Politics in Scotland

Duncan McTavish

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138933200
• eBook ISBN: 9781317391883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Politics in Scotland is an authoritative introduction to the contemporary political landscape in Scotland and an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Scottish Politics. Written by leading experts in the field, it is coherently organised to provide a clear and comprehensive overview of a range of themes in contemporary Scottish Politics.

Key topics include:

• Government and electoral behaviour.

• Representation and political parties in Scotland.

• Public policy and Scotland's relationship with the rest of the world.

• Scottish politics both in the run up to and after the 2014 referendum.

• The Future of Scottish government and politics.

This textbook will be essential reading for students of Scottish politics, British Politics, devolution, government and policy.

1 Unionism and nationalism

The historical context of Scottish politics

Ewen A. Cameron

DOI: 10.4324/9781315678672-2

Although the referendum campaign of 2014 took place without very much reference to political history, it will be the contention of this chapter that its historical contextualisation is vitally important. What reference to history that there was tended to focus on appeals to the shared history of Britishness during the Great War and the Second World War, anniversaries of both of which occurred during the referendum campaign. The SNP and the Yes campaign seemed deliberately to eschew appeals to the Scottish historical past, perhaps on the grounds that this would be seen as exclusive. A range of books was published during the campaign that sought to explain and contextualise the referendum for a broader audience but, once again, very little of this material was explicitly historical (Cameron 2013). There was an exchange of views between two of Scotland’s leading historians, but their interesting debate concentrated on broad historical issues rather than the specifics of Scottish political history (Devine 2014; Whatley 2014).

The objective of this chapter will be to provide an overview of the modern political history of Scotland, with the focus on points of political change since the late nineteenth century. It is important to delve into a slightly longer period than the recent past in order to understand some of the key themes, such as the history of unionism or the way in which Scotland has been governed within the United Kingdom in the period before the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. It is argued here that there was a series of developments in the late nineteenth century – the establishment of the Scottish Office, electoral reform and redistribution of constituencies in 1885 and the debate over Irish Home Rule in 1886 – which had a defining role in the creation of modern Scottish politics.

It would be misleading to see the political history of modern Scotland as forming a single narrative leading to this point, important though the current moment is. It would be easy to construct a Whiggish narrative, glorifying the present moment, to show that Scottish politics has always been distinct and divergent from a British norm and that this can explain readily the route by which we came to the referendum in September 2014. This chapter, however, will look at the different political traditions in Scottish political history and will emphasise that the polarisation evident in the referendum campaign masks significant ways in which unionism and nationalism represent broad and overlapping understandings. In periods, such as the 1950s, when the Scottish Unionist Party was popular, its strength was based on a subtle understanding of the accommodating nature of the Union and a series of policy demonstrations – housing or administrative reform – of the way in which the idea of Scotland could thrive within its structures. It is a significant feature of later periods that this conception of the Union was lost, even by unionists. The demise of this inclusive form of unionism will be charted. The chapter will also look at the rise of nationalism as a force within Scottish politics that goes beyond the history of the SNP. The ways in which Labour and Liberalism attempted to bolster their nationalist credentials, partly as a response to the rise of the SNP from the late 1960s, will be stressed. The chapter will thereby contextualise the politics of the home rule question. An important theme running through the chapter will be examination of a series of points at which fundamental changes in the political landscape became evident and the ways in which those whose position was under threat sought to respond to these changes. The Scottish historical context of ideas for post-referendum development will also be discussed. The conclusion will look at the extent to which these formulations can be accommodated within UK-government understandings of parliamentary sovereignty and the extent to which the current moment has the potential to undermine the long continuity and centrality of that idea.

A monolithic Liberalism?

