TO assess the extent of the crisis that affected interwar Scottish society, it is necessary to place the discussion within a comparative context to give meaning and measurement to its severity. The consequences of the First World War had unleashed a torrent of political, social, and economic change across the world. The growth of political extremism and instability, made worse by fundamental changes in the global economy, were the hallmarks of much of contemporary European history in which politics on the Continent became increasingly polarized between far-right nationalism and Fascism and left-wing socialism and communism.1 Liberal democracy struggled hard to put down roots after the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and found it difficult to grow in the shadows of both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The enormity of the Second World War and all the horrors that it entailed has meant that historians find it difficult to look at the period without reference to the fact that it was then that the seeds were sown which would grow into the bloodiest war in human history. Historians of seventeenth-century Europe have identified a ‘general crisis’ in that period and historians of the twentieth century could take a leaf out of their book and focus more on the common experiences of the interwar period, rather than examine the same phenomena from the ‘national’ perspective.
One of the key objectives of this chapter is to relate the interwar Scottish experience to a wider British and European historiography. Firstly, the main contours of the crisis will be explored to demonstrate how politics and economics became enmeshed as Scottish society was polarized by class divisions. Although the political and cultural debates were heated, they took place in a context of social and economic stagnation in which unemployment and poverty showed no signs of disappearing, and indeed seemed to become solidified during the Great Depression. The sense of crisis was born out of a seeming impotence by the political mainstream to solve the nation’s problems. Salvation only came as a result of preparation for war. The second part of the chapter will examine the question of why similar traumas of socio-economic dislocation that engulfed other political systems in Europe did not have the same effect in Scotland. Indeed, while there is a tendency to emphasize the degree of Scottish dislocation, what has received less attention is the remarkable stability with which Scotland weathered the interwar storm.
With splendid insularity, the historical debate in Britain has tended to point out the ways in which the United Kingdom diverted from the European norm and avoided the worst of the pitfalls of economic and political instability.2 The ‘mother’ of democracy survived and emerged stronger from the experience.3 Financial prudence, the balanced budget, and an overvalued sterling had helped to put the brakes on economic expansion in the period after the war relative to North America and Western Europe. As a result, British economic growth was sluggish and when the Great Depression arrived in 1929, its consequences were not as severe, because the economy had less far to fall. The impact of the Depression did not have the same disastrous social and economic consequences that led to political instability and extremism in some parts of Europe.4 Although the popular image of the interwar period is associated with mass unemployment, poverty, hunger marches, and the dole queue, historians have revised this negative picture into one that was more positive. The historiography of the interwar era in Britain can be summed up as follows; in the era after the Second World War when Keynesian economics and state planning were the political orthodoxy, the ‘Devil’s Decade’ was portrayed as one of failure on both the domestic and foreign-policy front. The ‘Guilty Men’ of the Tory-dominated national government presided over inaction regarding mass unemployment, while ‘appeasing’ the Fascist dictatorships.5 As post-war optimism in the ability of the state to deliver prosperity began to wane, historians increasingly began to recast their assessments of the interwar era. The era of low inflation, low interest rates, limited trade-union power, and a revolution in consumerism and home ownership supplanted the image of regional unemployment, decaying heavy industry, and the problems of the ‘North’. After all, average living standards rose faster than at any time in British history. Although it might be stretching the point, British historiography of the interwar era has tended to reflect the dominant ideological mores of the post-war period.6 As the ideological gravity shifted from the corporate consensus towards the free market, and electoral significance tilted to the south-east, so this was reflected in changing attitudes to the record of the interwar government. The national government’s economic policy was portrayed as a sensible reaction to the international turmoil, and the failure of political extremism to take root was also cited as evidence of the stability of the British state.7
