The Future of Scotland

Robert Underwood, Robert Underwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Originally published in 1977, at a time when Scottish affairs were in a state of flux as the debate over political devolution and self-government was pursued, this book deals with key features of Scottish development. It explores the main issues which were then being considered in the planning of Scotland's future. The contributors discuss the issues from a global perspective using Scotland as an occasion for detailed focus.

1
THE SCOTTISH IDENTITY

Christopher Smout

There may be a Scottish identity, which is the heritage of the Scottish past, but there is no Scottish people in a racial sense. Early medieval Scotland was a peculiar amalgam of Picts, Irish Celts, Vikings, Britons, Angles, Normans and Flemings. In the course of hundreds of years these people and tribes became fused into a nation state, though with at least three strong regional identities, that of the highlands, of the lowlands and of the northern isles. Then industrialisation and a quarter of a million of union with the rest of Britain had its effect. Many Scots today are descended from very recent immigrants. About one in six are catholics, and most of these are descended from the Irish peasantry of Victoria’s reign.

In the 1961 census of Scotland nearly a quarter of a million people were reported as born in England and Wales, which is a larger absolute number (though representing a much smaller proportion of the population) than the maximum number of Irish-born reported in any of the decennial nineteenth century censuses. Then there are the Poles, the Jews, the Italians, the Pakistanis, the Americans, all immigrants in small numbers, but all with the right and opportunity to be or to become as Scottish as the next man. To live in Scotland with the consciousness of being Scottish does not imply the same spiritual and material goals as the followers of Robert I or of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Scotland is part of the modern, agnostic, consumer, capitalist society, facing problems of resource shortage, and potential nuclear extinction. That society is the West.

The history of the Union enshrines the continuing central paradox of the Scottish identity. It bears witness to the survival of an elemental nationalist consciousness that Scotland is not England; and on the other hand it carries the apparently opposing consciousness that Scotland and England are linked within a national British entity. Whether the union breaks up next year, or continues forever, the highly complex feelings that Scots have had for hundreds of years about their relationship to the English are unlikely to change overnight.

The Union of the Crowns in 1603 was the moment when dynastic accident first led to the compromising of Scotland’s independence. There was then one King and two governments, with the Scottish government generally a satellite of the will of a London resident King. On several important occasions in the seventeenth century, those who might be said to speak for Scotland (Churchmen, merchants, the whole convention of the States on one occasion) strove for an even closer political union with England. Yet in the same century there was a national rebellion because one King tried to impose an English-type liturgy on the Scottish church, and later extensive anti-English demonstrations at the time of the Darien scheme because another tried to prevent the Scots setting up a colony in territory claimed by the King of Spain. The ambivalent character of Scottish feelings towards England was thus evident at a very early date in the modern period, but it is worth noticing that no explicitly nationalist movement ever appeared in the seventeenth century, and no unionist one either. The struggles were about religion, dynastic power, and trade; attitudes towards England were taken up in relation to these questions, not in relation to the concept of the nation as such.

Since the formal Union of Parliaments in 1707 Anglo-Scottish relations have gone through several further stages. The Union itself was urged by England, whose earlier indifference to closer relations suddenly changed when the Scots threatened to choose a different successor to Queen Anne. England feared that the ending of the Union of the Crowns would lead to a revival of the old Scottish/French Alliance, and therefore to an intolerable security threat. It was accepted by the Scots parliament for complex reasons that have been the cause of much discussion. The economic and political arguments against going it alone were very strong, but the Ministry at Westminster did not hesitate to use the gum of patronage and bribery to secure its friends to the side of what contemporaries called an incorporating union. Perhaps the most interesting thing about 1707, however, is that it was not an incorporating union at all. The Scottish church was left intact; the Scottish legal profession was left quite separate; the Royal burghs, their merchants and tradesmen, were left in possession of their ancient privileges. In these ways the economic interests and career structures of those whom we would now term the Scottish middle classes were entirely secured from English encroachment. Scottish education and Scottish Poor Law developed unhindered taking a radically different direction from their English equivalents. All that was incorporated was parliament, and eighteenth-century parliaments did much less, and mattered much less in the lives of ordinary people than parliaments do today. Certainly union, once achieved, was accepted without enthusiasm or complaint by the majority of Scots, in much the same way as entering the EEC has been accepted in Britain in the last two years.

