
past generation, although the religious and institutional bases of former versions of
that identity are unrecognisable today.

The principal objective of this book, and of the New Edinburgh History of Scotland as
a whole, is to place politics at the centre of analysis of Scottish historical
development. This is perhaps uncontroversial for the middle ages or the early-modern
period, but it does represent a modest counter-current to recent syntheses of modern

1 See the useful remarks in Finlay, ‘Does history matter?’, 243-50; McGarvey, ‘New Scottish politics’,
427-44
Scotland.1 Historians emerging from the tradition of economic and social history
which took root in Scottish universities in the late 1950s and 1960s have dominated
the field, with William Ferguson’s Scotland since 1689 standing as an attempt to
survey modern Scotland from a political perspective. 2 Ferguson’s work, remarkable
in many ways, not least in the elegant acerbity of his prose, is also notable for its
attempt to cover the twentieth century. This was a bold undertaking at a time when the
scholarly literature at his disposal was so limited. This political emphasis brings its
own dangers though, especially since the historiography has developed to such a great
extent since the first publication of Dr Ferguson’s book. There is now a risk of
becoming sucked into the relatively narrow interests of modern Scottish political
historians. An even worse fate would be to respond simplistically to a media
agenda—and Scottish journalism has not been weaker at any time since 1880 than it is
now—which was responsible for elevating devolution from the 1970s to the 1990s,
only to become obsessed with cynical criticism of the Scottish parliament since 1999.
It is also regrettable that Scottish historians, although ready plunderers of information
from the columns of Scottish newspapers, have been so remiss in considering its
historical development.3 Not only are there such substantial gaps in the historical
literature, as Richard Finlay correctly points out, but there are also virtual obsessions.
Two stand out. The seemingly never-ending stream of work on the development of
the Labour party in Scotland is one. This splendid body of work gives a red hue to the
shelves of anyone with a collection of books on modern Scottish history. It is a
literature stimulated by a number of factors. Critics might suggest that one is a

1 I am thinking of such important works as Devine, Scottish nation and the three volumes of the People
and Society series and Devine et. al. The transformation of Scotland, the last of which I contributed to,
so one should not think of Scottish historians as drawn up into fixed camps.
2 Scottish historiography was surveyed from a variety of perspectives in two special issues of the
Scottish Historical Review in 1994 and 1997.
3 A point made recently, and correctly, by a distinguished Scottish journalist, see Reid, Deadline, x
generally left of centre consensus among the body of scholars working on the topic,
but this is not a sufficient explanation. Scotland seemed to represent a classic case
study of the decline of the Liberal party and its replacement on the progressive wing
of political debate by Labour. Alongside areas like Wales and the north east and south
west extremities of England, Scotland was a Liberal culture in the nineteenth century.
By 1945 election statistics suggest that this had been obliterated. In contrast to Wales,
however, Scotland was not immediately dominated by the Labour party. It seems odd,
therefore, that there are so few works on the history of the Unionist politics which
were such a powerful feature of Scotland in the period from the 1920s to the mid-
1950s. In 1955 the Scottish Unionist Party achieved 50.1 per cent of the popular vote,
a level of support only matched by the Liberal before the Great War in a period when
the franchise was restricted to around 60 per cent of adult males. No doubt these
politics did not provide the vivid characterisation and powerful oratory of the Labour
movement, but they placed an important mark on twentieth century Scotland and they
deserve greater consideration. In another sense, however, there are strong continuities.
Labour did not so much overtake or replace Liberalism on the left of Scottish politics
as absorb some of its outstanding features. A Liberal tradition, tangibly embodied by
the Liberal Nationals, can also be found in Scottish Conservatism, an organisation not
as consistently opposed to that traditional Liberal idea of home rule as is suggested by
its approach in the 1980s. The Scottish National Party, whose political identity and
objectives have been singularly elusive during its history, also has an element in its
make up which owes much to Liberalism, and there have been periods where the
parties have attempted to cooperate. In some ways it might be thought proper that
when devolution was implemented in 1999 the Liberal Democrats, although the most
unpopular of the four major parties, should have had a hand in the government of