Such an overview of the interwar situation in Britain, however, does not reveal the regional disparities that existed and downplays the fact that the process of social and economic disruption was not even. The contrasting experiences of the prosperous south and the poor north were a hallmark of interwar Britain, as indeed they were of the Thatcher era.8 This was especially the case in Scotland, and for many contemporary observers there was a profound sense of dislocation and a pessimism. Arguably, unlike the North of England, and to a lesser extent Wales and Northern Ireland, the Scots had a fairly clear sense of national consciousness, which added an extra dimension to the experience of the interwar period that was different from other parts of the United Kingdom.9 In some respects, Scotland was similar to mainland Europe in that the dislocation could be seen as a distinctive ‘national’ and not a ‘regional’ phenomenon. Furthermore, a comparison between a range of socio-economic indicators demonstrates that Scotland featured towards the top end of the negative spectrum.10 Like the rest of Britain, there was a desire to return to ‘normalcy’ after 1918, and to reverse the more disturbing trends that had emerged during the conflict. The traditional values of domesticity, deference, paternalism, individual independence, and the like, which formed what were imagined to be the quintessential characteristics of pre-war Scottish society, had all come under threat from new forces such as greater state intervention, organized labour, and the widespread acceptance of socialism. The rise of the trade-union movement and the Labour Party gave the working class political teeth, which were used to force a rent freeze, improve wages and conditions, and posit an alternative future in which the workers received a greater share of national wealth.11 Socialism alarmed the imagination of the middle classes, and they seemed to have their fears confirmed by the results of the 1922 General Election when Labour became the largest single party in Scotland. Even the prospective Conservative prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law, was in fear for his political career as the Labour Party claimed ten of the fifteen Glasgow seats.12 The sudden rise of Labour in Scotland, which went from minority to almost majority within the space of four years, gave the threat of socialism an urgency in Scotland that had few parallels within the United Kingdom. Local Tories and Liberals cooperated informally after the ending of the coalition government in 1922 just to keep Labour out. This ended after the Liberals supported the minority Labour government in 1924, which allowed the Tories to claim that they were weak in stopping socialism. The Liberal Party increasingly found itself squeezed out as politics became polarized around class interests and by 1924 was firmly relegated to the touchline. It is also worth stressing the role of political geography in contributing to the class polarization of Scotland in the 1920s. Given that the majority of Scots were squeezed into the Central Belt, it meant that the heartlands of socialism were never physically far away from the middle-class suburbs. This was unlike England, which had a political geography that largely separated Labour north from the Tory south and arguably added to a sense of physical remoteness, and possibly a degree of insulation, from the issue of class division.
Scottish politics in the interwar era were shaped by economic uncertainty. The onset of the First World War led to an unsustainable boom in the heavy industries that had been at the vanguard of the Victorian and Edwardian economy. The Clyde conurbation was the most important centre of armaments production in the United Kingdom and its productive capacity increased by a fifth to accommodate the insatiable demand for the staples of war. The easy profits of war meant that diversification into other sectors of the economy, such as consumer and electrical goods, was stopped in its tracks. If the Scottish economy had been unbalanced before 1914, the wartime boom pushed it into an unsustainable trajectory. After a short period of restocking, demand for the staples of the Scottish economy dried up. The uncertainty of the post-war global economy meant that there was a reluctance to buy capital-investment goods such as ships or heavy-engineering plant. This in turn had a knock-on effect on coal and steel and demonstrated the tight industrial interdependency that had lain at the heart of Scottish economic success before 1914.13 Reliance on wartime government orders had meant that pre-war markets, particularly in textiles and jute, were lost to overseas competitors. Political change in the form of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Versailles Treaty meant that Eastern European markets for fish and coal were also lost, with significant consequences for Scotland’s east-coast mining and fishing communities. By the early 1920s, some one hundred thousand Scottish men were permanently ‘superfluous’ to economic requirements.
