Neal Ascherson: The history that led to 2014 independence referendum

When I look back 10 years, to that campaigning summer of 2014, I am reminded of a poem. In “Before I Die”, almost his last work, Erich Fried imagined explaining his life to a puzzled youngster: “To speak just once more about joy, / So that they ask: / “What was that? When is it coming again?’”

In those months, Scotland astonished itself. Men and women, girls and boys never touched by “politics” seemed to come awake and crowd out of the shadows with visions of what an independent Scotland should be and should do, for them and for the world. Of course the referendum was lost, if by a margin close enough to terrify the monarchical structure of “Ukania” from top to bottom, from Balmoral to Whitehall. But the experience of shared hope and detailed optimism behind the enormous turn-out in September changed Scotland for good, for the better. Yes, we can! Do we want to, at this particular moment 10 years on? Perhaps not. But we can.

The movement – or better, the mood – for political self-government surfaced in the second half of the 20th century. For me, it appeared briefly when I was a boy, on the slab of the fishmonger in Kilmacolm. This was John MacCormick’s 1949 “National Covenant”, which very politely asked for a Scottish parliament. I watched the women in headscarves scanning, then signing it as they reached the head of the queue and stowed a piece of haddock wrapped in “The Bulletin” into their bag. Two million signatures? Over half the voting population? In London, the Labour government held its breath and pretended the covenant was just a provincial gaffe. “You should know that in this country we change things by parliamentary elections, not silly petitions. So just wheesht and go away.” And to this day the immense significance of the covenant is underplayed.

 John MacCormick (far right) with others at the first National Party of Scotland (NPS) meeting in 1928As everyone today knows, the disintegration of the British Empire and the decay of Scotland’s huge industrial and mining economy led to growing disillusion with the Union in the post-war decades. But there were other, more subtle factors. Among them was the fading of the cult of “the Scottish Soldier”. It has been written that in the years of its ascendancy in Scotland, the Unionist (Conservative) Party was actually the main carrier of Scottish patriotism rather than the SNP – politically insignificant until the late 1960s.

The cult invoked memories of imperial loyalty and courage shown by Scottish regiments, from the taking of Quebec through the relief of Lucknow, the Boer War, the Somme, St Valéry in 1940 and – its final spark – the storming of the Aden Crater by “Mad Mitch” and the Argylls in 1967. But the Empire fell to pieces, and that loyalty was seen to be betrayed as those famous regiments were disbanded. Pride in Scotland’s military contribution to Britain melted into another grievance against London rule.

In 1967, Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election, and the emergence of the SNP as a serious political actor – already obvious in local election results – became clear even to Westminster. Young people began to join, but at this stage the SNP were far to the right of their later “social-democratic” position. There was a distrust of “centralising socialism”, a heavy reliance on tartanry and Bannockburn, and a strain of anti-Catholic sectarianism represented by the otherwise saintly leader Billy Wolfe. This was off-putting to Scotland’s young left, who identified the SNP as a “bourgeois nationalist” party – part of the class enemy. In fact Scottish Labour saw talk about Scottish independence in crude “vulgar Marxist” terms: To them, nationalism was a bourgeois deflection leading inevitably to racism, fascism and war. It took the analyses of Tom Nairn’s Break-Up of Britain (1977) to dent this dogma by showing that nationalism could also take progressive and emancipating forms.

Winnie Ewing was an SNP MP, MEP, and MSP during her long career in politics (Image: PA) The discovery of North Sea oil in the early 1970s injected economic arguments into the mix. A delegation from the Scottish Council for Development and Industry had visited Norway (just before the oil boom got going) to examine why the prosperity of that small country contrasted with the confusion and poverty of contemporary Scotland. They returned persuaded that the difference lay in the simple fact of Norway’s sovereign independence and command of its own resources (two businessmen members of the delegation became SNP MPs in 1974). The Government managed to suppress the McCrone report – which alarmingly concluded that with oil revenues an independent Scotland could be, per capita, almost the richest nation on earth. But the SNP’s use of the “It’s Scotland’s Oil” slogan laid a solidity under the independence case.

