The story of more than a century of debate around Home Rule in Scotland

I first saw “A Warning from Ireland” on Facebook in the run up to the 2014 referendum, but it was posted again the other day. It states: “Between 1889 and 1914, Irish Home Rule was debated 15 times at Westminster and there were four Home Rule Bills. Nothing changed.”

How many Scots know that between 1886 and 1900, Scottish Home Rule was debated seven times at Westminster? How many Scots know that in 1894 and 1895, the Commons voted in favour of a resolution for Home Rule but they ran out of parliamentary time? How many know that in 1913, the federalising Government of Scotland Bill was moved in the House of Commons and the proposal was backed by 204 votes to 159? Only the outbreak of the First World War stopped its implementation or we could have had a devolved Scottish legislature a century ago.

There has grown up almost a mythology about how Scotland was always going along with the incorporated Union inflicted upon us in 1707. Yes, there was a long period, say from after the 1745 Jacobite Rising until the 1850s, when Scotland took the building of British Empire to heart and did rather well out of it, but as I showed in recent columns, the Union was not a great success at first.

For the first half of the 19th century, Westminster was quite happy to be decentralised in a lot of its functions, and councils and boards did much of the actual business of governance, so Scots just got on with the business of business.

With Sir Walter Scott to the fore, however, as the early 19th century progressed, many people began to worry about the loss of Scottish nationhood – nor was that class-based, as workers and middle-classes alike worried about this creeping cultural and political intimidation.

The National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights was formed in 1853, but was short-lived and made little political impact. But its main complaints – that Scotland was under-represented in parliament and that Scotland was not getting sufficient returns for the vast sums it contributed to the Treasury – sparked a lively debate, but it fizzled out of existence in 1856.

The Liberals were in control in Scotland for decades, but by the 1880s, the party was in trouble over its policy of Home Rule for Ireland, and on the back of that issue a Scottish Home Rule Association began in 1886, the same year that Keir Hardie and others began their Labour movement and the year after the Scottish office was founded as a sop to the Home Rulers.

It’s extraordinary to look back at the great debate on Scottish Home Rule in the House of Commons that took place in 1889 – the first time it had been fully debated in parliament, and a quite astounding event, frankly, that has almost been forgotten.

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham MP said on that historic day, April 9, 1889: “Taking into consideration the great pressure that will soon be brought to bear from social causes upon this House from the electorate of Scotland, we have not come here with an absolutely futile or fatuous proposition when we have, for the first time, endeavoured to press the cause of Scottish Home Rule upon the House of Commons.”

Dr Gavin Clark, MP for Caithness, moved the resolution in the Commons “that, in the opinion of this House, it is desirable that arrangements be made for giving to the people of Scotland, by their representatives in a National Parliament, the management and control of Scottish affairs.”

HE stated: “I have no desire to repeal the Union between England and Scotland, and I think that Union has been mutually beneficial—a good thing for Scotland, but a better thing for England.

“I frankly admit that, although my motion is based mainly on practical considerations, there is a sentimental basis for the growing Home Rule movement in Scotland. We Scotchmen are all proud of our country and of our country’s history.

“An attempt is made here to ignore Scotch nationality. We hear of the English government, and the Minister is not called to order for the expression. Why, only the other day the secretary for war spoke of the English troops he was sending to Egypt, the Scottish Borderers.”

So far, so familiar even in our own day.

Clark continued: “We have confusion, anarchy, and chaos in mingled jurisdiction in Scotland, owing to the disgraceful state of our Public Health Law, but the House has never had time to deal with this subject, and so anarchy continues. There are thousands of preventable deaths every year in Scotland in consequence of our disgraceful Public Health Act.

“Everybody, even old Tories on the other side, must admit that some change is necessary. Then what is the remedy to be? It must, I think, take the form of devolution.”

The word had been spoken … and it was only 1889.

William Hunter, Liberal MP for Aberdeen North, seconded the motion, correcting the record: “On August 20, 1886, I think the question of Home Rule for Scotland was raised for the first time, and somewhat casually, in the debate on the Address; but it is remarkable that since then there has been nothing of a sustained agitation in its support by public meetings or in the press.

