A People's History of Scotland (21 page)

For Maclean revolution was necessary to stop a new world war between Britain and America – the old global hegemon and the new one – to aid revolutionary Russia and to help destroy the British Empire. Conditions, he held, were more favourable in Scotland: ‘Scotland is firmer for Marxism than any other part of the British Empire. Clyde speakers get bigger and better audiences in Scotland …'
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His decision to organise a Scottish Workers Republican Party was also justified by his opposition to those leading the British Communist Party, among them Willie Gallacher, who he regarded as opportunists.

In his final years his key concern was organising the unemployed. The jobless total had been mounting since the end of 1920 and, unlike, in England, there was no parish relief, it being illegal under Scots Law to give relief to the unemployed. Up until April 1921, when the law was changed, allowing poor law authorities to give relief, the unemployed were destitute. Maclean fought to win them food and shelter. After initial gains in 1921, the focus shifted to winning relief at the same rate as south of the border.

Maclean never visited Russia, despite being appointed Soviet consul in Scotland immediately after the revolution, and being pinpointed by Lenin as one of the key opponents of the war. He demanded a passport from the British government and refused to go until one was issued.

Just a week before his death, Maclean stated in his election address to the voters of the Gorbals: ‘The social revolution is possible sooner in Scotland than in England … Scottish separation is part of the process of England's imperial disintegration and is as help towards the ultimate triumph of the workers of the world.'
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Earlier, in November 1922, while standing for Parliament for the Gorbals in support of a Scottish Workers Republic, his election address had begun with these words: ‘I stand in the Gorbals and before the world as a Bolshevik, alias a Communist, alias a Revolutionist, alias a Marxian. My symbol is the Red Flag, and I shall always keep it flying high.'
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A month before his death he told an old friend he was getting 3,000 people to his open-air meetings in West Regent Street, ‘the biggest crowds ever held Sunday after Sunday in Glasgow'.
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John Maclean went to an early grave, an internationalist and a revolutionary, along with James Connolly the finest this country has produced.

The End of Scottish Capitalism

B
efore the war, the Scottish economy was largely owned and managed by a native elite. Within a few short years of the armistice, this state of affairs came to a sudden and startling end. For example, in 1917, Lord Pirrie, head of Harland & Wolff shipyard in Govan, believed that he would have full order books after the war and so purchased Caird's yard at Greenock and embarked on rapid expansion. When he died in 1924, his ever-expanding empire expired with him. Caird's was closed and stood empty for years.
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The profound economic difficulties of the inter-war years pushed Scottish society to the verge of catastrophe.

The post-war period showed that the UK was overreliant on the old staple industries such as steel, coal, textiles and shipbuilding, but this was particularly true of Scotland. Lack of investment, poor management and no strategy for diversification would only add to the problem. The car industry was a success story in England between the wars, but whereas before World War I there had been seven companies making cars in Scotland, by 1930 there was only
one, Albion in Glasgow, which concentrated on making commercial vehicles.
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In addition, employment in Scottish shipbuilding declined from 100,000 in 1920 to 50,000 in 1925 and just 10,000 in 1929, a 90 percent decline. In the face of foreign competition more than half of Scotland's iron furnaces were dismantled in 1927, while the coal industry contracted by one-third in the 1920s and the fishing industry also saw a drop of 30 percent in tonnage.
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In December 1925, the
Scotsman
reported from Tarbrax, a shalemining village then in South Lanarkshire, under the headline ‘Situation at Tarbrax: Faced with Starvation', which reported: ‘Workers from Tarbrax, to the number of nearly 400, marched in procession to Carnwath, nearly ten miles distant, on Thursday night last for the purpose of asking poor relief. Relief under the emergency clause of the Poor Law Act, which enables people in a state of absolute destitution to get relief, has been given to a number of people in Tarbrax on the recommendation of the doctor there. A meeting of Carnwath Parish Council has been called for today to consider the whole situation.'
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The old industries hung on if they could, waiting for better times. But these did not come until the close of the 1930s and re-armament in the build up to World War II. Survival meant a strong emphasis on cutting labour costs by holding down wages. For working people these were desperate times. In the 1920s, 400,000 Scots emigrated, most moving south of the border.
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The inter-war years were disastrous, too, for the Highlands and Islands. Between 1921 and 1931 Shetland lost 17 percent of its people, Ross and Cromarty 12 percent and Caithness 11.5 percent. The crofting communities had, thus far, relied on being able to find work locally in the fishing industry or in domestic service and the shipyards farther south, returning for the harvest, but this tradition collapsed. Herring had been a major export to Eastern Europe but demand dried up, mechanisation meant farming required less labour and there were fewer domestic servants hired in the Lowland cities. The fall in the population of the Hebrides was greater than at any time in the previous century, with the Islands losing 28 percent between 1911 and 1951.
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The soap magnate Lord Leverhulme bought the Isle of Lewis in 1918. He wanted to turn Stornoway into a modern fishing port and fish-processing centre. Farms near the island's capital were switched from crofting to dairy production. But the young men who had returned from the war had been promised land and responded to Leverhulme's schemes by taking it.
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At the first meeting where Leverhulme outlined his plans he was shouted down by a crofter, Alan Martin, who challenged him: ‘What we want is land – and the question I put to you is: Will you give us the land?'
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By the summer of 1920, sixteen out of the twenty-two largest farms on Lewis had been taken over by the raiders.
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By the late 1920s, the Lewis crofters had won back nearly half a million acres from the landlords.
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One of the raiders, Alec Graham, recalled: ‘We didn't care at that time whether there was legal action or not, no. We just wanted the land – and if we didn't get it, well, we had just come out of the war and we were right for anything as you might say.'
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But this was not enough, unfortunately, to stop the loss of people. In April 1923, two Canadian Pacific liners took 600 Hebrideans from Lewis, Barra, North Uist, South Uist, Benbecula and Harris from Lochboisdale and Stornoway to new homes in Alberta and Ontario in Canada. They were taking advantage of the year-old Empire Settlement Act, which granted subsidised passages to Canada, following a lecture tour of the Hebrides by a Canadian emigration agent that year.
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Such a mass exodus was remarkable given the popular resistance to emigration. It can only be explained by the harsh economic conditions that led the British government to fear a return to the famine years of the 1840s, and by the dashed hopes that finally the crofters would be given the land.