In a determined effort to return to ‘normalcy’, public spending was cut to balance the budget and the objective of returning sterling to the Gold Standard was achieved in 1926.14 This had a number of important consequences for the Scottish economy. Firstly, it overvalued sterling, which meant that buying British goods became relatively expensive, putting export industries at a competitive disadvantage.15 Secondly, it meant that the primary means to become competitive was to reduce wages, as labour was the single biggest cost determinant in most of Scottish industry. This in turn meant that diversification into the consumer industry was unlikely, because of low demand and a depressed domestic market. When the British economy began to expand in the interwar years, it was confined to those areas in the south led by consumer demand. Also, the business community was dogged by a ‘wait-and-see’ mentality, no doubt shaped by the experience of the pre-war cyclical economy when bad times had been followed by good ones, which led to an expectation that things would eventually turn right. This conservative approach placed a premium on survival and promoted the tendency of defensive amalgamations in order to beat the downturn. Often, this meant the sacrifice of more modern plant and machinery in order to keep inefficient and out-of-date units going. The fact that the economic problems seemed intractable, with no solution in sight, simply added to a sense of doom. The emphasis on low wages as the primary means to restore competitiveness in the economy did little to smooth troubled industrial relations, and a turbulent labour force further acted as a disincentive for investment in new branches of industry and manufacturing.
The troubles of the economy dovetailed with political change. The rise of organized labour and socialism certainly contributed to the conservative outlook of Scottish business leaders, and the primacy of wage reduction as a means of ensuring competitiveness was held as a fundamental tenant of belief. On the whole, rather than accommodate the trade-union movement, Scottish business was notorious for its class-confrontational outlook.16 The Economic League, for example, was a shadowy organization funded by business to take on socialism because, as the group’s leading industrialists believed, it perverted the laws of economics. Information on socialist activists was shared and blacklists were compiled of known agitators. Scottish class conflict does not sit easy with the representations of England by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and George Orwell as a gentle place of evensong and spinsters bicycling to church.17 Anti-socialism was the defining political idea of the 1920s and the polarization of class was responsible for the rise of both the Labour and Conservative Party. By 1924, the Liberal consensus that seemed to be an essential hallmark of pre-war society was at an end. Class tensions were constantly reinforced by the prospects of industrial militancy. The ‘spectre’ of ‘Red Clydeside’ haunted the middle-class imagination, even though working-class militancy was in evidence in Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, and other towns and cities. The 1919 ‘8 hour day strike’ was a prelude to the General Strike of 1926 when both left and right squared up to one another. One feature of the 1926 Strike in Scotland was the widespread use of police and arrest powers, which were used more extensively than in other parts of the United Kingdom.18 In 1919 and 1926 middle-class volunteers were every bit as militant as strikers. The defeat of the strike in 1926 was significant in that it settled middle-class fears about revolution, while dampening working-class confidence in direct action. As was evidenced in other parts of Europe, the early and mid-1920s in Scotland was a period of deep and resentful class confrontation. While it is important not to overemphasize the impact of class warriors on the development of Scottish politics in the interwar period, the fact remains that both the far left and far right were well represented in Scotland. While much class warfare was rhetorical, its impact on the public imagination should not be underestimated, whether it be the fiery revolutionary denunciations of the socialist politician James Maxton, who claimed that both Liberals and Tories were ‘murderers of children’, or the slash-and-burn attitude to state welfare of the industrialist Sir James Lithgow.19
The growth of class conflict was fuelled by the inheritance of nineteenth-century poverty and poor social conditions. Many of these, particularly housing, came to a head during the First World War because there was an immediate need to rehouse a quarter of a million people as a result of overcrowding in the existing slums. Growing expectations among the working class were heightened by the power of collective action which had squeezed concessions from the government. Wartime slaughter had led many workers to question their relationship with the state. If the nation could ask its citizens to lay down their lives in defence of the country, was it fair to expect them to put up with appalling social conditions and poverty? The number of ex-servicemen protesting in 1919 was particularly alarming to the authorities. Yet, the strained public finances following the war meant that ‘homes for heroes’ was its first casualty. According to J. W. Pratt, MP, the vice president of the Scottish Board of Health, there was a paramount ‘need for public and private economy’.20 Made worse by mounting unemployment, there was no prospect of an immediate solution to the deep-seated problems of poverty and poor social conditions. The pre-war