Some Labour MPs always had their doubts about the 1998 Scotland Act. According to Tom Harris, former Labour MP for Glasgow South, there was a joke in the Commons tearoom: ‘Line 1, between “there shall” and “be a Scottish Parliament”, insert “not”.’ Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has dropped in every single election. In May it won just 17 out of 129, tied with Reform in a distant second place after the SNP, which has 58 seats and is about to enter its third decade in government. A chunk of Harris’s old Glasgow constituency is now represented in Edinburgh by Holly Bruce of the Scottish Green Party, which beat Labour into third place in both of Scotland’s main cities.
‘By the early 21st century,’ David Torrance writes in A History of the Scottish Labour Party, the party ‘appeared to have lost an empire but not yet found a role. The irony was that the party had itself helped to bring about that evidently uncomfortable state of affairs.’ It’s not that they weren’t warned. Torrance’s book quotes many of Labour’s leading figures acknowledging the risks not only of creating a new forum for Scottish nationalism, but filling it with more competition than Labour was used to. Donald Dewar, who steered Labour’s plans for devolution in the 1990s, presented this as a virtue: ‘What we have got to do is persuade Scotland that fear must be conquered and that canny caution be put on one side. The people must decide if they are prepared to live a little dangerously in order to achieve what they want.’
It has never been clear, however, what the party itself wanted. Dewar portrayed the adoption of proportional representation in the Scottish Parliament as an act of ‘charitable giving’. In 1999, in the first election to the Scottish Parliament after the devolution referendum, Labour went from winning 78 per cent of Scottish seats in the 1997 general election to 43 per cent of those at Holyrood. The SNP was not the only beneficiary of PR; the Conservatives, who had won no Westminster seats, got eighteen MSPs. Nye Bevan said that ‘the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away,’ but he didn’t mean like that.
Torrance looks at some of the other strange inversions in Scottish Labour’s history. One of them is that the party was born out of radical Liberalism, and many of its founders’ lives reflected the eclecticism of that old cause. Gavin Brown Clark ran away from his bourgeois Glasgow home at thirteen, living in India, Australia and London before working as a surgeon in Edinburgh; by the 1880s, this ‘inveterate joiner of organisations’ had become dedicated to temperance, land reform and the independence of the Transvaal, and won election to Parliament as a Crofters’ MP for Caithness. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham was a member of the Scottish aristocracy who became famous in Argentina as ‘Don Roberto’ for his exploits as a cattle rancher, returning home to become the first president of the Scottish Labour Party and, later, the honorary president of the SNP on its founding in 1934. Then there was Keir Hardie, whose proposed reading list for socialists began with ‘the first four books of the New Testament’, but who was, unlike many of the other early activists, working-class. Gordon Brown used to joke that in those early days, ‘we promised home rule, proportional representation and the prohibition of alcohol. And in more than seventy years we have managed to secure none of them.’
In 1894, the Scottish Labour Party dissolved itself into the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which preached a similar gospel from its West Yorkshire heartlands. In England, the trade union bureaucracy dominated the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), which was set up to help increase the number of socialist MPs and changed its name to the Labour Party in 1906. The balance of power in the Scottish movement was more complex. Unlike the Trades Union Congress in England, the Scottish Trades Union Congress included trades councils – local workers’ institutions which were more open to radical influence. The Scottish Workers’ Representation Committee bound together trade union representatives, trades councils, co-operative societies and the ILP into something spikier than its southern equivalent. It was also less well organised, and failed to form a Lib-Lab pact of the sort that helped the LRC break through in 1906, winning 29 seats (two of them in Scotland). With Scots like Ramsay MacDonald and Hardie already at the heart of ‘British’ Labour, thanks to their parliamentary seats in England (MacDonald) and Wales (Hardie), the SWRC dissolved itself into the new Labour Party in 1909.
The ILP retained a degree of autonomy within the new party – until 1918, no one could join the Labour Party directly, only an affiliated organisation – and supplied, along with various Marxist groups, the energy that powered Red Clydeside. From 1906 Tom Johnston produced a weekly newspaper called Forward, which turned Glaswegian socialism into a laboratory of protest and policy, publishing the revolutionaries James Connolly and John Maclean as well as those, like Johnston himself and John Wheatley, who hoped socialism could come through parliamentary representation. Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour, Mary Laird and Agnes Dollan of the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association led a rent strike that forced the government to introduce rent controls during the First World War. The men of Red Clydeside made it to Westminster in 1922 and then into government. Wheatley’s 1924 Housing Act, promoting quality municipal housing, was the crowning legislative achievement of Labour’s interwar sprint through the corridors of power.
