Internal minorities and the road to devolution

As in Catalonia, support for nationalism in Scotland cuts across and overlaps with religious, class, and ethnic cleavages. However, because of the idiosyncratic structure of the Union state, the recognition of Scotland as a nation has rarely been subject to controversy. As a result, Unionists and Nationalists alike have been able to pull the

99. To be accurate, Scots-born subjects were no longer considered as aliens on English soil since the Union of the Crowns a century earlier. This point is further developed in Chapter VI, section 6.1.

112 nationalist string, while conceiving constitutional issues in a radically different way.

The question of Scotland’s constitutional status has been sporadically debated ever since 1707, although it never came to the fore of the political debate until the 1970s. At least since the creation of the Scottish Home-rule Association in 1886, constitutional change has been discussed and advocated by umbrella organizations seeking to create a broad coalition of support, aggregating groups and individuals with distinct ideological inclinations and yet united in their common objective to reform the Union-state. The period from 1918 to 1964 saw the consolidation of a two-party system in Britain organized along class cleavages, although, as I showed earlier, class divisions competed with religious ones in Scotland throughout the entire period.

The first breakthrough of the SNP in the 1967 Hamilton by-elections marked an important shift in Scottish politics, as the class cleavage for four decades to come would no longer be superseded by religious affiliations, but by divergences over Scotland’s constitutional status, “at times cutting across and at other times reinforcing the class cleavage” (Mitchell 2009: 33). Scottish nationalism has historically been associated with the Liberals and the Labour party, which emerged as an autochthonous force in the second half of the nineteenth century (Keating & Bleiman 1979). The main reason for its hegemony north of the border, apart from following the regional pattern of industrialization, lies in the party’s successful balancing act between class and national interests. For a long time, this consisted in tapping resources from the centre rather than seeking partial exit in the form of political autonomy. In the 1970s, the Labour party’s renewed interest in devolution did not stem from a genuine ideological shift but came primarily in response to the SNP electoral threat. With 21.9% of the vote in 1974, the SNP was challenging the Labour party in its old Scottish bastion and forced the Labour leadership to reconsider its position. However, its reluctance to do so was manifest in the profound internal dissensions that ultimately contributed greatly to the referendum failure and subsequent fall of the Labour government¹⁰⁰.

100. Although a majority of Scottish voters supported the devolution Bill, the result fell short of reaching the 40%

electorate threshold, an amendment passed to appease anti-devolutionists within Labour ranks.

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Table 4: UK General election results in Scotland (1951-1997)

Parties Cons Labour Lib-Dem SNP Other

1951 48.6 47.9 2.7 0.3 0.5

1955 50.1 46.7 1.9 0.5 0.8

1959 47.2 46.7 4.1 0.8 1.2

1964 40.6 48.7 7.6 2.4 0.7

1966 37.7 49.9 6.8 5 0.6

1970 38 44.5 5.5 11.4 0.6

1974 24.7 36.3 8.3 30.4 0.3

1979 31.4 41.5 9 17.3 0.8

1983 28.4 35.1 24.5 11.8 0.3

1987 24 42.4 19.2 14 0.3

1992 256 39 13.1 21.5 0.8

1997 17.5 45.6 13 22.1 1.9

Sources: my own compilation from Hassan and Lynch, 2001: 349-352.

But in the 1980s, successive victories of the Conservatives in general elections acquired an ever-growing territorial dimension. While quasi-hegemonic in the South-East of England, the party lost its ability to mobilize its traditional electorate in the periphery, and especially in Scotland where its vote share went down to 24% and 10 seats in 1987, against 42.5% and 50 seats for Labour. In her notorious Sermon of the Mound in 1988 at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Margaret Thatcher vainly attempted to reconcile her neo-liberal agenda with what she saw as a deeply rooted Scottish religious ethos¹⁰¹. However, clergymen and pundits alike received her intervention with scepticism, the Conservatives’ steady electoral decline being the consequence of the party’s inability to deliver economic growth in Scotland, the secularization of Scottish Protestantism and the rise of political nationalism (Mitchell & Bennie, 1996).

Besides, the decade saw the development of another phenomenon that was to have crucial consequences for the evolution of Scottish nationalism. As Labour was adopting a more explicitly nationalist discourse and coming to terms with its internal divisions

101. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, the Scottish religious ethos was “about spiritual redemption, not social reform.”

