The Road to Independence?

Scotland since the Sixties

Murray Pittock

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781861893659
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861894571
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Is the ‘United’ Kingdom really as united as its name might suggest? For many people in the UK, increasing nationalism in Scotland raises serious questions about what Britain is, and where its future lies. In The Road to Independence?, Murray Pittock not only gives an account of modern Scottish nationalism, but also explains what Scotland’s role in Britain has been historically, and why it has changed radically in the last fifty years, with the debate about independence coming to the fore.

The author relates the economic, social and cultural history of Scotland, the rise of modern Scottish nationalism and the reasons for it, the recent history and differing character of Scotland's cities and cultural industries, the impact of multiculturalism on Scottish as distinct from British society, and the changes wrought by devolution, including the reasons for the election of Scotland’s first-ever nationalist government in 2007.

The Road to Independence? is the only history of Scotland available with a truly contemporary focus. In dealing with everything from modern painting to political structures it is remarkably comprehensive; in explaining the rise of modern nationalism it is of fundamental importance to policymakers and the wider public. It will be of interest to students of politics, history, law and social science, and to all who want to understand the rapidly changing face of Britain.

Chapter 1

Contacts and Corporatism:
Scotland Since 1945

In the 1945 General Election, the Labour Party was returned to power with a substantial majority, and a lead of almost 200 seats over the Conservative opposition: Labour support in Scotland was broadly in line with the UK figure. Although the party’s Scottish manifesto had made Home Rule for Scotland its ‘second priority after the defeat of Japan’,¹ Labour’s domestic goals – as their election propaganda showed – were in reality far more geared to the perpetuation in peacetime of the common purpose of 1939–45. The Second World War had been a conflict which had pressed the British Empire more closely than the First, and the threat to the state itself was such that even those of the population not directly engaged were called on to accommodate evacuees, give up their houses for military billeting, or – as happened in many well-to-do middle class areas – volunteer their railings and decorative ironwork for the war effort. It was very much an atmosphere of ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his needs’, and this sense of the war as Socialism in action was rather enhanced than damaged by Churchill’s own Christian-derived rhetoric of the sacrifices the few were making for the many. This sense of being ‘all in it together’ was one that Labour sought to perpetuate beyond the date of Victory in Europe; and the combination of skilful propaganda, Labour’s own solid performance in the wartime coalition, and a general disinclination on the part of the electorate to risk the disappointment that followed the promise of a ‘home fit for heroes’ in 1918, combined with Tory complacency to produce a historic victory.

Once in power – for the first time in history with an overall majority – Labour naturally turned to wartime means to implement peacetime goals. Central planning and the continuation of rationing served to promote the sense of social solidarity and to normalize government procedures of direction, allocation and confiscation designed for emergency. A wave of nationalizations both gained government control of the commanding heights of the economy and also ensured that that economy would be directed from the south-east of England. Between 1946 and 1951, the Bank of England, coal, railways, road transport, telecommunications, gas and electricity supply and iron and steel all came under the control of government, which itself set up a National Health Service in 1948. Nationalization implied standardization – fair shares for all again – and this can be clearly seen in contemporary posters advertising the change. For example, the Electrical Trades Union in their ‘As A Housewife I say . . . Switch Over / Nationalise the Electricity Supply Industry’ poster stressed ‘one rate that all can afford to pay’ for electricity used, ‘Supply to Remotest Parts’ and ‘standard sizes and voltage’ for appliances: the promise of universal and homogeneous provision.² Unions of course were one of the major beneficiaries of nationalization, which concentrated their bargaining power, rendered it monopolistic, and brought them close to the ear of government. Huge numbers of workers became government employees for the first time under Attlee’s administration.

