A RQUITECTURA DE LA SOLUCIÓN

Scotland paid a heavy tribute during World War I and human losses on the battlefield were relatively higher than in England or Wales. In theory, such a rise in male mortality

78. Especially among Irish Protestant migrants, who settled in Glasgow and represented an ever increasing proportion of Irish immigration after 1880.

98 and subsequent demographic gap should have been translated into a labour shortage⁷⁹. Yet, the 1920s saw a recrudescence of emigration. The 1931 census recorded for the first time a net loss of population since its creation in 1855, despite the post-war increase of the fertility rate. Unlike the previous period when high rates of emigration went hand-in-hand with economic expansion, the inter-war years were marked by economic decline and social conservatism in the homeland. The Scots were then fleeing the consequences of the collapse of a once great industrial economy no longer able to provide its relatively well-educated workforce with rewarding opportunities⁸⁰. In the shipbuilding industries – until then the jewel in the crown of the Scottish economy – employment collapsed from 100,000 in 1920 to 10,000 in 1932 (Harper 1998: 91). The country entered a period of prolonged depression, aggravated by the rise of protectionism in the 1930s, making its export-dominated sectors increasingly fragile (Keating 2001a: 244). Concurrently, the long-standing laissez-faire attitude of the state towards emigration shifted in 1921 with the promulgation of the Empire Settlement Act (ESA). Unlike earlier legislations which only targeted the Highlands, it was now extended to the whole of Scotland (Harper 1998: 38). As the government’s promise of providing ‘homes fit for heroes’ after the War proved far-fetched in a receding context, the programme of state-funded emigration came to be seen in imperialist circles as a way of simultaneously mitigating unemployment in the homeland and boosting economic and demographic growth in the Dominions. By contrast, the Labour Party claimed that resources should rather be invested in social reforms and in modernizing domestic industries, while the nationalists attributed the flight of Scotland’s most enterprising spirits to the absence of self-government.

The impact of this new wave of emigration in Scotland was ambivalent. On the one hand, it constituted a safety valve in a time of recession, by allowing ambitious youth to seize the opportunities it could no longer find at home. On the other, it inhibited the development of a domestic market for the increasingly consumer-oriented economy of the twentieth century (Harvie 1977: 169). The transition to a Fordist industrial model, the purpose of which being to increase wages in order to stimulate domestic

79. In France and Russia for instance, this was translated into a dramatic rise in female employment.

80. Touring Scotland in the 1930s, the poet Edward Muir captured well the dominant mood of the time: “My main impression is that Scotland is gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate character. If a country exports its most enterprising spirits and best minds years afters years, (…) some result will inevitably follow.”

99 consumption, was made difficult in a country where natural demographic growth was severely undermined by emigration. This in turn further intensified the recession, which instead of triggering a violent reaction against the centre increased reliance on England.

Although already bending, the Empire still represented an appealing exit option.

Emigration was then mainly directed to the cities of Canada, relatively less affected by the great depression than its southern neighbour and acting as a potent magnet for semi-skilled and semi-skilled Scottish workers (Ramirez 2007). While unionists could still claim that Scotland would be (even) worse off outside the British realm, nationalists could not use the widespread discontentment that economic downturns usually entail as a catalyst for change. Besides, the myth of the ‘community of twenty million’, bridging together homeland and diaspora Scots, provided a sentiment of continuity and a potent justification to the Conservative strand of Unionism. Although Scotland had become by any standards a periphery in the British Isles, the protracted outflow of Scots to the confines of the Empire still furnished the “image of Scotland as a metropolis, a mother-country; as centre and not as periphery” (McKenzie 1981: 157).

To be sure, the ‘haemorrhage’ from Scotland did figure among the concerns of British policy-makers anxious to provide incentives for talented Scots to stay, despite the severe economic downturn. The inter-war years saw the first, and somewhat rudimentary, territorial development plans and Edinburgh was designated as a Special Area as early as 1934. Another way to do so was to strengthen the responsibilities of the Scottish Office and consolidate a web of depoliticized public institutions able to incorporate a sizeable number of home-grown skilled workers into an expanding civil service, which also presented the advantage of reinforcing their allegiance to the state.

In 1939, the Conservative government, following the Gilmour report recommendations, agreed to deepen administrative devolution by relocating the Scottish office and its increasing number of departments in order to “transfer people and power to Scotland.”