system of poor relief, dependent on local rating, likewise increased class tension as middle-class ratepayers wanted it cut back, while the unemployed working class wanted it implemented in full. In the early 1920s the courts were used as a means by the middle class to restrain generous poor relief.21 The improvement of social legislation during the war also had an impact on middle-class property owners who let out slum housing. Property was a staple of middle-class rentier income, and many were reeling under the impact of what they believed to be intrusive state interference. About the same value of Scotland’s national income was based on both property and wages (a higher proportion than England), and the impact of new legislation can be seen in the fact that some 12 per cent of Scotland’s housing stock was simply abandoned.22 The cost of maintenance was simply not economic. A key factor that has been identified in contributing to the European political crisis of the interwar years was the radicalization of the middle classes, whose fears of economic change and the growth of socialism drove them into the arms of the extreme right. In Scotland, this process is clearly visible. Wartime inflation devalued savings and salaries, growth of trade-union power threatened status, government regulation threatened business, and paternalism and deference declined. In other small European nations during the interwar era, the middle class increasingly surged to the extreme right and embraced nationalism and Fascism.
The limited stability of the late 1920s was ended by the Great Depression in 1929. Any prospect of economic recovery was dashed and in terms of the regional impact on Britain, Scotland was one of the worst affected. Credit dried up and the growth of protectionism hurt those parts of the British economy that were dependent on international trade, especially in the traditional heavy industries. The statistics for Scotland make for grim reading as the course of the Depression peaked in the early 1930s. Factory closures were higher, unemployment was greater, and recovery was slower.23 When improvement came it was in the late 1930s as a result of rearmament, but this was slow and haphazard.
Unlike other parts of Europe, the crisis did not lead to political disintegration or crisis in Scotland, nor did it fuel the growth of extremist parties. The left suffered more than the right, and it is fair to say that there was a remarkable degree of consensus regarding the political course to be steered through the crisis. Labour, which had been in power when the Great Crash began, found itself ideologically ill-equipped to deal with the crisis.24 In essence, the party was caught between two competing visions of itself; namely a socialist party committed to an ideological programme and a party that sought to protect the interests of its working-class electoral constituency. It proved impossible for the party to marry these two objectives together. Scottish Labour was not a hothouse of intellectual socialism, especially after the death of its one original thinker, John Wheatley, in 1930.25 Socialism was a rhetorical device that appealed to social justice and fairness, rather than a coherent and carefully articulated programme of political and economic change. Scottish Labour shared the mainstream British view that socialism was an evolutionary process that would grow organically out of the capitalist system as it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. What this meant and when this would happen had not been addressed and it bound the party to work within the parameters of the existing capitalist system until some unspecified event in the future. In short, this meant that the party had no answers to the problems of the Great Depression other than orthodox economic thinking.26
Yet, the impact of the Crash was felt with greatest consequence among traditional working-class Labour voters, particularly in the west Central Belt of Scotland. The decision of the Labour leadership to back financial orthodoxy, cut public expenditure, and balance the budget caused a split as the bulk of the trade-union movement and the rank and file rejected this course of action. The Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, had support from the Liberal and Tory parties because unpalatable economic cuts had to take place, and it was agreed to form a ‘national government’ so that no single party would take the blame.27 Also, politicians did not know how far and deep the recession would travel. In the general election of 1931, the national government candidates romped home with a landslide, while those Labour MPs and candidates who refused to support the cuts were wiped out. This trouncing of the left was exacerbated by schism in the 1930s as the Independent Labour Party, under Maxton and particularly strong in Scotland, broke away from the official Labour Party.28 Similar schismatic tendencies were in evidence among the broader Labour and trade-union movement as a result of growing communist influence.29 Those Labour MPs who survived were not the most inspiring and when the working class needed a clear and articulate political voice, none was to be had. The first-past-the-post system meant that the use of one preferred ‘national’ candidate retarded Labour’s progress in terms of MPs in the 1935 General Election, even though its share of the vote went up.30