Standardization was found not only in economic organization, but also in industrial production, where centralized supply benefited from economies of scale and helped to make a political case for consistency and uniformity as financial as well as moral benefits. Regulation also extended the powers of government. The greater share of state activity in the economy (by 1983, the Scottish Office was spending ‘about four times the expenditure of the Home Office, and twice that of the Department of Education and Science’),³ acted together with capitalist tendencies towards monopoly and the weakness of many businesses in the immediate postwar environment to accelerate business homogeneity through the decline of local firms, as many companies were taken over. In this, as in other areas such as public housebuilding, where the Conservative Government returned to power in 1951 they trumped Labour: it was the Tories who set up a Ministry of Housing.⁴ The 1945–51 government thus set a precedent which long outlived it. Governmental centralism helped to establish a governmental and indeed cultural prejudice in favour of large organizations which replicated the standardization of public ownership in the private sector. The development of vast conglomerates in key manufacturing areas like the British Leyland Motor Corporation (a 1968 development driven by the Labour Government’s Industrial Reorganization Committee, chaired by Tony Benn) and the Rootes Group in the expanding car market, helped to promote homogenization far outside the confines of the state. At one point, the historic Brown’s Lane Jaguar factory was dubbed ‘Large Car Plant Number Two’ by its BLMC masters, for all the world as if it had been a tractor assembly plant in Minsk. The brand erosion which resulted from this and similar practices contributed to the catastrophic decline of the British car industry, accelerated by mediocre management and militant unions who – possibly encouraged by the extent of government intervention – treated vulnerable private sector companies as if they were monopolistic suppliers. Between 1960 and 1976, Alvis, Armstrong-Siddeley, Austin-Healey, Bond, Hillman, Humber, Riley, Singer, Standard and Wolseley all disappeared as brands, while Sunbeam lingered only as a model title, Triumph and MG had had no new models for a decade or more, and quality control at Jaguar had sunk to the lowest common denominator. In the end, the destruction of the domestic British car industry (in contrast to its successful retention in France, Germany and Italy) owed much to the way in which it cloned itself as a nationalized industry long before it came to need the assistance of the state because it had done so.

In Scotland, the Scottish Office, in the wake of the 1960 Local Employment Act, began an ’Inquiry into the Scottish Economy’ which gave rise to the 1961 Toothill Report, and a new phase of planning. The Linwood plant, among those set up to compensate the country for the increasing centralization of heavy industry, was reliant on manufacturing the Hillman Imp, which was neither replaced nor upgraded between 1963 and 1976. After it disappeared, the factory staggered on making other outmoded models until the end came in 1981. Linwood’s fate epitomized the double bind of a centralizing industrial policy. Nationalization and commercial centralization alike drew power to the centre: but when regional policy used taxpayers’ money to undo the ills which to an extent taxpayers’ money had been used to create, it repatriated the assembly jobs which produced favourable media coverage, not the research and development capacity which was expensive, took longer to develop and replace, and which created fewer headline jobs. Yet without R & D, the long-term future for plants like Linwood was bleak, and clumsy central initiatives like the ‘National Engineering Laboratory at East Kilbride’ (1947) did not rectify the situation. Political imperatives were always short-term, and it would matter little to Macmillan’s government that Thatcher’s would let Linwood close. But what would matter to Scotland was the fact that R & D spend fell against the UK average to stand at only 45 per cent of it overall by 1997. Within even this poor figure, manufacturing (30 per cent), chemicals, aerospace and transport (10 per cent or below UK levels) stood out.⁵

Fifty years earlier, things had looked much rosier; ‘from the vantage point of the late 1940s it appeared that Scottish industry had a bright future’, as Richard Saville remarks: but this postwar dividend depended on the short-term effects of the ravages of war elsewhere in the world. Government policy was highly interventionist: it was influenced by pre-war reports stressing Scotland’s weakness in electrical engineering and vehicle and aircraft manufacture, and the rectification of these was among the planning priorities of government, determined as it was not to let Scotland suffer the disproportionate pain (one shared by areas of the north of England) it had experienced in the slump conditions of the 1930s, which had themselves called forth early government planning quangoes such as the Scottish Development Council of 1931 and the beginnings of regional planning policy in the Special Areas Act (1934, 1937). These developments were, however, dwarfed by the British centralism brought about by World War II.

