Scottish politics is currently dominated by arguments about self-determination and the possibility of a second referendum on independence.
From a historical perspective, though, it is striking that until very late in the twentieth century such constitutional arguments lacked political salience. Before the 1970s there was no significant electoral constituency for Scottish nationalism; British constitutional norms regarded the referendum as alien to Britain’s historic parliamentary tradition; and there was no widespread agreement, even within Scotland, that the Scottish electorate possessed a right to democratic self-determination separable from its contribution to a collective, UK-wide parliamentary mandate.
Malcolm Petrie has written an outstanding book that offers a persuasive account of how each of these assumptions was overturned between 1945 and 1979. Politics and the People will be of most interest to historians of modern Scotland. But, as Petrie emphasises, the book also contributes to debates about British political history, since it explores how the authority of the two large parties, and representative democracy itself, decomposed after the 1960s, leading to the emergence of multi-party politics, new forms of direct democracy, and a potent form of populist political rhetoric. Anyone interested in modern British history will find reading this book to be a rewarding and thought-provoking experience.
Petrie’s departure from existing accounts of Scottish politics is partly methodological. Following in the footsteps of other historians of political culture, his focus is on the way in which rhetoric was used by political actors to frame their appeals to voters. In doing so, he foregrounds the (constrained) agency exercised by politicians, activists and ultimately the voters themselves as they interpreted and responded to the changing circumstances of post-war Scotland. Noting that the predominant emphasis among modern Scottish historians has been on the socioeconomic context of political change – with crucial recent work for example focusing on deindustrialisation – Petrie adds to this literature a welcome emphasis on ideology as an explanatory variable in the shifting political alignments of the late twentieth century.
Individual v state
As Petrie acknowledges, though, ideology has not been completely absent from writing on Scottish politics. For example, the seemingly surprising strength of the Unionist Party’s vote in Scotland up to the 1960s is often attributed to that party’s capacity to deploy Protestantism and imperialism to win over working class voters (the Conservatives competed in elections in Scotland under the title of the Unionist Party between 1912 and 1965, after which they switched to the ‘Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party’). One of the bracing features of Petrie’s book is that he argues that a libertarian, individualist rhetoric should instead be seen as critical to Unionist electoral appeals in Scotland in the middle of the twentieth century – one that was staunchly anti-socialist and opposed to the growth of centralised state power on the grounds that it threatened Scotland’s interests as a distinct nation. This individualism was economic in focus rather than constitutional, but it focused its complaints squarely on policies that emanated from London and on the public ownership and planning powers embedded in the UK state’s repertoire at the Labour Party’s behest during the 1940s. Petrie notes that the Liberal Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP) of the 1940s and 1950s largely echoed these themes. In purely electoral terms, the Unionists, running in alliance with the National Liberals (those Liberals who had remained with the National Government in the 1930s), were able to establish themselves as the leading party in Scotland, claiming just under 50 per cent of Scottish votes in 1951 and, remarkably, scoring over the 50 per cent mark in 1955.
But once the Conservatives had returned to government at Westminster in 1951, disillusion with that government’s slow progress at liberalising the economy created an opportunity for the Liberals and the SNP to peel off some of the Unionist vote. The broad anti-socialist vote mobilised by the mid-century Unionist party began to fracture in the late 1950s. This was compounded in the 1960s by the Unionists’ muddying the ideological clarity of their individualist, quasi-nationalist rhetoric. Unionists now offered a more ambiguous electoral appeal that partially conceded that Labour’s ideas about stronger state planning of the economy held some attractions and played down the party’s distinctive Scottish profile (for example by the abandonment of the label ‘Unionist’ in 1965). The stage was set for the emergence of the SNP as a serious electoral presence. One of Petrie’s distinctive arguments is that the SNP gained support after the 1960s as the legatee of the individualist, anti-statist tradition first deployed by Unionists against Labour in the 1940s. The leaders and activists at the helm of the SNP were able to channel this antipathy towards an over-reaching, bureaucratic UK state into a whole-hearted constitutional critique of the Anglo-Scottish Union itself.
This political realignment in Scotland paralleled the rise of the Liberal Party in England and, Petrie suggests, Enoch Powell’s populist, anti-immigration English nationalism of the late 1960s. All three reflected a popular mood that was increasingly disenchanted with representative democracy and saw government and parliament as disconnected from public opinion.
As Petrie is at pains to stress, his argument is not that the SNP’s form of nationalism was substantively similar to Powell’s, but that an inchoate mood of disillusionment with the representative parliamentary system provided the popular impetus behind both. The SNP’s populist rebellion against remote elites proffered solutions that were self-consciously intended to be modernising and democratising rather than rooted in an ethnic conception of national identity.
