The Scots and the Welsh Leave Us Close to Tears
Scotland and Wales had very different political cultures but by the sixties they shared the sense of being parts of the UK in decline, whose old Labour elites no longer delivered the goods. Scotland’s industrial heartland was dominated by coal, steel, shipbuilding and engineering. South Wales, built on coal and steel, was also culturally besieged, as people migrated to the richer new towns of southern England, and the Welsh language declined. Both these smaller countries asked themselves whether, if they cut free from the United Kingdom, they might somehow achieve a new beginning. The European Common Market showed that it was possible for small countries to thrive perfectly well. Even outside it, the Norwegians, Icelanders and Swiss seemed to be managing. No Western country seriously felt threatened by her neighbours any more. Living through the political traumas of the seventies, almost everyone in England was to an extent trapped inside the nightmare. For Scots and the Welsh there was the possibility at least of simply closing the door and walking away.
Yet in neither country did the secessionists ever have majority support. In both countries, their base tended to be among small business people, academics and public servants, the kind who in England were at the same time joining the Liberals. But the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru had clear objectives, effective political organizations, a certain fashionable rebel quality; and they scared the wits out of the established parties. These would be years when the breakup of Britain haunted many politicians and when nightmares of IRA-style violence being copied elsewhere fuelled best-selling books and television dramas. Once it had been easy to satirize Druidical Welshmen capering about and plunking their harps, or collections of wild-eyed, bushy-haired Scottish poets in kilts and jerseys. But by the seventies, it was not funny any longer.
The Scottish story can be traced back to the beginning of this postwar story. On 29 October 1949, a raw day in Edinburgh, a solemn faced, dark suited crowd walked into the gloomy headquarters of the Church of Scotland, a parade of landowners and miners, aristocrats and shipyard workers, fat businessmen and lean clerics. They had come to sign a Scottish Covenant, a practice last heard of in the bloody seventeenth century, when fanatic Presbyterians were taking on London and the losers had their heads lopped off in public. But this lot were hardly a revolutionary sight, and their document was full of sonorous assertions about their loyalty to the Crown. There was an impromptu prayer. The Duke of Montrose signed his name. There would be another 2 million signatures in due course, nearly half of Scotland’s adult population, politely requesting a Scottish Parliament again.
Fast forward a few months, and move to Westminster Abbey at dead of night. A handful of dark-coated Scottish students were busily jemmying loose a lump of stone allegedly carried by a Greek prince and Pharaoh’s daughter in the time of Moses to Scotland, via Ireland. This is the ‘Stone of Destiny’ on which Scotland’s ancient kings sat to be crowned. It had been swiped by the wicked English and was being smuggled back to Scotland where it would be hidden as an inanimate hostage. (The Stone was eventually returned to the police, draped in Scottish flags, and was finally returned to Scotland again in the nineties by the Conservatives.) Soon afterwards brand-new postboxes with the symbol QEII for the new Queen, were being defaced or blown up across Scotland, where there had been no QEI. These are parts of the history of post-war Britain which hardly anyone in England has heard about, or understands. Yet at a time when Scotland is becoming ever more politically disassociated from London, it is a story which deserves to be remembered.
Having abolished their own parliament in the 1707 Act of Union, the Scots had become steadily keener on getting it back again, ever since Victorian times. The first National Party of Scotland was formed in 1928, merging with the Scottish Party to become the Scottish National Party or SNP in 1934. By the end of the Second World War Labour was committed to some kind of Scottish Parliament. Yet home rule disappeared as an issue again for most people during the forties and fifties, and indeed into the sixties. This was partly the binding-together effect of the war, which increased pride in being British. It was also because both Labour and the Conservatives (called Unionists in Scotland) had pursued policies of granting the Scots factories, agencies and jobs. In the age of centralism and planning, Scotland seemed to be getting quite a good deal.