Postwar regional planning within Scotland (as in other areas of the UK) was initially driven by the 1945 Distribution of Industry Act and the ‘system of Industrial Development Certificates established under the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act’ – which led to the creation of industrial estates created by governmental ‘non-profit making’ companies. As well as neglecting the effects of governmental centralizing in other spheres on the long-term capacity of a peripheral economy, these policies tended to be ‘broad brush’ and to neglect investment and development of existing strengths in favour of diversification so that Scotland would be more in line with the general UK model: the Clyde Valley Plan of 1946 was an example of this, not only with regard to the nature of industry in the area, but also in respect of the fact that it ‘argued the consistent line of the English town planning format . . . and applied this to the Clyde’. Directly and indirectly, the Clyde Plan led to the setting up of five New Towns in Scotland to accommodate ‘overspill’ from Glasgow. The term was too frequently used in planning circles, and on occasion those who left Glasgow in the 1960s and ’70s still use the term ironically to refer to themselves: ‘overspill’ symbolized the growing gap between central planning and the lives of individuals, whose initially positive experience of replacing tenements with council houses faded as time went on. The New Towns met with mixed success: Cumbernauld, twice winner (2001, 2005) of the ‘Plook on a Plinth’ award for bad architecture and with a town centre nominated for demolition in a Channel 4 programme, is frequently reviled: its wages may be higher than average, but its house prices are lower. Almost none of the five New Towns (with the eventual exception of Livingston) expanded to their planned potential, and few see them as desirable places to live, despite the fact that over many years ‘they have received favourable treatment in the allocation of public investment and have enjoyed additional advantages compared with other areas of Scotland in the attraction of incoming industry’. The development of the last, Stonehouse, was abandoned in 1976.

More successful was the development of a hydro-electric industry (championed by Tom Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland in the war years) which drew on the distinctiveness of local conditions, and which provided the first step towards Scotland’s current position as a potential leader in renewable energy. In 1975 the setting up of the Scottish Development Agency (SDA) was a response to claims for a share of North Sea Oil revenue, which the July 1974 White Paper on North Sea Oil deemed inadvisable. One benefit of the devolutionary atmosphere that obtained after the 1974 elections was that there was – at first at least – ‘no real parallel’ with some of the SDA’s activities outwith Scotland. The modelling of the SDA on the Irish Industrial Development Authority, combined with its role as a consciously national agency, served to make it arguably more effective than previous governmental development initiatives which were more centrally driven and attempted, even via regional policy, to homogenize one economic model throughout the UK.⁶

It is true that the 1961 Toothill Report had sought, through the identification of ‘growth points’, to fine-tune regional distinctions within Scotland, but the ‘broad Scottish Development Area’ introduced by the incoming Labour Government in 1964 restored centralist and homogenizing policies. Despite the development of a Highlands and Islands Development Board (1965) and regional development areas, the linkage of ‘employment growth to social expenditure’ was a premiss whose remit militated against constructive engagement with local difference. The creation of an expensive infrastructure would itself create lasting employment opportunities: all enterprise would come through central government action. Within a very short space of time, it was fairly clear to many that this policy, which boasted plans for an ambitious growth rate of nearly 4 per cent, was not working. Moreover, planning priorities within Scotland were ‘from the start distorted’ by the areas of devolved policy within the Scottish Office, which themselves had a bias towards infrastructure, Glasgow, where only 9 per cent of the population had cars in 1966, gained a gigantic new urban motorway network, which was underused for many years: there was little sign it boosted economic growth in the short term.

If government action in Scotland was a mixed blessing, there were other problems also. Scottish businesses lacking an established market position in new areas or ‘first mover’ advantage became more vulnerable to takeover from outside, and to competition from incoming industry: between 1937 and 1950 some 235 firms from the rest of the UK ‘were established in Scotland’, thus diluting the local control so central to Scottish Unionism, with its historic stress (see Introduction) on local autonomy and a separate domestic public sphere, driven by education, finance and the professions. In 1950 ‘only 4 per cent of Scottish manufacturing employment was provided in overseas-owned plants’, a proportion which had risen five-fold by 1985. Inevitably, the power of incoming capital helped to increase the pressure on the Scottish economy as much as political centralization was already doing. Regional policy initiatives, deriving from the Local Employment and Industrial Development Acts (1960, 1966), like ‘the pulp mill at Fort William, motor vehicle assembly plan at Bathgate and the aluminium smelter at Invergordon’ were all, like Linwood, transient headline-grabbing initiatives doomed to closure in the long run. Increasing population loss underlined the reality of endemic weakness and decline: between 1861 and 1951, net migration was 43 per cent of the natural increase in population; in 1951–81, it was 102 per cent.⁷