Three phases can be identified in the modern political history of Scotland that commenced with the 1832 Reform Acts. Prior to 1832 the Scottish electorate was tiny, with only around 4,500 voters in 1832 (Pentland 2008). They elected forty-five members of the United Kingdom Parliament at Westminster, an arrangement arising from the Union of 1707. Indeed, in the influence of feudalism in the Scottish franchise there were continuities with the period before the Union (Ferguson 1959; 1998). With the 1832 Act the Scottish electorate was extended to about 64,000 and the number of Scottish MPs grew to fifty-three. From 1832 to 1918 Scottish politics was dominated by the Whigs, and from the middle of the nineteenth century a clearly defined Liberal political identity had emerged and this continued to virtually monopolise Scottish representation at Westminster down to the Great War. During this period there was only one general election – that of 1900, fought at the height of the Boer War – at which the Liberals did not win a majority of Scottish seats (Brown 1992). On some occasions, such as 1868 or 1885, their dominance was almost complete; on other occasions, such as 1846 or 1874, it was a little less so. The Conservatives were extraordinarily weak in Scotland, especially in the burgh seats, where they had hardly any success (Hutchison 1986: 1–217). The electorate was expanded with the enfranchisement of householders in the burghs in 1868 and the extension of this franchise to the counties in 1885. The year 1885 also saw a redistribution of seats, confirming a trend towards the increased representation of populous urban areas and a recognisably modern constituency map. We can trace the modern electoral map of Scotland to these reforms, although the rural areas were still over-represented. This new system remained manifestly undemocratic, although that test is anachronistic. Across the country only around 60 per cent of adult males were able to vote and women remained outside the franchise, although some could vote in school board elections after 1872 and county council elections after 1889 (Hoppen 1985).

The Liberalism that dominated this period was characterised by free trade, low taxation, an aspiration to minimise government expenditure and a foreign policy that sought to avoid wars, which were expensive undertakings (as the Boer War was to prove in a way that disrupted both the fiscal and the political consensus around free trade) (Biagini 1992). These ideas were expounded by Gladstone in his Midlothian campaigns in 1879 and 1880, as he sought election for that seat. He appealed to his own electors in a direct manner at meetings across the county and, through the power of the press, to the wider electorate in an innovative campaign that exploited technological advances in the form of railway travel and telegraphic communication (Brooks 1985). The strength of Liberalism in this period was all the more remarkable when one considers that they were able to see off challenges from a variety of different directions. In Highland seats at the elections of 1885 and 1886 the Liberals were challenged by new voters who, uniquely across Britain, used their votes to support ‘Crofter’ candidates from outside the traditional party system but by 1895 these had been largely reabsorbed by the Liberal party (Cameron 1996).

The threat to Liberalism from independent Labour candidates was muted in Scotland. Such was the power of the Liberal party and the range of issues that it campaigned on that it was difficult for Labour candidates to carve out a distinctive political identity. Although Labour organisation was precocious in Scotland, with a Scottish Labour party founded in 1888, its electoral performance before the Great War was weaker in Scotland than in other industrial areas of the country. The Liberals in Scotland eschewed the pact with Labour that operated in other parts of the country, although they did have some concerns about the extent to which Labour could grow to become a threat in the longer term (Hutchison 1986: 218–65).¹ Conditions were difficult for Labour in Scotland, as one activist pointed out in 1906: ‘we have not a clear fight anywhere, in every constituency we have to fight both Liberal and Tory’.² Nevertheless, the fact is that there were only three Labour MPs in Scotland elected in December 1910, the last election before the Great War, and the Labour share of the vote in that election was only 3.6 per cent, compared to 6.4 per cent across the United Kingdom as a whole (Cameron 2010: 80).