114 over devolution, the Conservatives, whose uncompromising unionism had been reinvigorated under the influence of Margaret Thatcher, became markedly anti-devolutionist. More than ever before, constitutional and class cleavages in Scotland overlapped and reinforced one another, the nationalist struggle taking a clear anti-Tory dimension (Mitchell 1998). For the Conservatives, Scotland’s national destiny now lay in the exaltation of private enterprise and the eradication of the Scots’ ‘dependency culture’ through the dismantling of the welfare state in an increasingly centralized state.

In stark contrast, home-rulers, despite their ideological divergences, shared the view that Scottish national identity was primarily territorial, leaning towards the left of centre, and necessitating a profound revision of Scotland’s current constitutional status. Electoral breakdowns of the 1979 referendum clearly show that support for devolution was mainly dragged from working class and Catholic voters and geographically concentrated in the West Central Lowlands.¹⁰²

The decline of the Conservatives, combined with evidence that the reserves of potential electors were to be found on the left of the political spectrum, encouraged the SNP to become explicitly left-wing in the 1980s, following a long period throughout which the party had been reluctant to position itself on the ideological axis (Lynch 2002)¹⁰³. In the 1970s, Scottish Labour sought to counter the rise of the SNP by accusing it of being the

‘Tartan Tories’, hostile to working class interests. However, this seemed increasingly far-fetched now that the party was clearly hunting on Labour’s territory.

By the late-1980s, Labour endorsed the idea of cross-party campaigning for devolution and participated in the Scottish Constitutional convention, together with the Liberal Democrats, the Churches, Trade Unions and a number of civil society associations. The SNP, torn apart by internal dissensions between fundamentalists and gradualists, remained at the margin of the initiative without entirely disqualifying it. The subsequent

102. The widespread belief that the 1978 Scotland Act was meant to entrench a Catholic-friendly Labour domination in Scotland through an assembly elected by the first-past-the-post system goes a long way to explain the referendum failure (McKenzie 1981). This is of course not the only factor that has been invoked. However, the decision to introduce proportional representation for elections at the Scottish Parliament in the 1997 Scotland Act was partly taken in order to dissipate these doubts.

103. In 1979, a group of party members – the 79 Group – created an internal faction and sought to persuade the SNP leadership to take an actively left-wing orientation. Although they were expelled in 1982, the party nonetheless evolved towards a more left-wing strategy, following the changing winds of Scottish politics and surfing on the widespread opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal agenda.

115 release of the Scottish Bill of Rights¹⁰⁴ illustrates the expansion of political nationalism, not limited to the SNP but covering the entire political spectrum apart from the Conservatives. The important difference from the previous decade is the intimate link built between devolution and democracy, or more precisely, between self-determination and the 'democratic deficit' engendered by the decline of the Conservatives, portrayed as having ‘no mandate in Scotland’ (Mitchell et al. 1998). Although the Catalan case was admittedly more problematic in the 1970s, the Scottish road to devolution also associated political autonomy with democratic legitimacy, undermined by the declining support of the Scottish electorate for the Westminster government and the development of an increasingly distinct party system. The 1997 referendum – imposed by Labour party backbenchers and endorsed by Tony Blair – illustrated the changing mood of the Scottish electorate who, after 17 years of Conservative rule, voted en masse in favour of the bill.

However, electoral breakdowns show significant variations along ideological, class and religious lines. While merely 8% of Conservative voters registered a double-yes vote, 85% of Labour voters and 90% of SNP voters did so. Class divisions show a similar pattern: 46% of middle class voters supported the scheme against 74% of lower class voters. More strikingly, the overwhelming majority of Roman Catholics (83%) registered a double-yes vote, while no more than 59% of Church of Scotland members did so (Denver 2002). These figures are sufficiently compelling to conclude that the re-establishment of the Scottish parliament marked the decline of the Conservative strand of unionism, and a concomitant rise of a territorially-defined national identity, asserting more left-of centre values, and cutting across religious and ethnic lines. On the eve of devolution, the national boundary was more than ever before territorialized. In 1995, the SNP former MP and future MSP George Reid was able to span a thousand years of Scottish history to give his own teleological vision of contemporary Scottish national identity, “built on the commonwealth of the Celts, the moral responsibility of the Calvinists, the social concern of the Catholics, the humanity of the Labour movement, and the civic nationalism of today.”¹⁰⁵

104. The Statement of the Scottish Bill of Rights reads: “We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs, and do hereby declare and pledge that in all our actions and deliberations their interests shall be paramount.”

105. Georges Reid speaking at the Donaldson lecture, 1995.

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IV