Many of these activists were also Scottish nationalists, convinced by the example of Clydeside that Scotland’s revolutionary potential was far ahead of England’s. James Maxton, the ILP chairman, argued that this potential was being steadily ground down by the votes of English members ‘pledged to a policy of social stagnation’. An attendee at an ILP-organised Bannockburn Rally in 1923 noted that one of the speakers, David Kirkwood, an important union leader during the war and one of the Red Clydesiders who went to Westminster in 1922, seemed ‘far more concerned with Bannockburn, Stirling Bridge, Bruce and Wallace’ than with ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat and Karl Marx’.
This mixture of protest and power-seeking was bound to curdle. Torrance notes that Scottish Labour’s own mythology celebrates a party – the ILP – that seceded from it in 1932, disgusted at the betrayals of MacDonald’s second term. In the US military, this kind of thing is called ‘stolen valour’. As Malcolm Petrie has argued, the ILP’s politics were local, radical and extra-parliamentary while the Labour Party’s were national, reformist and electoral. Labour didn’t see its supporters as communities to be mobilised, but voters to be canvassed and then left alone. Scottish Labour was always better than British Labour at pretending this divide didn’t exist, speaking for Scotland as if it were a big shipyard in dispute with a faceless conglomerate.
This false mythology has overshadowed most of Scottish Labour’s genuine achievements in power. Tom Johnston, who stayed in Labour after the ILP split, used his time as secretary of state for Scotland during the Second World War to establish a prototype of the National Health Service and to found the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, which was followed in the 1960s by Willie Ross’s Highlands and Islands Development Board. Jennie Lee, who as an ILP MP had supported disaffiliation and didn’t rejoin Labour until 1944, eventually became Harold Wilson’s minister for the arts, and tripled state funding for Scottish artists while defending the independence of the Scottish Arts Council, preparing the ground for the ‘second Scottish renaissance’ of the 1980s. Willie Ross’s relentless lobbying diverted vast quantities of state spending into Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s: he was the shadow or actual secretary of state for Scotland from 1961 until 1976. In the 1980s, Labour-run Scottish councils followed the Greater London Council in supporting community groups, unemployed workers and even the Palestine Liberation Organisation. But not much survived eighteen years of Conservative government. In 1996 it abolished the powerful regional councils; Strathclyde, which contained half of the country’s population, had been a particular annoyance.
There isn’t much feeling in Torrance’s history. Some of the richest accounts of left-wing party politics, such as Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, engage closely with the ‘structures of feeling’ through which political culture is built. Torrance offers something more impersonal, closer at times to a modern antiquarianism than to political history, laying out the facts in meticulous chronological order and leaving us to work out the rest. Torrance defends this as ‘the most efficient (and indeed coherent) means of bringing together a large amount of primary and secondary material’, but the result is disorientating, as if Scotland were trapped inside the Labour Party rather than the other way round: a series of leaders, office-bearers, elected members and the things they decided to do whizz past in a blur.
The clearest benefit of Torrance’s approach is his focus on Scottish Labour’s evolving relationship to the British party. After it merged with the Labour Party, the Scottish Labour Party ceased to exist until it readopted the name in 1994. Between 1914 and 1919, it was the Scottish Advisory Council of the Labour Party. When that body proposed a return to ‘Scottish Labour’ and a degree of autonomy in 1917, the British leadership reacted badly. ‘Were Scotland granted separate representation,’ Arthur Henderson, the party leader, argued, ‘London, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Wales, and perhaps other sections of the country differing in type, would each present a similar claim, with a great show of reason.’ Henderson (who was born in Glasgow) got his way, and the Scottish party had to settle for being called the Scottish Council of the Labour Party for the best part of the century.