The fact that the national government was able to command such electoral support in Scotland suggests that there was a degree of political stability, and though unemployment and poverty levels were high, they were not of such magnitudes to trigger a political crisis.31 That said, however, there was considerable disquiet at the disproportionate effect the economic crisis had in Scotland compared to the rest of the United Kingdom, in particular the south of England.32 Government policies received considerable criticism as being tailored to shore up economic development in the south through the imposition of tariff barriers to protect consumer-goods industries, which arguably harmed traditional heavy-export industries in the north. The policy of cheap money and credit created a market for consumer goods and helped fuel a house-building boom. Although coming off the Gold Standard in 1931 devalued sterling and should have helped exports, the reality of the depressed international markets and foreign tariffs meant that there was little upturn. For many it seemed that the key economic policies of the national government did little to address the problems of the depressed areas and traditional heavy industry.33 Lanarkshire still had an unemployment rate of 27 per cent in the late 1930s.34 In the press there were frequent comments on the state of Scotland, reflecting a wider concern that the nation was in decline. Books, pamphlets, and articles all chimed in to produce a chorus of doom. The south appeared to be draining the economic lifeblood as companies relocated to more prosperous markets in England. Economic recovery north of the border was slower and unemployment remained stubbornly higher. Some even talked about a conspiracy to drain Scotland of all its assets. Attention focused on high emigration rates and prompted fears that the best of the nation had left, while rabid anti-Catholic polemics talked about widespread Irish immigration replacing the best with the worst.35 This debate took on a racist perspective and reinforced the idea that the Scots were dying out.36 Like other parts of Europe, Scottish politics were tainted with cultural despair and pessimism.37
It is worth commenting on the intellectual reaction to this ‘crisis’ as it chimed in with similar tendencies on the European mainland. The ‘politics of cultural despair’ looked for radical solutions to the failure of liberal capitalism. Industrial capitalism came in for a great deal of criticism. Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, for example, all extolled the virtues of rural life and believed that industrialization had blighted the nation. Gibbon and Muir veered to the left, arguing that socialism was the answer, whereas MacDiarmid tended to oscillate between the extremes of the left and right. The Scottish renaissance, although politically disparate, did have a unifying objective in believing that Scotland required a new sense of national culture and that the old one was flawed and deformed.38 Scottish writers and intellectuals looked to Europe and beyond for their influence, and pointed with envy to the way in which ‘culture’ was supported and endorsed elsewhere. Just as the ‘crisis’ of the interwar era undermined many of the economic certainties of the old order, it had an equally dramatic impact in the way that it forced a reassessment of Scottish culture. The politicization of Scottish culture in this period is again something which shows that the experience was more similar to the European mainland than the rest of the United Kingdom.
Given the travails of Scottish society, it is not surprising that political nationalism emerged in this period in its modern guise. Many of the traditional bolts of Unionism were shaken as a result of the crisis. Although the realities of everyday bread-and-butter politics pushed the politics of identity way down the political agenda, for a vocal minority, however, the answer was nationalism.39 Yet a major problem for the embryonic nationalist movement was an inability to find a consensus. Some wanted devolution, others independence, some wanted a separate political party, others a pressure group, and some were left wing whereas others were right wing. The history of the nationalist movement during this time was one of changing direction and strategy as one clique ousted the other. Although the nationalist movement failed to build up significant political momentum, its existence was believed to be the pinnacle of a wider sense of unease as to the state of the Scottish nation. It represented the extreme end of a spectrum of public thought that believed the Scots were being treated unfairly and that something drastic ought to be done. Government politicians were aware that the sense of national unease had the potential to crystallize into a more significant movement and took steps in the mid-1930s to address this national ‘disquiet’.40 After all, nationalism was the ascendant force in Europe and this might be a Scottish variant of the same phenomenon. Administrative devolution was instituted as a palliative, though with varying degrees of success.41 Greater acknowledgement was made of Scottish nationhood within the Union. Government reform, appeasement of a sense of national grievance, and the nationalist tendency to secessionism and ideological incoherence ensured that the Scottish National Party remained on the fringes of politics during the 1930s. Although Labour flirted with home rule in the late 1930s, this was more as a result of the growth in the powers of the Scottish Office, and a Parliament in Edinburgh was seen as an option to curtail the growth of central government, especially one that was dominated by the Conservative Party.42 The growth of corporatism and the increasing role of business in government made many in the Labour Party feel that they were being frozen out of the political process and that political devolution would make the system more democratic. Also, nationalism was no longer perceived as a threat.
