A People's History of Scotland (28 page)

The Birth of the SNP

Today's Scottish National Party was formed in the 1930s – a decade of misery for working-class Scots but also one of deep uncertainty bordering on fear for the middle and upper classes. Economic power had shifted southwards, with the takeover of so many Scottish concerns by London-based corporations.

As the Great Depression began in 1929, the industrial giant Beard-more's was brought near to bankruptcy. Its shipyard on the Clyde was closed the following year and its engineering company sold off.

In 1932, the president of Edinburgh's Chamber of Commerce warned that the blood was being drained out of Scotland's economy: ‘Business after business was being bought up by English money and factories, one after another, closed down … if the process of English absorption is not stopped, Scotland will drop to a position of industrial insignificance.'
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There was a move away, too, from a political commitment to Home Rule. The once-powerful Liberal Party had fractured and was marginalised. The Labour Party shifted from its intent to create a Scottish parliament. In 1922, on the departure of the ‘Red Clydesider' MPs for London, John Wheatley had championed Home Rule but changed his mind after the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, arguing that only the power of the whole British state could protect the working classes from the predatory nature of international capitalism. Another MP, Tom Johnston, agreed: ‘What purpose would there be in our getting a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh if it has to administer an emigration system, a glorified poor law and a desert?'
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That chimed with the direction of the Labour Party, its identification with the British state, and within the ruling class the acceptance of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, which proposed that an element of state direction was needed to revive the economy. Supporters of Home Rule saw Labour's support for it ebbing away.

The National Party was launched in June 1928 by intellectuals, most notably the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, nationalists, students and former ILP members, such as its dynamic organiser John
MacCormick. A year earlier, a Home Rule bill had been defeated at Westminster and the new party took up the demand for a Scottish parliament.

In the 1931 Westminster general election, the National Party stood five candidates, winning 21,000 votes – gaining 9.4 percent in Edinburgh East, 14.9 percent in Inverness, 10.9 percent in Renfrew West and 13.3 percent in St Rollox in Glasgow. The Communists stood eight candidates, winning 35,000 votes.
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In 1931, the Unionist constituency party in Glasgow Cathcart broke away in support of Scottish Home Rule within a wider federation of British dominions, forming the Scottish Party. The disgruntled Tories, led by a Glasgow solicitor, Kevin MacDowell, were joined by the Duke of Montrose and Alexander Dewar Gibb, Professor of Scots Law at Glasgow University. He warned that ‘inferior' people of Irish stock were ‘usurpin'' the land of a ‘dwindling, though virile and intelligent, race'.
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MacDowell was an enthusiast for the British Empire and wanted to modernise it.

John MacCormick quickly opened discussions with the new grouping, arguing that the National Party of Scotland ‘could not allow the Scottish Party to continue in its separate existence. It was led by men whose names were far better known to the public than were many of ours and who command the respect which is always given, whether due or not, to rank and position.' The pursuit of such men involved MacCormick engineering the expulsion of Hugh MacDiarmid, regarded as too radical for such men.
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The emphasis of both organisations became one of addressing middle-class concerns about the loss of Scottish identity, with its leaders supporting either devolution or independence within the Empire. At a House of Commons special debate in November 1932, George Buchanan, MP for the Gorbals, reported that the surge of nationalist sentiment was now coming from the professional and middle classes: ‘I meet lawyers and sheriffs, and nearly every one of them is in sympathy with the movement … same with the doctors and the higher-paid civil servants.'
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The nationalists polled well enough in the 1933 UK general election, garnering 16 percent of the vote across the eight seats they
contested, but rather than that being a bridgehead for advance, it was its pre-war high mark. In 1934, the two groups finally joined together in the Scottish National Party, which claimed 10,000 members but by 1939 was down to 2,000.

The party began to polarise between those who saw the creation of a Scottish parliament as the immediate goal and those who advocated nothing less than independence. By the close of the decade it seemed to be a waning and fractious force. Time was to prove that impression wrong.

What was true was that the 1930s had left a deep imprint on Scotland. The working class was determined that it would never have to repeat what it had suffered in those years. The confidence of the upper classes had been badly knocked. As war approached, re-armament would bring orders to the shipyards and engineering plants, but that alone could not shake off an awareness of decline.

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REBEL LIVES: HUGH MACDIARMID

Scotland has produced two of the world's finest poets. The first, and most obvious, is Robert Burns. The second is Hugh MacDiarmid, the pen name adopted by Christopher Murray Grieve. MacDiarmid's reputation is greater after his death than in his lifetime, in large part because his poetry has become more widely available than it was when he died of cancer in 1978. But interest in him has also grown as interest in Scotland's culture and the debate on her place in the world have grown.

MacDiarmid was a difficult man, who loved an argument and never suffered fools gladly. For most of his adult life he had two passions – Scottish nationalism and communism. In
Who's Who
he listed Anglophobia as one of his hobbies.
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MacDiarmid was not just cantankerous; he verged on misogyny, as is evident from this quote: ‘Scottish women of any historical interest are curiously rare … our leading Scotswomen have been … almost entirely destitute of exceptional endowments of any sort.' Despite such statements, his two wives, Margaret ‘Peggy' Skinner and Valda Trevlyn, were fiercely independent women.
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Born in Langholm in the Borders in 1892 to a father who was a postal worker and a mother who was the caretaker of the town's library, he was proud of his solidly working-class roots. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘My development owed a very great deal to my growing up in a working class family and being fed on out-and-out Radicalism and Republicanism when still a child.'
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During World War I he served in the Royal Medical Corps. He recalled his reaction to news of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin: ‘I was in Barracks, in Sheffield of all places … If it had been possible at all I would have deserted at that time from the British army and joined the Irish.'
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After the war, he hoped to eke out a living through writing, and became involved in the Independent Labour Party, the Scottish Home Rule Association, the No More War campaign and the unemployed movement.