One of Torrance’s most useful insights concerns what he calls the ‘branch office paradox’. At its least independent, between the end of the First World War and the 1980s, Labour in Scotland seemed to function as an outlet for the nation’s instincts. But as Scottish Labour began to acquire authority over its own structures, policies and strategy in the 1990s it ‘ceased producing ideas of any consequence’. Autonomy was grabbed as a lifebelt whenever the party panicked about SNP attacks on ‘London rule’. This insecurity is clearest in Labour’s approach to devolution. Despite his party’s promise of Home Rule, MacDonald’s governments neglected the issue in office. By the 1940s, Labour was more interested in expanding the state than dividing it; Scotland had to make do with the ‘administrative devolution’ of the Scottish Council of State and the Scottish Council of Industry. In the 1970s, Labour reluctantly embraced the idea of a Scottish Assembly to fend off the rising SNP. But the timidity of its proposals prompted Jim Sillars, then one of Labour’s rising stars, to form his own ‘Scottish Labour Party’ in 1976 with the Paisley MP John Robertson. It proved a struggle to find support beyond Sillars’s own Ayrshire base and members of the Scottish intelligentsia including Tom Nairn, Neal Ascherson and Hamish Henderson, as well as members of the Trotskyite International Marxist Group. Paranoid about the IMG, Sillars and his allies attempted to purge the entryists and the party fell acrimoniously apart. It left behind a distinctive policy of ‘independence in Europe’, in opposition to the Eurosceptic SNP’s ‘separatism’, which would come to define modern Scottish nationalism. Labour’s proposed Assembly was ultimately rejected in the 1979 referendum, when a narrow ‘Yes’ vote failed to breach the required 40 per cent of the registered electorate.
The 40 per cent rule had been mischievously inserted by the Labour backbencher George Cunningham, born in Dunfermline but MP for Islington South, supported by other dissenters from Wales, Scotland and the North of England. There have always been unexpected allies on both sides of the battle in Labour between centre and periphery. Norman Buchan, an enthusiastic participant in the Scottish folk revival with his wife, Janey, argued that a straight choice between an assembly and the status quo would not settle the debate; he thought independence should be a third option, so that ‘separatism’ could be explicitly rejected. He saw Britain’s territorial inequalities as an argument for union: ‘If we remove all Scottish political control over what all accept is a single economic entity in the United Kingdom, then we are left inevitably to be controlled by that total economy … we would have less say than we have now over our own fate.’
Buchan was appalled by the evolution of Scottish Labour rhetoric in the 1980s, when Thatcherism’s electoral success in the South of England prompted a nationalist turn. Torrance rightly identifies this as the beginning of a genuine commitment to legislative devolution, despite the lack of interest shown by the party’s British leadership. In 1988, Neil Kinnock waved away the omission of the issue from his speech to the Scottish Council Conference by joking that he hadn’t mentioned ‘environmental conditions in the Himalayas’ either. On the fringe of that conference, an organisation called Scottish Labour Action was launched with a radical prospectus:
1. Recognition of the right of the Scottish people to self-determination
2. … assert that the Tories had no mandate to run Scotland
3. Non-payment of the poll tax
4. Labour participation in a Constitutional Convention
5. Non-co-operation at Westminster on Scottish business
6. Greater autonomy for Labour’s Scottish organisation
SLA members became surprisingly influential, touring constituency parties and supplying several leading figures in the first devolved governments. But unlike the Trotskyist group Militant, which caused far less trouble in Scotland than it did in England, there was little policy in SLA’s factionalism. Its members were doing what Nairn called ‘display-identity’: broadcasting the intensity of Labour’s commitment to Scotland, in the absence of real power. Labour’s helpless MPs in Scotland, swamped by an English Tory majority, had been branded the ‘feeble fifty’ by the SNP, and this struck a nerve. In November 1988, Sillars – now in the SNP – took Govan from Labour in a by-election, and the party flung itself into the cross-party Constitutional Convention to establish a framework for a Scottish Parliament.
This new determination was the product of a metamorphosis in the party’s social and intellectual profile, which reflected deeper changes across Scotland. Labour’s earlier successes had been won in a society that could barely be described as capitalist. Scotland was ‘a statist economy without a state’, Neal Ascherson wrote in 1975, ‘a country which has drifted – nobody paying attention to the moorings – out beyond the three-mile limit of “the West” to a point at which the lighthouses of “the East” can be seen on the night horizon’. Scotland had the largest proportion of public-sector employment in the EEC and the majority of households lived in council housing – it’s surprising that people voted for anybody else. Labour could add religious loyalty to its appeal: it had dominated the Catholic vote since the 1920s and had claimed much of the Protestant working class as well. This helps to explain Scottish Labour’s cultural conservatism, which often prompted the party to abstain, or worse, on social issues. Thanks to a minefield of practical, legal and cultural obstacles, until the 1980s homosexuality, divorce and abortion were probably easier in secular East Germany than in Labour Scotland.