During the war, Churchill had appointed a visionary socialist called Tom Johnston, who had once been considered an excellent alternative to Attlee as the next Labour leader, as his Secretary of State for Scotland. Johnson was soon dubbed ‘the uncrowned King of Scotland’ and set about scattering hydroelectric schemes through the Highlands, bringing electricity and work; ordering great commercial forests to be planted; reforming education, and generally carrying on like a progressive dictator. After the war, he continued running the hydro schemes, forestry and Scottish tourism outside party politics, a one-man socialist planning bureaucracy. He even tried to get fish farming started, half a century before the technology was ready, though it would eventually employ tens of thousands. The Tories, then quite popular in Scotland, pursued similar policies, doling out industrial plants such as the Ravenscraig steelworks and obliging the British Motor Corporation to build cars in Bathgate, and the Hillman Imp to be constructed at Linwood. During the Wilson years, Scotland was run by Willie Ross, a Scottish Secretary as authoritarian, self-certain and skilled as Johnston himself, a veritable second uncrowned king. His gifts included a nuclear reactor at Dounreay, the Invergordon aluminium smelter and rescuing a Clyde shipyard. He set up the Highlands and Islands Development Board and the Scottish Development Agency. If planning could make a country rich, Scotland would be paradise. In the sixties, public spending per head there was a fifth above the English average.
Through most of this time Scottish Nationalism was a mere midge of a movement, producing intense but very local irritation. That grand Scottish Covenant signed in 1949 had simply been ignored. Labour dropped its old commitment to a Scottish Parliament in 1956. Nationalism was associated with poets, dreaming students and the odd eccentric aristocrat, a tartan irrelevance to the modern world. The man who did most to change that is almost forgotten now, including in his own party. He was not Billy Wolfe, the SNP’s first charismatic post-war leader, but a farmer from Ayrshire called Ian Macdonald who left his farm to organize the ‘Nats’ full-time. Before 1962 when he took over, the SNP had fewer than twenty active branches and a membership of around two thousand. Three years later under Macdonald’s organizing, there were 140 branches and six years on, in 1968, the SNP had 484 branches across Scotland and 120,000 members. It is hard to think of a similar rate of growth in any British political party. With the distinctive CND logo everywhere at the time, the SNP came up with its own modernistic thistle loop, and that was soon glinting from lapels and jerseys across Scotland.
It was at this stage a classic protest party, whose members tended to be prominent in anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear protests. As disillusion grew, both with the post-Profumo Tories and with Harold Wilson, the SNP began to win first local council seats and then parliamentary by-elections. The first breakthrough came in Hamilton, a small industrial town outside Glasgow where one of the SNP’s new generation, Winnie Ewing, won a safe Labour seat in 1967 and was driven in triumph in a scarlet Scottish-made Hillman Imp to Westminster. Though she lost the seat in the general election she was followed by Margo MacDonald, the ‘blonde bombshell’ of Govan on the Clyde, and by rising success in local elections. In 1970 Donald Stewart became the first SNP victor in a general election contest, winning the Western Isles. In the first 1974 election, the party won a further six Commons seats, and four more in the October election, taking its total to an all-time record of eleven, and the support of just over 30 per cent of Scottish voters. This would give them a crucial power-broking role in the politics of the late seventies which, as we shall see, they badly mishandled. Scotland’s economy was doing badly in profound ways. Apart from the short-term boost of oil-related jobs, mainly in the north-east, industry was old-fashioned, riven by strife, badly managed and losing ground in every direction. There was a feeling that the country could not be run worse by its own parliament; that the days of London planning and the gifts of uncrowned kings had not, in fact, produced the modern country everyone hoped for.
Labour became increasingly panicky. Harold Wilson deployed a favourite device, the setting up of a Royal Commission (‘takes minutes and wastes years’ in his own formulation) which duly suggested devolution for Scotland and Wales. After plots and counter-plots Wilson finally imposed this on a reluctant Scottish party. It was a form of devolution strong enough to outrage many Labour left-wingers at Westminster, including the young Neil Kinnock, yet too weak to please the out-and-out home rulers in Scotland. A handful of politicians, officials and journalists left the Labour Party in the winter of 1975 to form the breakaway Scottish Labour Party under the charismatic Jim Sillars. It briefly captured the headlines before being infiltrated by Trotskyists who, like crocheted bedspreads and lava lamps, seemed to turn up everywhere in the Seventies. The SLP duly split and then collapsed. Some of its members returned to Labour. Others, including Sillars, eventually ended up in the SNP.