The Rise of Labour

World War I also broke the hegemony held by the Liberal Party over Scottish politics. The party had split in two after Lloyd George ousted Herbert Asquith as prime minister in 1916, with the former
munitions minister then heading a coalition government with the Tories. Asquith himself served as MP for East Fife from 1886 until his defeat in 1918, and then from 1920 was shoehorned into what had once been the safe seat of Paisley. The winners in the short term during the inter-war years were the Tories, or Unionists as they called themselves north of the border, who took the lion's share of Scottish votes in UK elections in those early post-war years. But these victories concealed the growth of Labour in Scotland. By the time the war ended in November 1918, the Independent Labour Party in Scotland had seen its number of branches double, and its membership triple compared with 1914.
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By September 1918, it had grown to more than 9,000 members in 192 branches, a third of the total British membership. Elsewhere in Britain, Labour Party membership in World War I went down.
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The December 1918 Westminster general election was run on the basis of whether or not you approved of Lloyd George's wartime coalition uniting the Liberals and Tories, and with thousands of soldiers taking part far from any campaigning and with no chance to hear opposition voices. Nevertheless, Labour in Scotland ran thirty-nine candidates, with its vote going up tenfold compared to the last election in 1910 and achieving an average of 22.9 percent across Scotland. Labour held Dundee and West Fife and took Central Edinburgh, South Ayrshire, Glasgow Govan and Hamilton with a Liberal MP elected in North Aberdeen also crossing over. More important, they had come second within a greater number of seats than the divided Liberals. The stage was set for a breakthrough.
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In November 1920, Labour took a third of the seats in Glasgow's municipal elections. The Irish vote, around 15 percent, swung behind Labour as Lloyd George's policy of repression in Ireland broke the back of its traditional support for the Liberals. Labour ensured it kept this vote by supporting state-funded Catholic schooling and dropping its support for the prohibition of alcohol.
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The headline-grabbing breakthrough came in the 1922 Westminster general election, when Labour increased its vote to 32.2 percent of the vote and took twenty-nine seats, half in Glasgow and the surrounding area.
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It was met with an explosion of joy and
expectation: across Glasgow the newly elected MPs addressed mass meetings, and on Sunday 20 November a service of dedication was held at St Andrews Hall, where the audience sang the 124th Psalm: ‘Had not the Lord been on our side'. The climax came with the departure of the victorious MPs from St Enoch Station to London, with 250,000 people packing the surrounding streets. The crowd sang ‘Jerusalem' and finished off with ‘The Red Flag' and ‘The Internationale'.
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Facing defeat in local politics, the Glasgow Tories and Liberals joined together in an alliance in which they divided up the seats and stood as moderates in order to keep Labour out. As a result, though Labour received just over 50 percent of the vote in the elections in late 1923, the party did not win control of Glasgow City Council.
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Despite this, Labour held ten out of fifteen seats in the city in the December 1923 Westminster general election. In Scotland as a whole, Labour won thirty-four of the forty-eight seats it fought, sixteen in seats where either the Tories or Liberals stood aside in an effort to block Labour. The
Scotsman
commented: ‘… the advance of socialism in our midst is the most unpleasant feature of the situation. Formerly its strength lay mainly in Glasgow and the Clyde and the industrial parts of Lanarkshire but it has now spread its tentacles considerably in Eastern Scotland, particularly in the mining areas bordering on the farms.'
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Across Britain, Labour won fifty extra seats with a total of 192 MPs to the Tories' 258 and Liberals' 151. The two ruling-class parties were split, however, over the issue of free trade and economic protectionism, with the Liberals championing the former, therefore unable to back a Tory-led government. Nonetheless, Scottish Labour MPs such as John Wheatley and James Maxton were not willing to see a Labour–Liberal coalition. The Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was prepared to form a minority government, arguing that to refuse would be a missed opportunity and that in office Labour could prove it was fit to govern, to demonstrate that ‘working men could hold the highest offices of state with dignity and authority'.
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The likes of Maxton and Wheatley argued that Labour should push ahead with a bold programme of socialist measures and if it was
voted down, fight an election on that basis. But MacDonald was having none of that; he was determined to show Labour could govern on behalf of the nation as a whole rather than the working class.
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J. H. Thomas, who would become the new Secretary of State for the colonies, reassured his betters that ‘the Labour Party were proud and jealous of, and were prepared to maintain, the Empire'.
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As a result, in the words of later party leader Gordon Brown: ‘In all economic matters the new Government did little … Labour's measures were completely inadequate.'
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MacDonald seemed more concerned with what to wear when he visited Buckingham Palace and the views of his aristocratic friends than with securing change on behalf of his supporters. The government lasted less than a year, and the ruling class was prepared to tolerate it if only as a necessary means of house-training a new litter. The sole victory for the workers was won by John Wheatley, who succeeded in steering a relatively bold housing programme through Parliament.