By the time Thatcher took power in 1979, however, a new breed had emerged in the Scottish party, bristling with degrees, professional jobs and modern tastes. They were more responsive to the movements that had been struggling to liberalise Scottish society since the 1960s. Robin Cook introduced an amendment to decriminalise homosexuality to the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill; it came into force in 1981, more than a decade after the equivalent legislation in England. Dennis Canavan and Judith Hart supported parents’ efforts to ban the belt or Lochgelly tawse, a leather strap used for corporal punishment in schools (most schools stopped using it after the European Court of Human Rights judged in 1982 that parents had a right to refuse the corporal punishment of their children). Labour women’s groups battled for gender balance in the selection of parliamentary candidates. As new social movements emerged in Scotland, they had to confront the country’s constitutional strangeness, navigating its distinctive systems of law, education and local government with only the Tory-run Scotland Office for oversight. This situation produced a democratic case for devolution that cannot be explained by electoral calculation alone.
By 1992, one of these modern Scots, John Smith, led the Labour Party. By 1997, after Smith’s premature death, they ran Britain. In place of Hardie, MacDonald and the Red Clydesiders were Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Alistair Darling, George Robertson and others – the highest ever proportion of Scots in a Labour cabinet. Even Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh. In his quest to scrap Labour’s Clause IV commitment to common ownership, Blair was encouraged by a victory at Scottish Labour’s 1995 conference, recalling in his memoirs that if they could win in Scotland ‘where traditional thought was strong … we could win in most places, and even in the unions’.
New Labour imbued the Scottish Parliament with its vision of a ‘middle-class’ future, but few Labour MPs beyond Dewar moved back north, and several left-wingers were blocked from standing, so Holyrood’s 1999 intake accelerated Scottish Labour’s transformation: fourteen of its MPs at the time came from manual working-class backgrounds, but only two of the 56 new Labour MSPs. In 1998, Jack McConnell, who would become MSP for Motherwell and Wishaw, argued that ‘Scotland is actually a modern, cosmopolitan country, where people do have individualistic aspirations to get their children a decent education and a secure job. While Scotland’s community spirit lives on, collectivist aspirations [are] becoming a thing of the past.’
If Scotland was suddenly so similar to post-Thatcherite England, what was the Scottish Parliament for? Labour’s rhetoric in the 1980s had emphasised the need for a forum that could assert ‘Scottish values’, in particular the country’s relative radicalism. During negotiations after the 1999 Holyrood elections over forming a coalition, the Liberal Democrats suggested abolishing or altering university tuition fees in Scotland, prompting a revealing exchange between Blair and the Lib Dem leader, Paddy Ashdown:
Blair: You can’t have Scotland doing something different from the rest of Britain.
Ashdown: Then you shouldn’t have given the Scots devolution, including, specifically, the power to be different on this issue. You put yourself in a ridiculous position if, having produced the legislation to give power to the Scottish Parliament, you then say it is a matter of principle that they can’t use it.
Blair (laughing): Yes, that is a problem. I am beginning to see the defects in all this devolution stuff.
When, after Dewar’s sudden death, Henry McLeish became first minister in 2000 he wisely attempted to reassert some difference, proposing that the Scottish Executive be renamed the Scottish Government. Brian Wilson, then minister of state for Scotland at Westminster, responded that ‘they can call themselves the White Heather Club [a kitsch old Scottish variety show] if they want, but they will never be a government.’ When McLeish introduced free personal care for the elderly in Scotland, Alistair Darling, the work and pensions secretary and MP for Edinburgh Central, withheld £23 million in reserved funding for overlapping ‘attendance allowance’ benefits – a ‘calculated rebuke’, Torrance argues – so that Holyrood had to make up the extra costs itself. McLeish was quickly forced out after an expenses scandal.