Back at Westminster the new Labour leader Jim Callaghan began a long and weary battle to deliver home rule. Leading the fight was Michael Foot, a romantic enthusiast for devolution, despite the fact that his great hero Nye Bevan had been wholly opposed to such ‘chauvinism’. Yet the most single-minded and influential MP in the devolution debates of the seventies was probably the anti-devolution backbencher Tam Dalyell who later led the Belgrano inquisition. An Old Etonian left-winger, he fuelled himself late into the night with pockets full of hard-boiled eggs prepared by his housekeeper and a head full of hard-boiled arguments about the breakup of Britain, prepared entirely by himself. His ‘West Lothian question’ asked how Parliament could tolerate having Scottish and Welsh members who could vote on matters affecting the English, while not having any authority over the same issues in their own constituencies (because they would be handled by a devolved parliament). It has never been satisfactorily answered. Many believe it will one day end the Union of Scotland and England. A bill for Home Rule was eventually enacted on 31 July 1978 after an exhausting parliamentary battle in which the government’s fate hung in the balance night after night. But a key concession would end up scuppering the bill and Callaghan and the SNP too.
The government had accepted that the Scottish Parliament would only be set up after a referendum in Scotland in which a simple majority would not be enough; at least 40 per cent of the Scottish electorate must vote ‘Yes’. Would this be so hard to achieve? When the referendum was finally held, the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns were both rather ragged. Most of the Scottish media were in favour of devolution revolution and a ‘Yes’ vote was generally thought to be inevitable. The timing, however, was pitch-perfect terrible. The campaign ran in February 1979 against a backdrop of the ‘winter of discontent’, terrible weather and a collapse in government prestige. Voting against devolution was for some a way of registering contempt for Labour. Others simply could not be bothered. In the end, though most of Scotland voted in favour of home rule, turnout was low and only 32.9 per cent voted ‘Yes’, far below the 40 per cent hurdle.
Devolution was dead for twenty years to come. Callaghan, Foot and John Smith did everything they could to find some way of reviving the bill or postponing it but by now the majority of the SNP had had enough. They issued ultimatums to the government and eventually put down a motion of censure, though not all of them voted. Mrs Thatcher saw her chance. Labour lost the vote by a whisker and the general election of 1979 was duly triggered. This would bring about the election of a now implacable opponent of home rule. It would plunge Labour into chaos in Scotland as well as elsewhere. The SNP group was cut from eleven MPs to just two, and never regained the initiative. Earlier in this section we noted that Mrs Thatcher was lucky in her enemies and the Scottish Nationalists were yet another good example.
Wales’s part in the story runs parallel to Scotland’s in many ways. Like Scotland, Wales had become a post-war Labour stronghold in her industrial heartland, with a Liberal tradition in the rural areas. Like Scotland, Wales had experienced a rise of interest in the national question between the wars – Plaid Cymru, the party of Wales, had been founded in 1925, nine years before the SNP. Like the Scottish nationalists, the Welsh nationalists were dominated in the early years by literary men, poets and lecturers, and had little working-class support. In the post-war years Wales, like Scotland, had benefited from the scattering of regional policy initiatives, above all the great steel rolling-mill at Llanwern in 1962 but also the Shotton blast furnace, the Licensing Centre at Swansea, the Passport Office at Newport, two nuclear power stations, and factories run by Rover, Ford, Hoover, Hotpoint and others – the equivalent to the car-making plants and aluminium smelters of the Scots. Just as in the Scottish Highlands, vast acreages of conifers were planted by the Forestry Commission, so too it happened across the hillsides of rural Wales. The Scots got a development agency. So did the Welsh. If the Scots popularly expressed their national pride through the up-and-down fortunes of their football team, and the occasional even dodgier pop phenomenon like the Bay City Rollers, the Welsh had rugby. At Cardiff Arms Park, renamed the Welsh National Stadium in 1970, England failed to win a single game between 1964 and 1979.