By the late 1930s, the worse of the Depression was over. Employment was growing slowly and events in Europe were concentrating minds away from domestic problems. The Second World War was to initiate a political revolution that would ensure greater state intervention in government policy and lay the foundations for the solution to Scotland’s endemic socio-economic problems that had plagued the interwar era. In some respects the story is one of ‘all’s well that ends well’. Yet it is worth stepping back and looking at the era in isolation for a moment. In comparison with other European countries, it is also worth commenting on why Scotland had not faced a crisis of the magnitude that tipped the political balance towards extremism. After all, on the surface, Scotland looked to have all the necessary ingredients. There was a prolonged economic downturn with its concomitant effects of social dislocation and long-term, mass unemployment. Racism and nationalism were in the air with growing anti-Irish sentiment and the formation of a separatist nationalist political party. The middle class was becoming radicalized—a key factor explaining the growth of right-wing parties in Europe at the time. A huge reservoir of unemployed provided a suitable breeding ground for the politics of discontent.43 As has been shown, there were elements of crisis, and Scottish society showed manifestations of this phenomenon that were commonplace in Europe but less pronounced in the United Kingdom. Any examination of the impact of the interwar crisis in Scotland must take into account the ways in which the Union seemed to exacerbate the problems, or at least not help, as was noted by contemporaries and many historians. But what tends to receive less attention are the ways in which the British connection ameliorated the worst aspects of the crisis.
To address the question why Scotland avoided a crisis, it needs to be borne in mind that the decision to return to the Gold Standard in 1926 put the brakes on much of the Scottish economy, especially in terms of its export market. The structural problems that dogged the 1920s were not solved by the time the Great Crash arrived in 1929, and as such it meant that, comparatively, the Scottish economy had not been built up to the heights that other economies achieved in the same period.44 So rather than a ‘Crash’ as was experienced elsewhere, in Scotland it was more like a bump, albeit a heavy and painful one. Although the Depression was deep and sustained, it was not as sharp and as traumatic there as was experienced by the heavy industries of Germany and the United States, for example. Furthermore, the fact that the Depression was region-specific in the United Kingdom meant that resources could be diverted from more prosperous parts to those in greatest need. According to the politician Sir Robert Horne, proportionately more was spent on Scottish unemployment benefit, education, and roads.45 Some in the House of Lords advocated the abolition of the Scottish Office. because it would be more efficient if all government services in Scotland were absorbed into the ‘great branches of the public service’ to make it more efficient.46 Although the ‘hungry thirties’ depict the iniquities of the means test, social-security payments in the United Kingdom were comparatively generous compared to those elsewhere.47 Also, the national government stood firm in maintaining payments in the face of relentless middle-class criticism against ‘spongers and the work-shy’.48 Indeed, the Scottish middle class was not averse to joining in with this tirade. Greater state regulation ensured equal provision throughout the United Kingdom and took power away from local agencies to prevent middle-class ratepayers limiting the amount of relief granted.49 This comparative security prevented the emergence of greater political activism. Many contemporary observers pointed out the passivity, hopelessness, and apathy, rather than anger and a will to change or challenge things.50