Dewar once told a young Glasgow councillor that ‘whoever gets to the flag first, it is their values that will dominate.’ By the time McConnell became Labour’s third first minister in as many years, it was clear that Labour had gone for the wrong flag. While the party continued to pile up seats at Westminster under first-past-the-post, the Scottish party’s inability to distinguish itself from London cost it seats at Holyrood. In 2003, both the Greens and the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) surged, powered by disgust at the invasion of Iraq a few weeks earlier. In 2007, the SNP absorbed the votes of the imploding SSP to win its first Holyrood election by just one seat. Alex Salmond, arriving in Edinburgh by helicopter to claim victory, quickly established the SNP as a far more confident flag-carrier. He insisted that his administration be called the Scottish Government, abolished what was left of tuition fees and rhetorically embraced many of Labour’s heroes and values as his own. He was rewarded with an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament elections in 2011.
In the lead-up to the independence referendum that followed, Labour joined a cross-party ‘No’ campaign under the slogan ‘Better Together’. While Labour faced the public, Tory donors paid the bills. David Cameron initially believed he could rely on Labour’s Scottish machine to transcend his government’s unpopularity. George Osborne recalled that ‘it was a bit like that scene in The Wizard of Oz when we pulled back the curtain and realised that there was nothing much to Scottish Labour behind it.’
Torrance emphasises the long-standing weakness of Labour’s organisation in Scotland. Arthur Woodburn, the Scottish party secretary in the 1930s, admitted that after the secession of the ILP, there was ‘practically no Labour Party in Scotland … my job was to rebuild it from scratch.’ In 1957, Scottish Labour still had ‘the worst membership record in Great Britain’. After 1963, every Constituency Labour Party was required to have a thousand members, with the result that many of them faked their figures. An internal inquiry in 1969 discovered that the fifteen Glasgow CLPs had only 1786 members between them. Even under Blair, with Scots dominating the front bench, Scotland accounted for just 8 per cent of the British party membership. Scottish Labour was able to win in spite of this because of its deep roots in Scottish society. For most of the 20th century, it controlled the trade unions, local government and the provision of council housing; it delicately maintained a political home for Catholic and Protestant workers alike; and it never openly defied the humanistic socialism of Scotland’s intelligentsia, which meant it could command the instinctive sympathy of much of the country’s press.
The ‘indyref’ of 2014 was Scottish Labour’s final ride. In the last week of campaigning, with polls suggesting a surge towards ‘Yes’, Gordon Brown gave a speech instructing activists to ‘have confidence, and say to our friends that for reasons of solidarity, sharing, justice, pride in Scotland, the only answer for Scotland’s sake, and for Scotland’s future, is vote “No”.’ Labour offered, as it always had under pressure, ‘more powers’ for Scotland, which were published – as ‘The Vow’ – on the front page of the Daily Record two days before the vote.
The old song worked one last time, but only for those who remembered the tune. Not only did a majority of young people vote ‘Yes’ (though not, strangely, 16 to 24-year-olds), so did Glasgow and Dundee. Despite a ten-point victory for ‘No’, wiser activists worried that they were going against the direction of travel of their own base. Sitting behind Brown, clapping along to his speech, was the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson, who deftly repositioned her party as the natural unionist option. Labour, its vote split between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, was almost wiped out by the SNP in the following year’s Westminster election, losing many seats in Glasgow for the first time since 1922, and fell to third place at Holyrood in 2016.
Nationalists like to accuse Labour of having betrayed Scotland in 2014, but this is unfair. Despite the ILP’s early nationalism, the mainstream Scottish party has always believed that Scotland benefits from the union. It has consistently argued that Britain’s tangled, lopsided economy demands at least some political centralisation and the redistribution of wealth. This isn’t so different from the centre-left case for the European Union. Labour has pursued it fairly sincerely in office, and continues to do so. Spending on public services in Scotland is currently 22 per cent higher than in England, and Scotland’s block grant from the UK government has grown by £2 billion, about 2 per cent in real terms, since Keir Starmer became prime minister.
Labour has never really ceased to speak for Scotland. The party has been, if anything, too representative, battling to contain all of the nation’s complexity within itself. Most of its agonies over the years, from the Great Depression to devolution, have reflected the indecision of the whole. With the establishment of a Scottish Parliament, this extraordinary burden ought to have been lifted, liberating Scottish Labour to become something more focused, more principled and more sure of itself. It has failed to do this because devolution institutionalised the same problem: a truly representative body that is half-in, half-out of Britain, reinforcing rather than relieving the power of the ‘Scottish question’. It is unlikely that Labour will ‘find a role’ until that question is finally answered.