The Reorganization of Offices (Scotland) Act led to the creation of a “mini-White Hall with almost all under one roof”, the great bulk of civil servants being hosted in the recently-opened St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh (Mitchell 2009: 21).

100 3.2.2. The ‘menace to the Scottish race’

As for Irish immigrants and their descendants, the period began on a positive note, not least because the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act made “the country’s Catholic schools the first in a predominantly non-Catholic nation to be incorporated into a state-system”

(C. Brown, 1987: 201). In exchange for agreeing to the transfer of their schools, Catholic authorities were assured that religious instruction would be maintained at existing levels and that only teachers acceptable to the Church in regard to religious faith and character could be appointed. The reform was brought forward by the Liberal party with the support of the Labour Party, against the background of rising hostility in Ireland and fierce opposition of the Church of Scotland. Its purpose was to nationalize the ‘Scoto-Irish’ Catholics in Scotland by dragging them into mainstream Scottish society. Meanwhile, the 1918 Representation of the People Act broadened the scope of the franchise by abolishing all property qualifications. Labour greatly benefited from the reform as the electorate tripled and most new voters were drawn from the working class.

The Irish Catholic community in Scotland shifted en masse to the Labour party, which, besides being more supportive of the Irish Republican movement, had become

“synonymous with the defence of council housing, jobs in heavy industry and sectarian schools” (Smout 1986: 270).

Arguably, class solidarity was sometimes undermined by Irish-born workers who were competing with natives in a ruthless labour market, providing industrial leaders with the opportunity to lower wages and break strikes. While this is to a degree true, others have stressed the patterns of shared class interests between native Protestants and Irish Catholic workers and their sustained cooperation within the union movements (M.

Mitchell 1999)⁸¹. This notwithstanding, Labour greatly contributed to the integration of Irish immigrants and their descendants into mainstream society, not so much because of the rather limited material gains it brought ordinary Catholics, but “because such an involvement set a lot of them on the road to integration” (Gallagher 1991: 28).

Reciprocally they wholeheartedly gave their votes to the Labour party, which was committed to promoting Irish Catholic sectional interests in return for electoral support.

Hence, they played a crucial role in its consolidation in the western urban areas and

81. There has long been a strain between the Skilled Workers’ Union in which most members were native Scots and Protestants, and the Labourers’ Union, with a higher Irish Catholic presence, as well as less visible strains within the Labour party.

101 subsequently as the dominant political formation in Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century (McCaffrey 1991).

However, the process through which Catholics came to embrace a Scottish identity compatible with their faith stretched over several decades. In 1912, the Scottish Conservative party became the Scottish Unionist party, in an effort to stress its opposition to Irish home-rule and its determination to preserve Scotland’s Protestant heritage⁸². Fears of a Rome-led ‘Irishisation’ of Britain, already widespread in Victorian England, gained momentum in Scotland during the inter-war years. Paradoxically, this occurred at a time when Irish immigration had almost dried out after a century of sustained inflows. The Church of Scotland moved to the right of the political spectrum and in 1923 approved a report purposively entitled the Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality⁸³. Interestingly for our purposes, this fear was exacerbated by protracted emigration: “The Scot, who as a colonist is eagerly sought by all the Dominions and by America, is being driven from his own shores, and his place taken by an immigrant who makes a very much less satisfactory citizen.”⁸⁴ Some extremist groups such as the Scottish Protestant League were formed and made some inroads into the working class vote in Glasgow and Edinburgh, while calls were made to disenfranchise the Roman Catholics. Although Glasgow never quite reached the same degree of spatial segregation and systematic discrimination as Belfast, sectarianism nonetheless had some political implications. Indeed, the Unionist party could rely as late as 1955 – (when it was elected with 51% of the vote, an impressive result never matched again by any party in subsequent elections) – on the support of the medium-skilled Protestant working class. Unlike in Wales, the Conservative party squeezed the support of the Liberal party even further in its traditional rural strongholds, “as the

‘Scottish periphery’ had to choose between being anti-London or anti-Glasgow” (Urwin 1982: 47). Since the Union, the Church of Scotland had served as a surrogate Parliament which spoke for the country in social and political matters, retaining a potent moral grip over the population at a time when secularization was already well-advanced south of the border (Harvie 1977: 207). To be sure, its influence had already been

82. The name of the party was changed again in 1964, when it became the Scottish Conservative Party. For some, this shift illustrated a loss of autonomy and alignment with the British Conservative Party.