It was at this point that the Labour Party, worried by the growing electoral threat of the SNP, began to toy with ideas of political devolution: The “Home Rule All Round” which the party had once adopted but had forgotten over recent generations. The Kilbrandon Commission reported quite favourably. Then began an interminable parliamentary struggle against and within the weak and divided Callaghan government, as a white paper on devolution and the powers of a “Scottish Assembly” were debated. But at this point it’s worth looking back on the whole period – the 1970s – and asking if those years really deserve their bad reputation as a decade of Scottish passivity and indifference. On the contrary, this was a time when the old complaint “there’s naething for young folks here!”, the traditional pessimism which had led to such a haemorrhage of emigration, seem to waver. Talk of devolution alerted the ambitious young. Now perhaps they could look forward to a fine career in their own country. Here and there, exiles began to trickle back from London or New York, often rousing puzzled suspicion in their Scotland-based colleagues.

Politically, the “devolution decade” would end in fiasco, followed by the social and economic catastrophes of Thatcherism. But this was also a time when a small band of young men and women showed Scotland how to mock its establishment and laugh at its own sugary old totems. Murray Grigor was among those who now worked, through exhibitions and films, to undermine Scotland’s complacent tartan-and-shortbread self-image. These 1970s saw momentous efforts by young and creative Scots to break away from cultural dependence on London and import thrilling art experiment from abroad. John Bellany and Sandy Moffat went to Germany and brought back German Expressionism, igniting a furious figurative eruption at the Glasgow School of Art in the form of the “New Glasgow Boys”. Lynda Myles, aged 23, transformed the Film Festival and imported the tempestuous new film universe from Hungary, Poland and France, until “Edymburg” became a term for film culture in cafés from Budapest to Berkeley, California. Ricky Demarco went to Poland and came back to electrify the main Edinburgh Festival with the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor and other avant-garde Polish companies. In 1973, John McGrath used Bertolt Brecht’s dramatic techniques for his great satire play “The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil” – which delighted audiences in the Highlands and the Lowlands.

John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (Image: Archive) In short, the 1970s were a decade of germination. But the Westminster landscape looked more like dead bracken and nettles. Labour MPs were badly split over devolution: One side, led by John Smith and Donald Dewar, in favour; the other wing – including the Scottish Labour leadership in Glasgow – very reluctant, seeing a Scottish Assembly as a “slippery slope” towards independence and, even worse, as a surrender to their hated SNP challengers. In 1974, Callaghan’s headquarters forced Scottish Labour to hold a special conference (“Dalintober Street”) at which a heavyweight delegation sent up from the south battered the Scottish delegates into fully accepting devolution. But the promised white paper on devolution was faltering at Westminster, and in 1975 the impatient young MP Jim Sillars led a sudden breakaway to launch a “Scottish Labour Party”. This SLP, free of any London control, stood for an assembly with full economic powers (“not just a talking-shop”): In other words, for a socialist Scotland which would be almost an independent country.

The SLP didn’t survive long (I write as a scarred founder-member). But in its first months, it was if a chandelier of excitement had lit up the whole dusky world of Scotland ‘s left. For a few weeks, packed-out meetings gathered not only of Labour and trade union supporters but drawing unexpected leading figures from the Labour movement. “Big Beasts” made discreet contact, wanting to know more. Then, slowly, the tide turned. The Labour Party regained control of its branches, its party workers proved unwilling to change sides, and – much later – the SLP’s first party conference broke up in chaos as the party failed to overcome a clumsy Trotskyite “entry”.

So what was that “illumination” from the new-born SLP? It was the momentary revelation of an absolutely basic truth underlying the whole nationalist movement from that time onwards to today. It’s this: The wish for social justice and the wish to be a self-governing nation overlap. A conclusion follows: Only independence can achieve social justice. This is a small country with its own apparently intractable problems of ill-health, bad housing, gross inequality in wealth and land property, utterly inadequate control of its physical resources and no free global access to loans and credits. Tackling these monsters requires the heavy-lifting equipment of sovereignty – equipment which Scotland’s status within the United Kingdom can never provide.

(Image: Daniel Leal-Olivas) It’s this overlap which explains why it’s so eerily easy for voters to switch back and forth between Labour and SNP. Labour in Scotland, a noisily Unionist party, is now – once again – accumulating tens of thousands of voters who will continue to believe in independence. But that will blow no fuses. The matter of the Union apart, the domestic manifestos of Labour and SNP are not significantly different. On the surface, the two parties frantically denounce each other. But is this a real confrontation between two fundamentally opposed social forces? Or is it just rivalry – two dogs racing on parallel tracks? Put it like this. If Labour in Scotland had been a perfectly separate party from Labour in England and Wales, independent Scotland would probably have become a full member of the United Nations 20 years ago.

A mutilated devolution bill limped out of Westminster, and in 1979 went to a famously rigged referendum. The requirement for a Yes from 40% of the electorate meant – on an outdated register – that the dead and the abstainers all counted as No voters. The blade-thin Yes majority failed to qualify and the bill died. It’s interesting, looking back, to mark the different reactions to defeat in 1979 and in 2014. That first time, Yes supporters were deeply shattered. Even among those I knew, there was alcoholism, a turn to drugs, depressive breakdowns, flight to kinder countries. A future which had seemed to be opening had closed. To Fried’s “When is it coming again?”, the answer seemed to be “never”. And yet in 2014, when the far greater issue of national independence had been rejected, the reaction of Yessers was not just tears and grief but active defiance. Confidence that the opportunity would come again drove a phenomenal stampede to join the SNP.

That difference shows how powerfully the intervening experience of the 1980s had radicalised opinion. Margaret Thatcher, personally obnoxious in manner to many Scots, subjected Scotland to accelerated industrial collapse, widespread privatisation, the social tragedy of the miners’ strike and the trial application of the poll tax to Scotland alone (a pretty clear breach of the Union treaty). She had dismissed all notions of devolution, stamping on the handful of Scottish Tories who still supported it. The inflowing wealth from North Sea oil was not invested in Scotland but used to pay off UK debts, or to finance support for the mass unemployment created by Thatcher policies throughout Britain.

Former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher is a divisive figure in Scotland (Image: PA) Scotland responded sharply. The poll tax was frustrated by grassroots activism, as flying squads blocked the closes of non-payers against sheriff’s officers and police. Resentment at this bullying by a government which Scots had not elected grew intense. Anti-English feeling, fortunately, could concentrate on Thatcher herself rather than finding wider expression.

Politically, the 1979 referendum outcome had cowed party voices to a whisper. The SNP went into a long decline. But at the same time, the cultural seeds planted in the previous decade blossomed into a carnival of brilliant novels and plays, poetry and history-writing, often handling Scotland’s condition with an unpolitical fury at the nation’s helplessness. Under John Smith, Labour once more began to plan for a Scottish parliament. Scottish protest revived; Thatcher fell; and the unexpected failure of the 1992 election to bring down the Tory government released a frenzy of new political activity, showing how widely the wish for a Scottish parliament had already spread beneath the radar. The Kirk helped to set up Common Cause, a group whose energy powered the new campaigns for a parliament and added intellectual rigour power to the Constitutional Convention. This “unofficial” cross-party campaign for democratic self-government, originally thought up by the fighting journalist Alan Lawson and the retired civil servant Jim Ross, first met in Edinburgh in 1988.

It’s hard now to remember just how radical, almost desperate, Scottish democrats had become in the late 1980s, the last years of Mrs Thatcher’s unyielding rule. People talked about “the Doomsday Scenario”, meaning a Tory-free Scotland still subject to an English Conservative government in London. Some suggested that Labour should simply establish a devolved administration in Scotland and dare Westminster to overthrow it – UDI in effect. “The Tories have no mandate to govern Scotland” became a widespread slogan. The convention agreed on plans for proportional representation and issued a “Claim of Right”, asserting Scottish sovereignty, which even Labour MPs signed up to. Only the Tories stood aside, joined at the last moment by the SNP who objected that the coming referendum offered no independence option.