Undoubtedly, the growth of political extremism forms a chain reaction in which the growth of the extreme left or right acts as a catalyst for an equally vigorous growth at the opposite end of the political spectrum. The defeat of the General Strike in 1926 and the trouncing of Labour in 1931, together with the fact that communism remained firmly on the fringes, helped to keep the middle class within the pale of traditional politics. The British first-past-the-post electoral system militated against the growth of minority parties, while at the same time guaranteeing the integrity of the larger ones. In spite of the existence of nationalist, Protestant, and communist groups, Scottish politics did not fragment. Further factors helped keep the radical propensities of the middle class in check. The social structure of Scotland did not have as prominent a number of the petty bourgeoisie compared with much of mainland Europe, a group that has traditionally been identified as the bedrock of far-right support. Most of Scotland’s skilled artisans in heavy industry accepted their place within the proletariat and played an active role in the trade-union and labour movement. The underdevelopment of a domestic economy in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century left Scotland with comparatively fewer shopkeepers and self-employed.51 The extensive flow of middle-class and skilled working-class emigration during the 1920s had arguably removed a further reservoir of potential recruits to more radical politics.52 The farming community was also structurally different, with fewer, but larger farms, than was to be found on the Continent, and although the rural community suffered during the Depression, the comparatively efficient nature of Scottish agriculture and its smaller proportion of the total workforce meant that it did not experience the same degree of dislocation as was felt in the European mainland or America. It is worth remembering that it was in the rural constituencies where the extreme right made its breakthrough in Europe.53 ‘Back to the land’ solutions to the Depression were mooted fairly extensively, but a lack of support illustrates that it was more of a rhetorical device than a serious policy option.
Scottish politics were firmly rooted within British politics, which limited the scope for radical deviation. Indeed, the term ‘Scottish politics’ is somewhat of a misnomer in that it was more of a ‘British politics’ in Scotland. While Scotland did have its prominent class warriors on both the left and right, they were marginal within the British political sphere. Indeed, both the Labour and Conservative leaderships in Scotland were firmly moderate. The Red Clydesiders who survived into the 1930s were not ideologues, but pragmatists.54 Maxton’s secession of the Independent Labour Party in 1932 had the effect of marginalizing him, and those MPs elected under the ILP banner owed their success to personal followings in their respective constituencies rather that popular endorsement of the Cooke-Maxton Manifesto. Similarly, the Tory Party was firmly associated with moderates such as Walter Elliot and John Gilmour.55 The Scottish Secretaries of State in the 1930s were fairly dull, pragmatic, and moderate, and although they drew attention to the plight of the nation, they did not disaggregate Scotland from the wider British context. Both the Tory and Labour Party addressed the solution of Scottish problems from a British perspective. Furthermore, they often reminded electors that unemployment and poverty were not just Scottish issues.56 So long as British politics was immune to extremism, there was little chance of it taking off in Scotland because the organizations, the issues, the personnel, and the debate north of the border were dominated by an agenda that was set in London. The British idiom had the effect of watering down any extremist tendencies that may have arisen as a result of a purely Scottish political agenda.