After 1945, at first Scottish GDP kept pace with the UK rate of growth, but by the late 1950s, it once again began to lag: it was, however, already far behind the superior (119 per cent) level of output per capita at which it had stood before World War I, though there were arguably signs of decline even then. By 1960, it was 87.5 per cent of the UK figure, and falling in relative terms year on year. It was not until the impetus caused by the discovery of North Sea Oil at the end of the decade that matters improved, leading Scotland to recover to around the UK rate of growth in the 1970s, a time when regional industrial policy became devolved to the Secretary of State in the shape of the SDA and other initiatives. Regional incentives undoubtedly created jobs in Scotland in the 1960s and ’70s: but these jobs did little to address the deeper structural imbalances caused by the overall context of government policy and the weakness of domestic business which once had spanned the globe. By the end of the 1970s, Scotland was probably a net contributor to the European Community budget, despite the limited EC assistance it received; it was certainly contributing to the UK budget in the shape of North Sea Oil. Of the UK parties, only the Liberals (briefly) suggested that North Sea Oil revenues might to an extent be ringfenced for Scotland’s benefit. As it was, after the initial surge of employment which helped increase Scotland’s GDP to 97 per cent of the UK level per capita by 1980, no further relative improvement was made, although around £170 billion in oil revenues had flowed into the UK exchequer in total by 2006.⁸

The major heavy industries of Scotland may have been signs of a lack of economic diversification, but they were culturally very important. Coal, steel and shipbuilding contributed more per capita in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK: these industries also had a tendency to be geographically concentrated in the Central Belt of the country, and within that predominantly the west. Scotland, with around 9 per cent of the UK population, produced 12 per cent of UK coal in 1947 (down to 6.6 per cent in 1982, though still uneconomically high), 15 per cent of UK steel in 1945 (down to 8 per cent by 1978), 47 per cent of UK shipbuilding in 1938 (down to under 30 per cent by the 1970s). These industries were strongly bound to a nexus of cultural self-representation in west central Scotland which stressed the masculinity, skill, hardness, endurance, decency, solidarity and egalitarianism of the Scot, and presented a heroic and unbudgeable manliness as the core of Scottish identity. This portrayal of the country as gritty, male and working class was regionally limited: but then 49 per cent of the population of Scotland lived in Strathclyde as late as 1971 and, within that region, Glasgow had since the Victorian era seen itself as a kind of gigantic city state that at once epitomized and transcended the identity of the country in which it was located. The self-proclaimed Second City of the Empire, host of one of the last Empire Exhibitions of 1938, was in its own mind both the guarantor of Scotland’s status as junior partner in the British Empire and a leading player beyond Scotland in that empire. The loss of Empire and the decline of the native industries on which the manliness of Glasgow rested hit it doubly hard, and it is arguable that the rise of Glasgow as a cultural location for a sociopathic manliness from the razor-gang novel No Mean City to the era of Taggart, was to some extent a compensation in the city’s own self-image for the decline of more legitimate expressions of its cultural masculinity.⁹

If Glasgow excelled in heavy industry, then Edinburgh was the chief home of those cultural institutions which had been protected by the Union, and which contributed to the preservation of a separate national public sphere in Scotland which had helped to bring so many opportunities to the country in the imperial age. Most of these were professions rather than industries: globally, banking and financial services were the most important. Here too there were problems, however, as ‘from the late 1950s onwards financial institutions were widening the scope of their activities . . . and the area of competitive overlap between what were formerly quite distinct organisations had extended greatly . . . the Scottish clearing banks saw their traditional market invaded by English and overseas banks . . . and above all by the building societies’. A sequence of mergers in the 1950s had already more than halved the number of banks that existed at the beginning of th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Scotland?
• 1 Contacts and Corporatism: Scotland Since 1945
• 2 Scottish Politics and Identity
• 3 Scotland’s Cities: Populations, Cultures and Economies
• 4 Cultural Independence?
• 5 Who are the New Scots?
• 6 Devolving or Declining? Government and Society in Scotland since 1999
• References
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index