A more serious challenge was from those who left the Liberal party after 1886 in opposition to Irish Home Rule. They styled themselves Liberal Unionists, sought to defend the 1800/01 Union with Ireland and pursued an electoral pact with the Conservatives at the 1886 and subsequent elections down to December 1910, prior to a full merger in 1912 (Burness 2003). That merger created in Scotland the Scottish Unionist Party, nomenclature that survived until the reintroduction of the word ‘Conservative’ in 1965. The emergence of Unionism gave the Conservatives partners who allowed them to build a new identity and develop a much greater possibility of connecting with the Scottish electorate. There was some evidence of success in the elections of 1886, 1895 and 1900, but by 1906 the Liberals appeared to have seen off this challenge too and they won 56, 58 and 59 of the new 70 Scottish seats in the 1906, January 1910 and December 1910 elections (Cameron 2010: 79–101). The ramifications of Gladstone’s first Irish Home Rule bill were very important in the longer term. This bill established many of the themes in the argument about devolution that would rumble on across the twentieth century and beyond. Equally important was its role as the midwife of unionism as a political theme in modern Scottish politics.³ Although unionism was initiated by a threat to the union with Ireland, it developed a Scottish context as the twentieth century went on. At first this was implicit, ‘the Union’ encompassed the unions of 1800/01 and 1707, but became explicit after the partition of Ireland in 1922 and as the future of the Union of 1707 became a matter of more direct debate in the later twentieth century (Mitchell 1998a). The debate about the Irish question in the period from 1886 to 1922 unleashed an argument about how to best accommodate Scotland. In the aftermath of the first Irish Home Rule bill in 1886 a Scottish Home Rule Association was founded. This body argued for ‘home rule all round’, by which was meant the establishment of parliaments in Scotland and Ireland, perhaps also in Wales and even the English regions. Some of the people who argued this were Unionists who saw such schemes as the best way of preserving the Union and reducing the focus on Ireland, which they thought was being rewarded for bad behaviour (Kane 2015). Some Home Rulers of this period developed federalist understandings of the future of the United Kingdom. These were prominent among another Home Rule group, the Young Scots Society. They operated within the Liberal party from the immediate aftermath of the 1900 election and sought to increase the attention paid by the party to Scottish issues, such as home rule and land reform (Kennedy 2013). A significant problem in all of these schemes was how to avoid the difficulties of granting home rule to one part of the United Kingdom, Scotland or Ireland for example, and not to England. The answer to this problem, to grant some form of equality to England in a federal, or quasi-federal structure, brought a whole series of other problems (Kendle 1989). The principal difficulty was how to accommodate one large and three small units in a federal structure. England would dominate and it would be difficult to separate English from British or Imperial issues. One answer would be to regionalise England in some way, but this was difficult to structure. This debate was resolved in what turned out to be a very unsatisfactory way for the history of the United Kingdom: by the partition of Ireland and the creation of a very asymmetric system of devolution, whereby Ulster was the only part of the Union which had a devolved parliament, from 1922 to 1972 (Jackson 2011: 316–31).⁴ So, although Scottish politics appears monolithic, in that it appeared to be dominated by the Liberal party, it was pregnant with a range of themes which became important in later periods.

Unionist duopoly?

The second period began in 1918 and lasted until the 1970s. There are ways in which it could be broken down into sub-periods but it has a unity in certain respects. The first point is structural. Further electoral reforms in 1918 extended the franchise to nearly all adult males and to women over the age of thirty, with a fully gender-equal franchise being introduced in 1928. The redistribution of 1918 was very significant. There was an important shift in representation from the rural to the urban, from east to west and from southern and northern Scotland to the industrial Central Belt. This brought representation into line with population to a greater extent than ever before. The western area around Glasgow now had 45 per cent of the seats, compared to only 33 per cent in 1885; on the other hand, rural areas like the Highlands fell from 13 per cent of Scottish seats to 8 per cent and in the Borders and southwest the loss of representation was even more marked, from 13 per cent to 6 per cent (Craig 1974). Although there was an attempt to use arithmetic to equalise the population of seats there was continuing recognition of parliamentary seats as interests or communities of people with similar backgrounds. This is seen most obviously in the creation of the new Western Isles seat, with a relatively small electorate.⁵ This redistribution was at least as important as the extension of the franchise because it changed the electoral map of Scotland in a way which favoured the Labour party by extending the number of seats in the geographical area of their greatest strength and diminishing the number of seats in the rural fringes of Scotland where they had little support. The results of this change are seen clearly at the 1922 election. In that contest Labour won nineteen of its twenty-nine seats in western Scotland. Nearly half (48.1 per cent) of the electorate was located there and Labour’s share of the vote was 44.1 per cent in this region.

Too much atten...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front Other
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Politics in Scotland: Introduction
• 1 Unionism and nationalism: The historical context of Scottish politics
• 2 How Scotland votes: Elections and electoral behaviour in Scotland
• 3 Quality of Scottish democracy
• 4 Political parties in Scotland
• 5 Corks on a beach? Finding a hard budget constraint for the Scottish Government
• 6 Scottish local government: Past, present and futures
• 7 Civil service and machinery of government
• 8 Social policy in a devolved Scotland: Different, fairer?
• 9 Gender and equality in Scotland: Mind the gap
• 10 Scotland and the world
• 11 A small country in a bigger country or a small country in a big world?
• 12 The future of Scottish government and public policy: A distinctive Scottish style?
• 13 Scotland and British constitutional reform: ‘Oops, I did it again!’ Blair, Cameron and the Britney Spears model of constitutional reform
• 14 The media and politics in Scotland
• Politics in Scotland: Conclusion
• Index