Eurosceptic Nats
But Petrie also raises an interesting question about this wider British context: why were the SNP able to overtake the Liberal Party in Scotland as the primary repository of third-party voting? Petrie makes an intriguing suggestion here: the SNP was able to leapfrog the Liberals and make significant electoral headway in the 1960s and 1970s because they were the only party in Scotland to offer clear opposition to Britain’s entry to the European Community. The SNP’s euroscepticism at this time is usually portrayed as an eccentric but brief dalliance on the road to the party’s enthusiastic embrace of European integration in the 1980s.
But Petrie shows that the SNP’s hostility to the EC was much more important than that. The heavy guns of the party’s anti-centralising rhetoric were turned on Brussels as well as London, which proved to be a successful tactic in winning over voters in rural areas that had previously supported the Conservatives. Petrie brings to the fore the neglected point that the SNP’s breakthrough in the 1974 general elections was not in the urban, Labour-voting central belt but in provincial Scotland. More generally, Petrie’s close attention to the complexities of electoral competition outside of Scotland’s urban core is an original and welcome feature of this book.
The seemingly permanent resolution of the European question in the 1975 referendum was therefore a problem for the SNP, as it took off the table one of the driving forces behind its rise. However, in another sense Petrie shows that the advent of the referendum in British politics in 1975, and then again with the devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales in 1979, legitimised a new understanding of democratic self-government that was highly consequential for Scottish nationalism.
Since the founding of the SNP in 1934, Scottish nationalists had stressed that as a nation Scotland had a right to democratic self-determination. They had also elaborated a historical narrative about Scottish constitutional development that depicted a Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty at odds with the concept of parliamentary sovereignty that had evolved in England. But as Petrie observes, these nationalist ideas did not acquire much practical purchase on Scottish politics until the 1970s. The SNP had to win seats in the House of Commons to make its voice heard. The party was also committed to the constitutional claim that it would possess a mandate to begin negotiations for Scottish independence if the SNP won a majority of the parliamentary seats in Scotland. But during the 1970s it became accepted that constitutional legitimacy did not always rest with parliament – there could be times when the people themselves, rather than their representatives, would be called on to decide an issue. This was particularly salient in Scotland because both the European and devolution referendums popularised the idea that Scotland was a distinctive democratic polity.
Petrie points out that in 1975 the Wilson government was initially opposed to breaking down the result of the European referendum by region or nation to avoid such a view gaining traction – their plan in the first instance was to hold a single national count in London. But in the face of opposition in parliament the government was eventually forced to accept a regional count. This enabled a separate Scottish (and English, Welsh and Northern Irish) result to be reported alongside the UK-wide aggregate vote.
1979 and a’ that
The notion of Scottish popular sovereignty gained its greatest boost, though, from the failed devolution referendum of 1979. Ironically, this referendum was promoted most heavily by the parliamentary opponents of devolution as they (correctly) saw it as a way of stopping plans for new assemblies in Scotland and Wales. But an extraordinary unintended consequence of this strategy was that the very MPs who styled themselves as defenders of parliamentary sovereignty and the traditional British constitution were the inadvertent sponsors of the idea that only the Scottish electorate, and not their elected representatives, had the right to determine how Scotland was governed. In effect, Petrie argues that the widespread acceptance of a distinct Scottish popular sovereignty was called into existence by the referendums of the 1970s.
Petrie concludes the book by observing that in Scotland the immediate electoral beneficiaries of these developments turned out to be the Scottish Labour Party. Labour took up the anti-centralising rhetoric originally coined by Unionists and turned it against the Thatcher government in the 1980s, portraying its neoliberal policies as an illegitimate affront to Scottish national traditions. At the same time, Labour in Scotland emphasised the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine whether they wanted to be governed by a devolved parliament within the UK. A rhetoric that had initially been coined to glue together an anti-Labour electoral coalition had now become a staple of the Scottish left.
As Petrie observes, the fact that this political language had migrated across the ideological spectrum as the context shifted did leave open the possibility that in the future it might move again – and be taken up by other political actors who favoured Scottish independence rather than devolution, which of course is what happened in the early twenty-first century.
There is a lot more that could be said about this hugely stimulating book. It is impossible to give it the full discussion it deserves in a short review. Suffice to say it deserves to be read and debated for many years to come as a significant contribution to the political history of modern Scotland and Britain.
Politics and the People: Scotland 1945-79, by Malcolm Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022; pp. x + 213. £85)
First published in Political Quarterly, 94 (3), 2023 and reproduced with the author’s permission
Ben Jackson is the co-editor of PQ.
Bob Shaw says
In short, SNP support is in effect a protest vote, not a principled one.