Scottish home rule looked defeated in 1979. We can learn from that

My late father, Arnold Kemp, wrote that he had given 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 1967, Winnie Ewing was elected as an SNP MP in a by-election in Hamilton, famously saying: “Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on!”

In 1968, the Scottish Conservatives signed the Declaration of Perth, committing them to Home Rule for Scotland. In 1970, they set up a Royal Commission on the Constitution, which concluded in late 1973.

Jimmy Reid said the SNP could push for Scottish home rule (Image: Maritime Museum)

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, recalled how they formed a group to push for devolution in the 60s: “The [Labour] Party had abandoned its Home Rule policy in 1948, leaving a vacuum that could only potentially be filled by the SNP.

Labour were 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 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 …”

When Labour came into power in 1974, they set up a White Paper. My uncle David Kemp, who worked at Westminster as Granada’s political editor, got leaked documents from this which he passed to his brother Arnold, then deputy editor of The Scotsman which ran a series of front pages. A sense of excitement was building in Edinburgh that political and economic power could return.

READ MORE: Tommy Sheppard: We must take this step to independence before a citizens' convention

But there was implacable opposition to the plan from Unionists, who feared it would be a stepping stone to independence. They forced a referendum on the issue. As the bill went through the Commons, George Cunningham, a Scot who represented Islington, inserted an amendment ruling that 40% of the total electorate had to vote yes for it to pass. 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. “People were very angry about it.”

The Yes side in the referendum campaign was faltering and divided. The No campaign was “pungent” and well-funded, Arnold wrote. He described allegations in the book Britain’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, former Conservative PM Alec Douglas-Home appeared on TV urging Scots to vote No, and promising that a future Conservative administration would bring forward better plans.

In the event, the vote was a narrow yes – 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!”

Scottish journalist and author Neal Ascherson

In Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson remembered: “The years after 1979 were bleak … The failure of self-government ruined many lives, and they were not the lives of politicians. We were not immune at The Scotsman. A sort of high-spirited desperation settled over us.”

The newspaper’s promotions department organised a disastrous parachute jump at Strathallan in Perthshire. Ascherson had a slipped disc and pulled out. “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 [the editor] 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 took a job with the Observer in London. It was almost 20 years before I came back.”

A longer version of this piece was first published on Jackie Kemp’s Substack “A Letter from Scotland”