Tony Blair's New Labour won a landslide election in 1997John Smith died suddenly in 1994. But Tony Blair’s New Labour swept to power in 1997, and the referendum which followed within months gave devolution a heavy majority. The Scottish Parliament reconvened after 292 years, in July 1999. Looking back over the next quarter-century, did devolution increase the appetite for full independence? Some hoped it would quench it. They were clearly wrong. Scottish self-confidence grew steadily, although pride in the Parliament was always laced with acid criticism of supposed extravagance and privilege. Up to 2007, co-operation between LibDem-Labour administrations at Holyrood and Labour governments at Westminster had been smooth. Heat began to build in 2007, when the huge electoral surge of the SNP, rising to an absolute Holyrood majority in 2011, brought them to power. Now they faced hostile Labour and then Tory-LibDem coalition governments in London.

By 2007, as the slow run-up to the 2014 independence referendum began, support for full independence – not always for the SNP – was mainly located in working-class Scotland, supported by a small but vigorous “creative intelligentsia” who were themselves overwhelmingly from working-class families. Little remained of the old notion that nationalism was a middle-class pastime. Another barrier had fallen with Pope John Paul II’s visit to Scotland in 1982, when he told a vast Catholic gathering in Bellahouston Park that Scotland was their nation and they had a right to shape its destiny. But devolution also posed long-term questions for a nationalist movement. Paradoxically, success might be a problem. If the SNP were seen to govern well and to be using Holyrood’s powers to change Scotland for the better, why take the riskier next step to full independence?

That problem did not arise, for two reasons. First, the social devastation to Scotland caused by Tory policies after 2010, above all by Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity scything of welfare expenditure. Secondly, because the SNP’s record in managing health, education and transport – ferries especially – was increasingly judged to be a failure. (The SNP governments faced – with the single exception of The Sunday Herald – a merciless and often unfair hostility from a solidly Unionist media. Ironically, the London papers regularly belaboured their own government by praising Scottish innovations and experiments, above all in the social services).

Mandated by the SNP’s huge majority after the 2011 Holyrood elections, First Minister Alex Salmond demanded a referendum on independence. David Cameron, as UK prime minister, conceded. The 2012 Edinburgh Agreement set out the referendum terms and its single question: “Should Scotland Be an Independent Country?”

This uncannily good-natured accord underlined one basic truth and obscured another.

It implied that if a strong, determined and long-sustained majority of Scots demanded independence, no British government would ultimately stand in its way. There was nothing new about that. Even Mrs Thatcher had confirmed it, and it remains true today.

David Cameron and Alex Salmond at the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement in 2012But the Edinburgh Agreement bypassed the fundamental flaw in British democracy: “parliamentary sovereignty” or absolutism. This archaic monarchical doctrine means that Westminster can change any law and abolish any institution – even the Scottish Parliament. After 2014, it was this “Leviathan” authority which vetoed Nicola Sturgeon’s efforts to secure another referendum. Her one blunt instrument – evidence of overwhelming and impatient Scottish demand which might overflow into civil disobedience – was simply not to hand. For the moment, London’s flat refusal stands. But, as the political sage Ciaran Martin has remarked, a Union which refuses to grant its members the right to leave is no longer a partnership of consent. It rests solely on law imposed and enforced by the strongest nation. The disaster of Brexit, two years later, would confirm that, as Scotland was wrenched out of Europe against its will by English votes. In retrospect, devolution fatally undermined the old Union by inserting a democratic element. A “voluntary” Union in which one partner among four holds 85% of the electors is blatantly unstable. Whose interests should prevail?

In short, the contradictions of Scotland’s position in the United Kingdom are set to grow. sharper in the years ahead. At present, it’s not clear what – and who – will be the vehicle to carry the independence case forward. Nor is there a visible path through the minefields of Supreme Court and parliamentary sovereignty to reach another referendum. But that summer of 2014 revealed a lively, serious people hungry to be empowered – above all, at community level – and to see Scotland joining the world as it learns to take care of itself. It’s coming yet.

This essay from Neal Ascherson is from the book 10 Years of a Changed Scotland, published by The National to mark 10 years since the 2014 referendum. Copies are available to pre-order here for just £7 excluding postage.