A People's History of Scotland (35 page)

By August 1998 several hundred people had gathered outside the Faslane base to blockade it, with more than 100 being arrested. A year later, three women swam aboard a research vessel and dumped computers and files overboard, then tidied up and laid out anti-Trident pamphlets. They then called a press conference and, as a result, military police arrived. Looking at the tidy desks, they asked the women why they'd gone to such trouble to put out some
pamphlets. It was only when staff arrived the next morning that they realised what had been done. The three women were arrested but subsequently acquitted.
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Such action continues today and will until Trident and its successor are removed.

Nae Poll Tax Here

The Thatcher years were a pivotal moment in the history of Scotland. When she was first elected in 1979 there seemed no possibility of a Scottish parliament being achieved, support for the Scottish National Party had collapsed and the union seemed totally secure. Under Tory rule all changed utterly.

At the 1987 general election, the Tory share of the Scottish vote had fallen to 24 percent and they had lost eleven MPs, holding just ten Westminster constituency seats. Norman Stone, the Glaswegian Thatcherite academic, attributed the Scottish Tories' electoral annihilation to ‘the decline of Imperial consciousness', observing with sadness and nostalgia for the days of the Empire that the Tories in Scotland were a ‘foreign', ‘patrician' group of outsiders.
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Something else had changed too. So far in this book, since the days of Thomas Muir in the late eighteenth century, Scottish workers mostly fought back alongside their Welsh and English sisters and brothers. In the 1970s, Scottish workers fought as part of a British movement. This had been true at the time of the Chartists, in the Great Unrest, during the Red Clyde years and in the 1930s. But now there was a divergence between the political situation in Scotland and that south of the border. The Tories never won a majority in Scotland under Thatcher, and by the time she quit they were facing annihilation.

Rejection of Thatcher and the Tories hardened into a belief that Scotland did not just reject the worst of her free-market values but that a consensus existed across the nation which put welfare first. In 1989, an opinion poll found that 77 percent agreed that Thatcher had treated the Scots as ‘second class citizens'; a poll in 1987 had found that 75 percent regarded her as ‘extreme'.
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Increasingly, people
believed that there was a democratic deficit, in that Scottish voters consistently rejected Thatcherism but still ended up with a Tory government.

In May 1988, Thatcher travelled to Scotland to address the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound' appeared to be an attempt to convince the Kirk that there was a theological justification for her political and economic policies, with her informing them: ‘It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong but the love of money for its own sake.' She travelled on to Glasgow to attend the Scottish Cup final between Celtic and Dundee United, a diary date that could be explained only by her advisers' ignorance of Scotland. Thousands of supporters of both sides waved yellow cards at her.

This sense of alienation from the government in London and the Westminster system received a huge boost from the decision to implement the Community Charge – which became known as the poll tax – and to do so a year earlier than in England. The Tories fought the 1987 Westminster general election on the promise they'd implement the tax, claiming it was fair that ‘the bishop and the brickie' would pay the same. A Scottish civil servant explained: ‘The basis of the poll tax was the old ladies in Morningside living in six-bedroomed family houses who had no children at home and only had their bins emptied once a week.'
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The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland condemned it as morally indefensible.

Thatcher ignored the fact that the Tories had returned only ten MPs out of seventy-two north of the border and pressed on, making the poll tax law in 1988 and announcing it would commence in Scotland in 1989. It was obvious she could enforce it on Scotland only with the votes of English Tory MPs.

Labour fought the 1987 Westminster general election on the promise that they would make the poll tax unworkable.
Scottish Labour Briefing
said, ‘the policy was simple – Vote Labour to Stop the Poll Tax.'
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One of the fifty Labour MPs elected in 1987, Brian Wilson, was clear in calling for extra-parliamentary action: ‘No mandate exists for implementation of the poll tax in Scotland – the
battle cannot be won in the House of Commons … I believe there should be a mass Scottish campaign outside Parliament to defeat the poll tax.'
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Labour and the trade unions took to the streets in a show of strength, but having argued the poll tax was unworkable, the party refused to break the law, so Labour councils proceeded to put in place measures for registering taxpayers and collecting payments. A Scottish Labour Party special conference, held in March 1988 in Glasgow, refused to back non-payment. This marked the end of official Labour opposition. The tag ‘Feeble Fifty' was coined to describe the Scottish Labour MPs and it stuck.
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The SNP also promised they would obstruct the poll tax, and in November 1988 swept to a spectacular by-election victory in Glasgow Govan when Jim Sillars took the seat from Labour on an anti-poll-tax platform. The campaign made hay over Labour's failure to obstruct the poll tax, but in reality, the SNP-run council in Forfar went along with introducing the new tax.

At a grass-roots level, local Anti–Poll Tax Unions (APTUs) were being formed. One of the first was in Maryhill in north Glasgow. Activists went door to door, and by January 1988 had 2000 members. ‘No Poll Tax Here' posters began to appear in windows across Scotland. The APTUs came together to form the Anti–Poll Tax Federation, chaired by Tommy Sheridan, who explained: ‘We built the union through street meetings … bus stops, traffic islands, patches of spare ground all provided impromptu venues.'
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In March 1989, the Federation brought 15,000 people onto the streets of Glasgow in favour of non-payment. By 1 April,
Scotland on Sunday
calculated 850,000 people were not paying.
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Speaking for the anti-poll-tax campaigners, Sheridan declared that ‘non-payment in Scotland had become a deluge.'
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When sheriff officers turned up to ‘poind' (confiscate in order to sell) the belongings of a Rutherglen woman who had refused to register for the tax and then not paid the resulting fine, the APTUs mobilised 300 people to block them. It was the first of many such confrontations, with the local groups mobilising via ‘telephone trees', each member undertaking to phone four or five other supporters.
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In addition, the
Glasgow Herald
reported on 14 November 1989 that anti-poll-tax campaigners had occupied the premises of the sheriff officers H. M. Love and Co. in Edinburgh's New Town to protest against warrant sales. ‘As they spoke at the door to a member of staff more than thirty people, including some young children, and a dog with a cardboard placard round its neck appeared from behind some railings, rushed over the street and forced open the door.'