During the general election of 1922 a majority of Labour candidates signed an open letter from the Scottish Home Rule Association in favour of creating a Scottish parliament. The ILP-sponsored MP George Buchanan presented a Home Rule Bill in May 1924, supported by MacDonald. At a rally in Glasgow in support of the bill, Maxton said there was ‘no greater job in life than to make English-ridden, capitalist-ridden, landowner-ridden Scotland into the Scottish Socialist Commonwealth'. Later he was to regret the use of ‘English-ridden' explaining he had no quarrel with the English people.
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However, Tory MPs talked the bill out and MacDonald refused to take any measure to carry devolution forward.

The year 1927 saw the local party in the west of Scotland split over more local matters. At a time when birth control advocates began campaigning in mining communities, Labour councillors and the ILP in Glasgow were rocked by controversy over whether or not the city's libraries should stock
Birth Control News
. When the issue came to a vote in November, all the Moderate councillors voted against while twenty Labour councillors voted for it, but around a dozen failed to vote because of the opposition of the
Catholic Church to the measure.
Forward
refused to run adverts from birth-control advocates.
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In defiance of the party leadership, ILP members such as Mary Barbour and Mrs Auld in Glasgow helped set up birth-control clinics in working-class areas like Govan. Barbour campaigned to raise the funds needed to maintain the staff of women doctors and nurses.
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As a councillor she also fought for the introduction of municipal banks, wash-houses, laundries and baths; a pure milk supply free to schoolchildren, child welfare centres and play areas; home helps and pensions for mothers.

When Labour was returned to government in 1929, MacDonald refused to appoint Wheatley once again as housing minister. The Glasgow MPs in the ILP, who represented the left of the party, understood they had now been frozen out. They did not stand around in the cold for long.

Scotland and Irish Independence

The 1919 Glasgow May Day march drew 150,000 people. Joining John Wheatley on the platform was Constance Markievicz of Sinn Fein,
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while the Irish tricolour was carried on the march and the anthem of the new, illegal Irish Republic, ‘The Soldier's Song', was sung along with ‘The Red Flag'. At the Scottish conference of the ILP the following year, recognition of the Irish Republic was passed, though by a narrow margin of 268 votes to 207.
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Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army organised in Scotland. By September 1919, the IRA in Glasgow had a battalion made up of eight companies. The Falkirk company was 100 strong at its foundation that year, while the Motherwell and Wishaw companies comprised some 300 men. In addition, there were eighty Sinn Fein clubs and fourteen branches of Cumann na mBan, the Republican women's organisation. In September 1920, the Procurator Fiscal reported that the IRA had 3,000 volunteers in the city: ‘They have no rifles but the police have now obtained information … that they are in possession of numerous revolvers which have been picked up here
and elsewhere.'
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By 1922 the number of Sinn Fein clubs had risen to eighty-eight, with an annual income that had increased to £22,000 from £700 in 1917. The Dumbarton club boasted 600 members and that in Greenock 1,000.
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