Despite that, after Mussolini and the Fascists took power in Italy in 1922, he wrote admiringly of them. He was looking at Italy through Scots eyes and believed the slogan ‘Italy First' could be taken up at home as ‘Scotland First'. Mistakenly, he believed Mussolini would move leftwards and champion the peasantry. The poet, literary critic and Communist John Manson points out: ‘MacDiarmid was never a Fascist in the sense of a supporter of a right-wing dictatorship; he didn't belong to a Fascist group … he saw “a Scottish Fascism” as nationalist.'
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But his fascination with Mussolini does illustrate one weakness in MacDiarmid's politics: he saw the liberation of working people as being achieved through the actions of a ‘great man'. Later, that would be Stalin.

In 1926, MacDiarmid, then living in Montrose, threw himself into the General Strike, and it showed in his poetry. In 1928, he was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland but was expelled four years later when it merged with the Scottish Party (disaffected Tories in the main) because his left-wing views were an obstacle to the unity that created today's SNP. The new party set its aim as securing a Scottish parliament, not independence, but for MacDiarmid there was no point in gaining Home Rule; he wanted a complete break with the United Kingdom.

He wrote after his forced exit:

The Scottish Party headed by the Duke of Montrose and Sir Alexander MacEwan entirely consists of that sort of right wing moderate, and has as its sole object the confining of the Scottish Movement within the narrowest possible limits and with the least possible discomfort to the existing order. The National Party of Scotland had attempted, on the other hand, to stand pat on the few basic facts to a whole range of other considerations; but it has now abandoned even that effort and is fused with the Scottish Party.
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In 1934 MacDiarmid joined the Communist Party, but he could hardly hide his disdain of its central leadership in Scotland. A year after joining, he quoted Lenin: ‘It would be a very serious mistake to suppose that one can become a Communist without making one's own the treasures of human knowledge.' He then added: ‘My Scottish Communist comrades must forgive me if I am quite unable to recognise any of them in this description of what really constitutes a Communist.'

Later that year, in his journal,
New Scotland
, he raised the prospect of a new world war, arguing that Scotland should follow the lead of Ireland during the last conflict, and called for a ‘proletarian and Republican' secession from the Empire.
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This drew the ire of the Scottish Party leadership.

An exchange of letters followed, and by the beginning of the next year the Scottish leadership expelled him, but on appeal the leadership in London reinstated his membership. MacDiarmid's final expulsion, for ‘nationalism', came in 1939 after he claimed that Scottish and Irish members of the International Brigades in Spain had refused to fight in the British Battalion because they could not fight alongside English volunteers. Despite his expulsion he continued to identify with communism and the Soviet Union, yet his full-blooded identification with Stalinism and the USSR luckily did not contaminate his poetry.

One huge service he did perform was keeping alive the memory and beliefs of John Maclean. In 1948, MacDiarmid and his
fellow poet Sidney Goodsir Smith addressed a rally in Glasgow's St Andrew's Hall to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Maclean's death. Hamish Henderson wrote his famous song ‘John Maclean March' for this meeting. MacDiarmid helped found the John Maclean Society in 1968 with Morris Blythman (Thurso Berwick).

In 1957 he re-joined the Communist Party in solidarity with the Soviet Union, which a year before had sent in tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution, and at a time when it was losing members in protest. By the end of the decade, the poet was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and also joined the more radical, direct action Committee of 100. In 1964, he spoke along with Malcolm X at the Oxford Student Union.
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He remained active on the Scottish left and in nationalist politics until his death.

MacDiarmid initially wrote poetry in English, but in the course of the 1920s began to use his own version of Lallans (or Doric, as he called it), using his own version for the simple fact that there are so many variations across Scotland. MacDiarmid set himself the task of carrying through the Scottish Renaissance, a rebirth of the culture that he believed had been destroyed by Anglicisation, Walter Scott and the subsequent kailyard movement. His task also involved rescuing Burns from tartanry and a sentimental portrayal of Scottish life. MacDiarmid also drew on Modernist influences, James Joyce being one of his heroes. All of this comes together in ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle', surely his finest poem.

‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' also reflects his own passionate involvement in the 1926 General Strike and a section of the long poem is entitled ‘The Ballad of the General Strike'. He had joined the strike movement in Montrose, where he lived in the 1920s, and recalled:

we had the whole area of Angus, Forfarshire; we had it sewn up. I was speaking when news came through of J.H. Thomas's [general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen] betrayal of the strike. I was speaking to an audience of mainly railwaymen and they all broke down weeping. It was one of the most moving
experiences I have ever had – middle aged men most of them, weeping like children, you know. It was such a disappointment, because we knew, we knew we had it.
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Although typically in the poem the thistle has been considered the symbol of Scotland, writer John Baglow points out: ‘… the promise of the thistle eventually being transformed into a lovely flower represents on one level the aspirations and struggle of the working class to realise their potential.'
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The rose now bursts forth from the thistle:

But the rose shrivels as hope gives way to bitter defeat: