The movement for self goverment for Scotland looked defeated in 1979

The long road to a Scottish Parliament

Last week, I wrote about the Scottish Covenant of 1949. This week I take the story to 1979.

For much of the 50s, 60s and 70s, the momentum for Scottish self-government seemed unstoppable - yet in 1979, it looked defeated. My late father Arnold Kemp wrote that he gave up hope of seeing a Scottish Parliament in his lifetime. Independence supporters will recognise what he called:

“The classic nationalist scenario, that of heightened expectations punctured by reality.”

SNP leader Gordon Wilson reflected: “We’re rather like the Scottish football team. It’s a Scottish scenario. You’ve got to talk yourself up because in order to motivate people, you’ve got to give them something to work for.”

In the 50s and 60s, even the Conservatives supported devolution

At the time of the Scottish Covenant and through the 1950s, the Conservatives were among the strongest supporters of Home Rule, seeing it as a bulwark against Labour centralisation and nationalisation. However, they didn’t do much about it - until they started to notice their support slipping away in a way it was not in England. In 1959, for the first time, Scotland and England voted differently, with England electing a Conservative government while the majority of votes in Scotland were cast for Labour (though the Conservatives won more seats).

In 1967, Winnie Ewing was elected as the Member of Parliament for Hamilton - it was a dramatic moment. Ewing arrived in London with a pipe band and a fleet of supporters in Scottish-built Hilman Imp cars. “Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on,” she told the assembled press.

The next year, in 1968, the Scottish Conservatives, led by Tory grandee, the former Conservative Prime Minster Sir Alec Douglas-Home, signed the Declaration of Perth, which committed them to bringing in Home Rule for Scotland. In 1970, the Conservative government under Edward Heath set up a Royal Commission on the Constitution. It rejected federalism and recommended directly-elected Assemblies be set up for Scotland and Wales. It concluded in late 1973, just before a change of government. 

There was support for Home Rule in the Labour movement too

At the funeral of Scottish trade union leader Alec Kitson, Jimmy Reid, who led the famous work-in at the Clyde shipyards in 1971 said:  

“Some events of the sixties are worth recalling, it started over a drink of an evening in the Scottish Trade Union Congress. We were bemoaning the fact that the Scottish Labour Movement was all at sea over the national movement in Scotland. The Party had abandoned its Home Rule policy in 1948, leaving a vacuum that could only potentially be filled by the SNP. Labour was simply reacting to the issue in terms of political expediency. A flutter of support for the SNP and it would pay some lip service to the question. If the SNP was doing badly, the issue was quietly dropped.  This we considered an unprincipled approach. 

“We…agreed that we must try and redefine the underlying principles. We posed some questions to ourselves. Was Scotland a nation? And we decided that it was, one of the oldest in the world. Was the status quo tolerable? We reckoned No…The arguments for a Scottish parliament thus became the property of the Scottish trade unions. And then the property of the Labour Party. The ultimate goal was to make them the property of the Scottish people. Alec lived for the day when this was to happen, but it was not to be [in his lifetime]. When that day comes it will be due in no small measure to Alex Kitson and his kind.” 

When Labour came into power in 1974, they did so with a strengthened commitment to Home Rule for Scotland. In 1975, Dennis Canavan said in the House of Commons:

“Although there are differences of opinion about what specific powers the Scottish Assembly should have, will my right hon. Friend remind the House that the setting up of such an assembly is the policy of the Labour Party, the Scottish Labour Party and the  Scottish Trades Union Congress, that it was included in the Labour Party Manifesto and the Queen's Speech earlier this Session, and that the overwhelming majority of opinion among the Scottish people is that the Government must not renege on this promise and must proceed with as much haste as possible to set up a meaningful assembly with meaningful devolution rather than separatism?”

Hold the front page!

The Labour government set up a White Paper. This was supposed to be deliberating in secret.  However, my uncle David Kemp, who worked at Westminster as Granada’s political editor, was getting leaks of all kinds of secret documents on devolution through a researcher who worked for Labour’s deputy leader Ted Short. David passed these to his brother Arnold, then deputy editor of the Scotsman. The paper ran a stream of scoops on this - there was a huge appetite for detail of what the new Assembly would look like and the powers it was to have. 

A sense of excitement was building in Edinburgh that political and economic power could return. London then  - as in some ways it still is - was the effective capital of Scotland and there was a constant sucking away of economic and social clout and of talented people. In the 70s some of these people returned - including Neal Ascherson - believing that a new future was about to dawn. 

A referendum was announced

But there was implacable opposition to the plan from Unionists, who feared it would be a stepping stone to independence. There were also concerns about how devolution would affect Westminster. Tam Dalyell, the MP for West Lothian asked what came to be known as ‘the West Lothian question”. Essentially the concern was how England would react if Scottish Labour MPs pushed through legislation that would not affect their own constituents. 

The Labour government accepted demands from a rebel group for a referendum. That was seen as a delaying tactic but not a catastrophe, But as the Bill went through the Commons, George Cunningham an expat Scot who represented Islington,  inserted an amendment ruling that 40% of the electorate had to vote yes - not of the votes, the electorate. So people who were dead or had the left the country or who never voted were to be counted as supporting the status quo. This was obviously an unreachable bar. This sucked air out of the movement. 