To this there are two exceptions. Firstly, the majority of the gentry and polite intelligentsia of the eighteenth century appear to have been enthusiastic unionists and anglophiles, although capable on occasion of powerful outbreaks of Scotch anger if like Boswell in London they felt their nation was being slighted by the Sassenach. Secondly, in the first half of the eighteenth century there were the Jacobites who wished to overthrow the Hanoverian State, to assert the excellence of older and more Scottish ways. It is doubtful that they were nationalists in any simple sense, as the Stuart Pretenders themselves wanted to reign in London and not in Edinburgh, and certainly they had little following, as the failure of their plots and risings in 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745 all showed. Thereafter there was within the eighteenth century no opposition to the Union as such.

No doubt the eighteenth-century Union was the more acceptable because from about 1740 it began to benefit the economy in a very clear and unequivocal way for Scotland. There is no evidence from 1707 to about 1740 that it made much difference either way, but thereafter there were three main directions of growth. Firstly, there was the growing prosperity of the pastoral farmers now able to sell more and more cattle to the English market as the price for meat rose in the south. Secondly, there was the rise of Glasgow in the tobacco trade, something which could not possibly have occurred unless Scotland with Virginia and Maryland had been part of the same Empire. Thirdly, and most important, there was the growth of the linen industry. As early as 1760 perhaps one Scottish family in four or five drew some income from it. Up to a third of the linen woven was at times directed to markets in the West Indies or in the thirteen colonies of North America; perhaps another third was sold in England, and a larger quantity of yarn was sold annually to Lancashire manufacturers. It is little wonder that the connection with England was cherished by some and tolerated by virtually all in the eighteenth century. There has never been a period when there is so little doubt that it worked strongly to Scotland’s material advantage.

Scotland continued to flourish exceedingly within the framework of the Union in the nineteenth century. A free-trade Britain that was the workshop of the world was an excellent environment for a Scotland which exported a high proportion of her manufactured goods. The first manifestation of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland was the growth of the cotton industry, its easy transplantation from Lancashire to Scotland being itself a fruit of the Union. The growth of the iron industry in early Victorian times was more firmly set on the exploitation of Scot­ land’s own natural resources, but owed a lot on the demand side to the industrialisation of other parts of Britain. The rise of the Clyde as a shipbuilding centre, also rested partly on Scottish resources and partly on external demand. The quite extraordinary success of the West of Scotland meant that this area was largely exempted from very serious signs of industrial lag that began to appear in the closing part of the nineteenth century in many other parts of Britain.

All the indications are that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Scotland, through industrialisation, gained rapidly in wealth and income compared to the rest of Britain. She was, of course, still much poorer than England as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, though by then the extreme disparities of the Union were being narrowed. The north of Scotland remained poorer throughout the period down to the first world war; but farm incomes (the main form of income in this area) drew within four per cent of the national British average. The south (i.e. south of the industrial belt) was a relatively high income area in terms of farm wages, again its main occupation, from the 1860s onwards. But the real success story was in the central belt, where increasingly the population came to concentrate. In 1850 this had been a low wage region, and one of the attractions for capitalists moving to Scotland was probably that wages were well below the national British average. By the 1880s it had achieved parity with the British average; by the early twentieth century it was one of the four highest (out of thirteen) wage regions into which Britain has been divided by scholars. It is worth remembering that industrialisation for all its cost in terms of eviction, slums and displacement, brought higher incomes to the working classes, as it did to every other rank in society. So far as union with England was the framework within which this industrialisation occurred, it was as acceptable as the greater prosperity itself.

Nevertheless, the nineteenth century also saw a very significant shift in the role of Westminster within Scotland, and this began to give an entirely new political dimension to the Union. Reform Bills from 1832 onwards progressively created a new Scottish electorate, ultimately a fairly democratic one, in place of the handful of lairds and their creatures who had chosen MPs in the eighteenth century. It meant that political participation by the majority of Scots began to become possible. The problems of the Victorian state became so enormous that the government had to interfere in the way that Scottish local authorities did (or more often failed to do) their duty. Thus statutes emanating from Westminster altered the framework of the Scottish Poor Law in 1845, of the Scottish school system in 1872, and by a whole series of statutes local authorities were stimulated, or bullied, to tackle the problems of public health and housing in the burgeoning and cholera-ridden cities.

Westminster behaved towards Scotland in the nineteenth century with ineptness balanced by modesty, a combination that simultaneously aroused and assuaged Scottish ire. Several of the early statutes with major affects on Scotland were incompetently drafted because parliament took insufficient trouble to inform itself about the peculiarities of the Scottish situation. This, along with minor irritations caused by the insensitiveness of England to Scotland’s habits and usages, led in 1853 to the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. This romantic but briefly very popular protonationalist body was devoted not to breaking up the Union, but to reasserting the distinctiveness of Scotland within it. It was the tip of an iceberg of public opinion to whom Scotland was not England despite the prosperity and general acceptability of the Union. After this date Scotland always had a small but vociferous lobby ready to claim that the spirit or letter of the Union had been breached by English highhandedness.

But the Victorian state, still diffident in any case at the prospect of government interference and wedded to laissez-faire theory, ultimately reacted sensibly in the face of Scottish sensitivity. It did not try to establish a British poor law or a British School Board system, but it set up bodies in Edinburgh to administer the reformed Scottish systems. When it reformed crofting tenures in the 1880s, other new bodies, the Land Court and the Crofters’ Commission, were set up in Scotland, and finally, in 1885, it bowed to mounting public pressure and established a Scottish Secretary of State. In the context of Victorian Britain this seemed to be as much devolution as public opinion demanded: it maintained the identity of Scotland as part of Britain and at the same time as distinct from England. The Victorians had an instinct for this outside the sphere of politics; they founded a Scottish football association, not a British one, and a Scottish TUC that had ties to the British one, but which was not identical to it.

The twentieth century, however, was quite different in important ways from the two preceding ones. First of all the economic situation was relatively less favourable. Although the national income of Britain continued to rise quite rapidly, and that of Scotland to rise with it, until average incomes and affluences were considerably above what they had been in 1900, the relative position of Scotland probably slipped somewhat. In 1974 Scotland as a whole lay sixth out of the nine wage regions into which the country was divided. Although by 1975, under the influence of the oil boom, she had improved her place in this league table to third, this very recent development is quite untypical of the twentieth century trend. In 1964 for example, the average earnings of the Scottish male were 8.4 per cent below the UK average. Furthermore the twentieth century Scottish economy has suffered from prolonged and peculiar problems, especially in the west central belt that had been the apex of Victorian prosperity. The dreadful experience of unemployment in heavy industries between the wars is the most obvious example and the failure of the region to reconstruct and diversify its economy sufficiently after the second world war was equally important. Even during the prosperous 1960s the average rate of unemployment in Scotland was twice that of the UK as a whole. Nor should it be overlooked that the dissolution of the British Empire closed the door for countless Scots who had gone adventuring as administrators, soldiers, or just as emigrants, from the middle of the eighteenth century until the inter-war years.

Whereas up to the first world war almost all firms operating within Scotland were controlled from Scotland, thereafter more and more people found themselves the employees of State-run enterprises, or of firms based in London or abroad. Many Scots have bitterly resented the challenge to the control of their own economy A threat that never existed even in the Industrial Revolution, or the prosperity of high Victorian times, simply because before the days of modern communications it was impossible to run a business from hundreds of miles away. They see in the Union an obstacle to Scotsmen successfully reasserting control over their own lives. There may be much truth in their view. But few emphasise that remote control is also a European phenomenon, and perhaps the inescapable concomitant of a mixed economy and the rise of multi-national corporations. Nor is it easy to discover any recipe for unscrambling multi-national eggs.

The other dominant theme of the twentieth century has been the continuing enlargement of the sphere of the state in everyday life, with until recently, growing insensitivity on the part of that state to local considerations, or perhaps a growing confidence on the part of an increasingly professional bureaucracy that they know best. Thus the Scottish Poor Law was ultimately replaced by the British Welfare State, and the finance of Scottish Universities was funnelled through a British University Grants Commission. There are quite good arguments in terms of efficiency for doing these things, but it is perilous in a society which is still deeply conscious that Scotland is not England, and fairly determined to keep things that way. In the twentieth century, therefore, the Union has suddenly begun to take on an incorporative nature that it never had in the past. Politically, however, virtually no steps have been taken yet to counteract these basic shifts, and since Scotland has in no way lost its consciousness of wishing to maintain its difference from England it is not in the least surprising that a Scottish National Party dedicated to breaking off the Union should have grown from a small, sectarian, and cranky base, in the years before the second world war, into a powerful political movement.

Suppose that within the next ten years Scotland will obtain sufficient devolution or independence to manage her own affairs in some meaningful way. Further suppose that the road of human choice forks again, one sign says ‘this way to a growth economy, maximise your economic opportunities and visit us. The other sign says ‘this way to a no-growth economy, conserve your dwindling resources and visit us. When politicians talk about the future of Scotland, it is often described in terms of a trip to maxi-growth land, and in their travel brochures the national Volkswagen is usually parked in a landscape like that of Scandinavia. The reasoning seems to go like this; Scotland is a small northern nation and wants self-government; Denmark, Norway and Sweden are small northern nations, and they enjoy self-government; given self-government, or at least meaningful devolution, Scandinavian prosperity can be recreated in Scotland. But not all small independent northern European countries are prosperous: Eire might be a more likely version of Scotland’s future.

Sweden is blessed by abundant resources of timber and iron ore on which she raised herself to prosperity in the nineteenth century and which have helped to sustain her prosperity in the twentieth century until she has become the wealthiest country in the Western world. Scotland plus or minus oil could not match that. On the other hand Denmark is much worse off than Scotland in terms of natural resources, lacking minerals and having very indifferent agricultural land, despite her fame as an exporter of farming produce. What does Denmark have which Scotland does not have? In a nutshell the answer is very much higher productivity. And the reason for this seems to be rooted in a Scandinavian attitude of mind that could be described as co-operative, innovative and flexible, whereas Scots tend to be suspicious of one another, conservative and inflexible. These differences are not due to race, or even primarily to the fact that Scotland is not a self-governing country, but are rooted in the historical experiences of the societies concerned.

A hundred years ago the majority of Scandinavians were peasants who owned their own land, who were in a relatively egalitarian society in their country villages, and who were accustomed to a wide degree of co-operation between one another in their farming operations. Rapid economic growth then took place, in Denmark on the basis of the export of their agricultural goods to Britain and Germany, largely made possible by the development of Producers’ Co-operatives, and subsequently the basis of industrialisation mainly through light industries and the small firm. The story in Sweden (and Norway) also emphasises the importance of primary products in the early days and of manufactured goods later, though in Sweden in particular the firms were quite large. Simultaneously there was political revolution, so that by the first world war all three countries had peacefully become modern democracies. In this extremely rapid and even transformation the fabric of society was never torn, everyone’s income went up so fast that there was general agreement that economic change under capitalism was a good thing. Power passed to the people so smoothly that they never lost the sense that government was something for which they were responsible. The state was theirs, not the prerogative of some other governing class, and in each country great importance was laid upon universal and excellent education that would train the Scandinavian not merely for work and competition (although they did do that) but also for citizenship. In essence these are three highly successful modem societies which have kept a tradition of consensus, of mutual help, of working to a common purpose, and of welcoming change and novelty for the opportunities which it may bring.

Scotland, by contrast, has a seriously damaged social fabric. The experience of the Scottish working class has not historically been that economic change under capitalism was always a good thing. Despite the benefits referred to, economic change in the nineteenth century swept thousands into the lowland cities out of Ireland-and out of the highlands in circumstances where the push of eviction or economic collapse was often much stronger than the pull of high wages. Economic change likewise created the disastrous levels of unemployment of the inter-war years, with their apparently ineradicable consequences of Union suspicion of labour-saving techniques that they have left behind. More generally Scandinavian society did not allow such exploitive relationships as British society.

On the political front the Scottish working man has never felt that the State was in any sense his own, partly perhaps because of the absence of Home Rule, but also because of the persistence of the dishonest franchise system and the persistence of a British ruling class that has continued t...