Politically, however, Wales was in a weaker position. She had been incorporated by England too early in her history to have developed separate institutions of modern statehood. Her ‘Act of Union’ came in 1536, not 1707, and it was a crucial difference. Wales had no single powerful national church, no parliament to look back on, no Enlightenment universities or modern legal code of her own. Indeed she had no official capital until Cardiff was recognized as such as late as 1955; no minister or administrative offices until the fifties and no Secretary of State for Wales until 1964. Welshness was celebrated more as a linguistic and religious quality, though the decline in religious attendance hit the nonconformist chapel tradition almost as hard as it hit the Church of England. Politically, the Welsh had looked to Westminster men as their heroes, David Lloyd George most obviously, but Nye Bevan too. The decline of Liberalism had left Wales dominated by Labour and with all the drawbacks of the one-party statelet – internal backbiting, political stagnation and an unbalanced attitude to London, which was simultaneously the remote and alien capital and the source of power, money and jobs. Clever Welshmen from Raymond Williams to Dylan Thomas often emigrated, becoming exiled professors and writers, endlessly harking back to the romantic day-before-yesterday.
In the Fifties Welsh nationalists began to find cultural and political issues which spurred them on. Instead of attacking post-boxes and stealing the Stone of Destiny, Welsh nationalism was inspired to fight for the survival of the Welsh language. English road-signs would be painted out, people refused to fill in forms written in English and there were successful campaigns for more Welsh broadcasting. But the biggest early spur was water. Indeed it could almost be said that water was the Welsh oil, particularly after the drowning of the Tryweryn valley in north-west Wales to create a reservoir for the people of Liverpool. This was done by Act of Parliament in 1957, despite almost all Welsh MPs voting against it. As one historian put it: ‘Liverpool’s ability to ignore the virtually unanimous opinion of the representatives of the Welsh people, confirmed one of the central tenets of Plaid Cymru – that the national Welsh community, under the existing order, was wholly powerless.’ Attacks on the Tryweryn reservoir followed and the Free Wales Army was formed in 1963. Violent Welsh nationalism was, thankfully, almost as unpopular and badly organized as violent Scottish nationalism, but there were explosions in the sixties and two men died in 1969 trying to blow up the Royal train during the Prince of Wales’s Investiture. There would also be a more widespread and persistent campaign of burning out holiday homes and full-time homes owned by English incomers to Welsh-speaking areas.
Plaid Cymru’s first breakthrough came at the Carmarthen by-election of 1966, a year before the SNP won Hamilton. Gwynfor Evans, a nationalist campaigner since the thirties and Plaid Cymru’s leader since 1945, would lose the seat in the 1970 general election but two striking Plaid Cymru by-election performances in Rhondda West and Caerphilly in 1967 and 1968 suggested it was no flash in the pan. At last complacent Welsh Labour was being challenged. In the first 1974 election, Plaid Cymru would win two seats, and take a third in the second election of that year. Just as in Scotland, this produced a divided response among Labour in Wales. Should the nationalists be fought, as Neil Kinnock believed, or should they be paid to go away, with offers of devolution, as Michael Foot thought?
By then, like Scotland, the client economy of Wales was in very deep trouble. Yet despite the success of Plaid Cymru in local elections during the final years of ‘old Labour’ rule, they did not seem to pose quite the threat of the SNP. And of course, there was no oil boom in Welsh waters. So the proposed Welsh assembly was to have fewer powers than the Scottish one. It was to oversee a large chunk of public expenditure but would not be able to make laws. This was hardly likely to make anyone’s blood pound. When the matter was put to a referendum the Welsh voted overwhelmingly against the planned assembly, by 956,000 votes to 243,000. Every one of the new Welsh counties voted ‘No’. Plaid Cymru, unlike the SNP, did not vote for the end of the Labour government but in the Thatcher years Wales, like Scotland, was dominated by the politics of resistance to Conservatism. It would be a long wait.