Police eventually broke up the occupation. The same day saw occupations of the premises of sheriff officers in Dundee and Galashiels, by Federation supporters. They wanted to deliver warning cards similar to those left by the officers. In Galashiels the occupation lasted two and a half hours before the sheriff officers agreed to take the card, and in Dundee one and a half hours.

In Glasgow, a group of about forty members of the Scottish Anti–Poll Tax Federation left their warning ‘calling card' at the premises of the sheriff officers firm of Abernethy, McIntyre Co., in St Vincent Place. Tommy Sheridan said, ‘We have done it to them before they did it to us.'
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Non-payment spread south of the border as the poll tax was introduced there, but the crucial event in its defeat was the biggest riot Central London had seen in a decade. On 31 March 1990, more than 200,000 people marched through the English capital, and when police attacked a sit-in outside Downing Street the protest erupted. Another 50,000 people demonstrated in Glasgow on the same day.

By November, Thatcher was gone, after backbenchers forced a leadership vote that she failed to win resoundingly enough. The poll tax went with her. Despite the Trafalgar Square riot and the spread of non-payment to England and Wales, the whole episode left a deep feeling that Scotland had been treated unfairly by a government that had no mandate to rule the people of Scotland. That sense would only grow as Tory rule at Westminster staggered on until 1997.

The journalist Ian MacWhirter points out: ‘The poll-tax row finally persuaded Labour's ultra-cautious shadow Scottish secretary, Donald Dewar, to join the cross-party Scottish Constitutional
Convention in 1988 and sign its “Claim of Right” document, which called for a repatriation of Scottish sovereignty.'
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As a result of the poll-tax battle, Tommy Sheridan was elected to Glasgow City Council for Pollok in May 1992, despite being in Barlinnie Prison for defying a court order by attending a protest against the warrant sale of a non-payer's possessions. Scottish Militant Labour would form the Scottish Socialist Alliance with others on the left and then the Scottish Socialist Party. The basis for a major breakthrough by the radical left in the next decade had been laid.

The 1992 General Election and Scotland United

In 1992 the Tories under John Major won a Westminster general election they had been widely tipped to lose. Hopes were high that the nine Scottish Tory MPs would be wiped out. They actually won two extra seats. They had little time to celebrate, though.

Thousands flocked to Glasgow's George Square after a call went out from a new group, Scotland United, to hear speeches denouncing Tory rule as having no mandate and demanding a Scottish parliament. The initiative was begun by the leadership of the Scottish TUC, which quickly involved Labour MPs such as George Galloway and John McAllion plus the musicians Pat Kane of Hue and Cry and Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue. Importantly, the SNP decided to end a policy of not participating in broader groupings focusing on Scotland's constitutional position because they wanted nothing less than independence.
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On 14 April, the general secretary of the STUC, Campbell Christie, told the George Square rally they were there to ‘tell the nation, to tell the Conservative government and to tell everyone throughout the world, that we in Scotland are not prepared to accept the election results. We representing the 75 percent in Scotland, we representing the 2.2 million electorate in Scotland who voted for constitutional change, are not prepared to allow the 23 percent, the 750,000 Tories to rule us.'
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The director of 7:84 Scotland theatre company, David Hayman, followed and posed a series of questions to the crowd and demanded an answer, it went thus:

Hayman caught the mood. The rhetoric was light-years away from that of a decade and a half earlier at the time of UCS or when the miners had fought and won. Something fundamental had changed. Then the stress was on working-class unity across Britain. Now the stress was on the difference between values on either side of the border. The novelist William McIlvanney was cheered when, in response to attacks on it as being anti-English, he told a rally: ‘Scottishness isn't some pedigree lineage, it's a mongrel tradition.'
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Despite the turnout, the Labour shadow Scottish secretary, Donald Dewar, attacked the Labour MPs taking part as being ‘collaborators' with the SNP.

Opinion polls showed majorities of between 75 and 80 percent in favour of a Scottish parliament. With the SNP now prepared to work towards this, it was an unstoppable momentum. Later in the year, in December, the Nationalists organised a 25,000 strong rally in Edinburgh when the city hosted a European Union leaders' summit. Scotland United did not sustain itself or the protests but it did lay down a determination that Scotland should have Home Rule.

The Edinburgh writer, publisher and poet Kevin Williamson wrote of the hangover that followed the 1992 general election victory for the Tories: ‘May Day 1992 was one of the bleakest in recent memory. Scotland had sunk into a collective despondency when the Tory Party … [was] re-elected to another five years in office. After thirteen years of divisive Tory rule – characterised by greed, privatisation, unemployment, strikes, riots, war and the Poll Tax – it didn't seem possible.'
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At the same time, Labour was rebranded as New Labour under the leadership of Tony Blair – educated at Fettes, Edinburgh's top private school – who took over upon the death of the Scot John Smith in 1994. He was committed to ‘modernising' the party by accepting much of the Thatcher ‘revolution' and dumping any hint of socialism. But despite his own misgivings he could not dump a commitment to creating a Scottish parliament.