Europe after 1919 was dominated by the growth of irredentist nationalism that was dedicated to reclaiming territories and people displaced or lost as a result of Versailles.57 It was a key issue in German and Eastern and Central European politics. The politics of nationalist grievance that plagued interwar Europe did not have a similar resonance in Scotland because it did not travel in one direction. There were no tensions or contradictions in holding both Scottish and British identities that were mutually self-reinforcing. Although a sense of Scottish identity increasingly became posited in opposition to a British identity, it did not displace it. For John Buchan, among others, there was a fear that an exclusive Scottish nationalism might become mainstream, as had an ‘appeal to the professional and middle classes’.58 But lawyers and doctors were not the stuff of revolution and revolt. It was more a politics of nationalist complaint. Also, while many might believe that Scotland was being treated unfairly, it did not follow that the solution was to abandon Britain and the Union. An exclusive Scottish nationalism that preached separatism found the ground barren among the middle class whose conception of patriotism was based on Britain. Throughout Europe nationalism found support among the middle class who saw it as an ideology that would stave off the threat from the left and restore conservative and traditional values.59 Although many in the Scottish middle class felt that traditional notions of Scottishness were under threat, the same could not be said for Britishness, as witnessed by support for the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938. Indeed, Scottish nationalism was banded in with those things that posed a threat to traditional values, and its association with Irish nationalism and political radicalism further alienated potential support.60 Furthermore, many mainstream nationalists recognized that the movement had to water down its message and moderate its ambitions in order to attract potential support.61 Fascists in Scotland fared even worse and tied themselves up on the question of what nationalism to support.62
The growth of racism in the interwar period is another issue that seems to take the Scottish experience closer to the European mainland. Although anti-Irishness and anti-Catholicism were rampant in nineteenth-century Scotland, the phenomenon was morphing in the 1920s towards racism. Among many polemicists, Catholicism became more of a racial categorization than a religious one. According to the Church of Scotland: ‘There are only two explanations of the great racial problem that has arisen in Scotland—the emigration of the Scots and the immigration of the Irish people.’63 Catholics of Irish descent were portrayed as having innate racial tendencies towards colonization, crime, drunkenness, sexual deviance, squalor, and parasitic existence.64 In looking through many of these polemics, it is hard to differentiate their intention and scope from the rabid anti-Semitism found in Europe. The following would not be out of place in Der Stuermer: ‘disloyal to all the finest ideals and ambitions of the Scottish race; distinguished by a veritable will to squalor which is mainly responsible for Scottish slumdom; squatting and breeding in such numbers as to threaten in another hundred years to gain actual predominance in the country’.65 Although produced in the main by cranks on the fringes of mainstream society, such ideas did have adherents who were highly placed and respectable individuals, such as the moderator of the reunited Church of Scotland and the Regius Professor of Law at Glasgow University. These pernicious sentiments were percolating into the mainstream of society, as the incidents of an official government inquiry in 1929 showed.66 Official figures showed that Irish immigration had all but stopped, but that did little to quell the outlandish claims that every fifth child born in Scotland was ‘Irish’, nor abate the flood of anti-Catholic sentiment in the columns of newspapers and magazines. Outbreaks of sectarian violence showed that sectarianism had its followers who were prepared to take direct action. A number of proletarian Protestant groups and the winning of some seats in local-government elections demonstrated a potential pool of populist support, but no middle-class leadership emerged to direct it. In a British context, anti-Catholicism was meaningless and would be seen as a source of embarrassment. Indeed, Scottish interference with the passage of the English Common Prayer Book Bill in the House of Commons in December 1927, because of its ‘Catholicism’, was a good case in point.
While Scotland did manifest some of the characteristics associated with the general interwar crisis, the fact that it was located within a British political and economic sphere acted as a buffer against some of the worst of the effects. As many commentators at the time pointed out, the resources of the Scots were inadequate to deal with the full social consequences of mass unemployment. Indeed, the experience of economic dislocation in the interwar period was fundamental in establishing a unionist consensus that an independent Scotland would lose a transfer of resources from the United Kingdom necessary to meets its requirements. Certainly the experience of the British welfare provisions blunted the sharpness of trauma that might have been the case. The emphasis of government policy on the service sector was criticized for not doing enough for heavy industry, but parts of Scotland, especially in the Edinburgh environs, escaped lightly. The British political system acted as an effective buffer against the growth of political extremism. The Scottish dimension of the interwar crisis lacked the political weight to dent the dominance of British politics in Scotland. In short, a separate Scottish agenda never built up enough momentum to displace the wider British priorities that dominated Scottish politics at this time, and the potential growth of extremism was kept in check.
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