“Sir, having made up my mind that Home Rule for Scotland would be beneficial to the country, I decided next to explain my views to my constituency in Aberdeen. I had not the remotest idea how they would receive it, but I discovered very quickly that the constituency was ahead of myself, and that the mass of the people had been tending in the direction of Home Rule to an extent which I should not have thought possible. Indeed, I believe that we shall not have 10 members returned for Scotland at the next General Election unless they are pledged to Home Rule for Scotland.”

Sir Hugh Shaw-Stewart, the Old Etonian Conservative MP for East Renfrewshire, rose to oppose the motion: “They know that a Parliament established in Edinburgh or anywhere else in Scotland would absorb the functions of local life, and instead of stimulating would kill it. It would be centralization in its very worst form.”

He added: “I think that the spirit which animates my honourable friends is embodied in the advice given by an old Scotch Radical to a young man about to enter Parliament — ‘Be aye asking, and when ye get onything, be aye complaining that ye canna’ get mair’.”

UP rose the Grand Old Man himself, William Ewart Gladstone (above), the former and future prime minister and Liberal leader: “I do not think that we have yet reached the situation when the circumstances are ripe for an ultimate and final consideration of this question on its merits.

“The principles applicable to the solution of this question are, however, by no means obscure or difficult to understand. I hold that Scotland and Ireland are precisely equal in the face of England with respect to their moral and political right to urge on the Imperial Parliament such claims as they may consider arise out of the interests and demands of those respective countries. They are precisely equal in this right, so that if I am to suppose a case in which Scotland unanimously, or by a clearly preponderating voice, were to make the demand on the United Parliament to be treated, not only on the same principle, but in the same manner as Ireland, I could not deny the title of Scotland to urge such a claim. Moreover, I am bound to say that I have a perfectly sound conviction that if such a claim were made in the manner I have described as the clear and deliberate declaration of Scottish opinion, parliament would accede to it.”

What a principled debate, but the vote wasn’t close – the Ayes 79, Noes 200, and that seemed to be that. But as the Labour movement grew apace and the Liberal Young Scots arose, the matter of Home Rule for Scotland would not go away, and it preoccupied many minds in the early years of the 20th century.

By 1913, parliament was ready for another Scottish Home Rule debate and William Cowan, Liberal MP for Aberdeenshire Eastern, set it up with his Government of Scotland Bill.

He said: “You cannot nowadays take up a Scottish newspaper with very much chance of finding no reference to this burning question.

“I do not care who goes to Scotland today, if he speaks to anybody, if he goes anywhere, if he consults the people, he will find that this is the most absorbing political topic in Scotland.”

The SNP contingent in Westminster will recognise his next statement: “English members will be conspicuous by their absence, or will be represented by gentlemen who, having shootings, fishings, or deer forests in Scotland, imagine themselves experts on Scottish affairs and insist on wasting our time and their own by intervening in Scottish debates.”

He concluded: “Is it any wonder Scotland is tired and demands a parliament of her own? That she demands her own legislation for land, for the liquor trade, for education, for housing, for fisheries, for ecclesiastical affairs, for 101 matters of purely local concern?”

You can read both the debates in Hansard. You will find many of the points depressingly familiar.

In the highly unlikely event that Boris Johnson reads this column, I’d like to close with some words from his great hero, Sir Winston Spencer Churchill. Speaking in his then constituency, Dundee, on October 9, 1913, Churchill said: “You will remember how, last year, I addressed a meeting in Dundee on this subject (home rule). I made it perfectly clear that I was speaking for myself. I made it clear that I was not speaking of the immediate future, but ...raising a question for reflection and discussion rather than for prompt action. I spoke of the establishment of a federal system in the United Kingdom, in which Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and, if necessary, parts of England, could have separate legislative and parliamentary institutions, enabling them to develop, in their own way, their own life according to their own ideas and needs in the same way as the great and prosperous States of the American Union and the great kingdoms and principalities and States of the German Empire.”

“I will run the risk of prophecy and tell you that the day will most certainly come – many of you will live to see it – when a federal system will be established in these islands which will give Wales and Scotland the control within proper limits of their own Welsh and Scottish affairs.”

Of course, the real reason why there will never be a federal United Kingdom of Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland is that Scotland will go its own way first and regain full independence.

Let’s face it, the majority of English people want their independence from us and Wales and Northern Ireland. The lesson from history is that federalism will never be enough and we must all go our own separate ways.