83. The report exempted the Orange population from its grievances: “They are of the same race as ourselves and of the same Faith and are readily assimilated.”

84. Church and Nation Committee Report - 1926, quoted in Harper (1998: 200).

102 eroded by the 1843 Disruption and long-standing conflicts among the different strands of the Protestant faith, compared to which sectarianism seemed at times a secondary concern. Nonetheless, the Church of Scotland was reunited in 1929 and its membership reached an all-time high in the 1950s (Devine 2006b: 167). Until then, class politics were subject to the resilience of religious cleavages, the Tories attracting a disproportionate number of Protestants and Labour almost monopolizing the Catholic vote.

The period from 1918 to 1960 is often considered to be one of gradual homogenization of the British state’s constitutive parts. The convergence in voting patterns between Scotland and England is commonly perceived as an illustration of Rokkan’s nationalization thesis, whereby the freezing of cleavage structures facilitated the emergence of a class-based form of politics in which territorial differences no longer mattered and consecrated the consolidation of a unitary nation state. Indeed at no time throughout these four decades did the periphery mount a serious challenge to Westminster’s authority. But this period of “peripheral docility” was above all the consequence of the “decline of peripheral dissidents, and the domination of territorial conservatives favourable to the existing state of the Union” (Bulpitt 1983: 63). This was reflected in the unusual popularity of the Unionist-Conservatives and declining support for Home-rule among Labour ranks, the party setting aside its commitment to bringing about a Scottish Parliament in the 1920s, before officially renouncing it in 1958 (Keating & Jones 1985). Hence, the creation of the SNP in 1934 was a response to the decline of nationalist forces among mainstream parties rather than evidence of an upsurge of political nationalism, which was if anything much weaker than in the years preceding World War I. In 1914 home-rule agitation among the working-class and the highland crofters’ movement forced the Westminster Parliament to seriously consider a

‘home-rule all round scenario’.⁸⁵ Scottish nationalism was indeed on the rise. However, this was not the kind of nationalism that was to re-emerge more forcefully in the 1960s with the first electoral breakthrough of the SNP, territorially based and directed against the British state. Instead, the period saw the heyday of the Conservative strand of nationalism, for which Scotland’s national destiny lay in the union with England and was cemented by the Protestant faith and Empire.

85. Nationalism grew steadily from the 1850s onwards, so that in 1885, the Scottish Office was established because a

“growing body of Scots felt that Scottish distinctiveness was being ignored” (Mitchell 2009: 19).

103 3.3. 1960 – 1997: A nation reborn?

The formidable persistence of emigration combined with scarce immigration since the large inflows from Ireland considerably diminished after 1914 have nurtured the impression that Scotland was primarily a country from which one leaves, and not one to which one comes. While the population of Scotland has remained remarkably stable since 1900, that of England almost doubled over the same period, consolidating its self-understanding as a potent cultural, economic, and political magnet. Between 1914 and 1991, net migration in Scotland has systematically been negative, exceeding at times (-) 20,000 a year (McQuaid et al 2008: 9).

Table 3: Populations of Scotland, England and Wales, and UK (1900-1991)

Year UK

England &

Wales Scotland % Scotland/UK

1901 38228 32612 4479 12%

1911 42138 36136 4751 11%

1921 44072 37932 4882 11%

1931 46074 39888 4843 11%

1941 48216 41748 5160 11%

1951 50290 43815 5102 10%

1961 52807 46196 5184 10%

1971 55928 49152 5236 9%

1981 56352 49634 5180 9%

1991 57808 51099 5107 9%

Source: My own compilation from the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS).

Historian Murray Pittock summarized in a very illustrative way the shifting position of Scotland within the United Kingdom, “from an economic power-house of native industry to an also-ran assembly plant for US and Asian multinationals” (2001: 103).

104 The period that stretches from the 1960s onwards saw a recrudescence of political nationalism which brought constitutional issues to the fore of politics. In this section, I first briefly discuss the decline of sectarianism, and the simultaneous migration of highly-skilled Scots to England, and less economically-active Englanders to Scotland. I show how the SNP has consistently sought to polish its civic credentials and to gain support among internal minorities. The last part examines the long road to home-rule and shows how the combined effect of a party system that leans towards the left of the electoral spectrum and the reason invoked by home-rulers to legitimate their claims – in the name of a ‘democratic deficit’ – facilitated the constitution of a broad coalition of support cutting across religious and ethnic lines and territorially based against an England dominated state.