David remembers being at a Labour social event in London as the guest of his friend Gus Macdonald and when Cunningham arrived, he was booed by many of those present, including David. “People were very angry about it.”  (When Arnold interviewed Cunningham for his book years later, he said he thought full-on federalism would have been a better answer to the West Lothian question). 

The referendum campaign

The Yes side in the referendum campaign was faltering. The Labour Party was divided and so was the SNP. SNP MP Douglas Henderson rejected the watered-down Assembly that was then on offer as a weak and insulting compromise with the British state. The Universities opposed it. The Queen made a speech in which she said she was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, and the SNP made what Gordon Wilson saw as the mistake of attacking her. In his memoir SNP: The Turbulent Years, he  recalled a scene that makes me smile: 

“I thought it [criticising the Queen] had no continuing impact. My wife, Edith, who viewed things from a different perspective, thought otherwise. She noticed a neighbour running up the Union Flag on her washing line opposite our house, and believed it was a tipping point for the unionists.” 

Well, you would notice that for sure. The No campaign was “pungent” and well-funded, Arnold wrote. He described allegations in the  book “Britian’s Secret War” that the state intelligence service put money into the No campaign as “enjoyable bar room speculation.”

A few days before the vote, Alec Douglas-Home appeared on television urging Scots to reject Labour’s Assembly and promising that a future Conservative administration would bring forward better plans.  Arnold wrote:

“This quavering old aristo, this loyal servant of the British state had done his bit for the Union once again…his anxieties were principled [about the West Lothian question] but it was a sad moment. Sir Alec, having flirted with devolution had banished the old girl because she hadn’t passed the medical.”

In the event, the vote was a narrow yes 5 52% for and 48% against (just slightly less than the Brexit vote). But everyone knew that it was not by enough of a margin to deliver a Parliament in the face of the 40% bar. However as gloomy Scotsman journalists gathered the following evening, Arnold ordered champagne - because “We won!” 

But it was not decisive enough. As for many others. this was a personal as well as a political disappointment for my parents. The world of possibilities for a life spent in Scotland had shrunk. Later in a bitter analysis in the Hollow Drum, Arnold looked back

“In those days, as deputy editor of The Scotsman, I was one of those members of Edinburgh's chattering classes who deluded themselves that Scotland was impatient for change; journalists and political scientists, keen to create a polity to enrich their own lives, were accused of inventing the devolutionary movement of the time, although they were merely the descendants of a long line of campaigners. The truth was that Scotland was confused, uncertain and deeply divided. 

‘The politics of grievance, skilfully developed by civil servants and politicians of both parties to enhance Scotland's financial advantages within the Union, came back to punish us. We were inured to the idea of failure and relative disadvantage; indeed it had become central to our rhetoric in dealing with the state. We had acquired the sour tastes of dissatisfaction but we were not at all united in our view of how they might be dispersed. The Scottish public was offered more of what it had been told to dislike - government. Not surprisingly it was less than enthusiastic.”

Ascherson , Arnold wrote “packed his bags and went back to London….The loss of a proper Scottish political agenda was felt keenly enough by those who stayed behind.”

In Stone Voices, Ascherson consulted his diary and recalled:  “The years after 1979 were bleak. At my desk on North Bridge, the steady inflow of political handouts, reform plans, party statements and counter-statements which had been running for the previous five years dried to a trickle within weeks of the referendum. 

Much more upsetting was the impact on my own friends and acquaintances. During those years, they had grown accustomed to the idea that Scotland was to become an exciting, lively little country in which their talents would be needed. In the diary, I wrote: "The future existed for many years; people became used to it as a background; now it has vanished and there is a blankness only'

People seemed to shrink and fade. Many turned to alcohol, some to hard drugs. Many more fell back into the old assumption that Scotland was a dead-end (there's nothing for young folk here'), and they left for London, America or continental Europe. The failure of self-government ruined many lives, and they were not the lives of politicians.

We were not imnmune at the Scotsman. A sort of high-spirited desperation settled over us. That summer, the promotions department organized a fund-raising parachute jump at Strathallan, and suddenly the whole features staff, men and women alike, was volunteering. We agreed that we would all leap into space shouting the paper's motto: For You. For Scotland!'

To my shame and relief, I was persuaded to pull out and spare my slipped disc. But the others soon found themselves clinging to a wind-battered spar above Perthshire, one foot on the wheel-spat and the other waving in nothingness. Some jumped screaming; one had to be pushed.

The casualties were proportionately worse than at Arnhem. Fred and Henry broke their legs. The features sub-editor fell through a roof, nearly tearing his foot off. Julie landed in a pigpen;

Harry made a crater in a cornfield. David twisted his knee sinew. They were all rounded up by ambulances and came to rest in a row of hospital beds at Bridge of Allan.

Eric Mackay was angrier than I had ever seen him, and there were hard words about Walter Mitty delusions. But perhaps that leap of self-immolation was a way of purging the heart. Those who jumped almost all stayed in Scotland and worked on. Unlike them, I decided that I must get away from Scottish politics, at least for a time, and tooka job with the Observer in London. It was almost twenty years before came back.”

Next week, I will take the story to 1997