Scotland the Brief

Part 3: Choosing a Future
18 Depression and Renaissance

Unemployment and emigration characterised Scotland during the 1920s. After the business of making good wartime losses was over, the first rarely dropped under 20%. Roughly 10% of the population left the country, for England and until the catastrophic Wall Street slump of 1929 for America. The heavy industries contracted or rationalised but generally survived. It was the smaller, locally owned firms making general machinery and consumer goods that went to the wall, carrying much of the countrys enterprise culture with them.

Many of the radical promises of the wartime government were forgotten, though electrification expanded with the creation of the national grid, the telephone system grew, and for many families the cinema, particular after the talkies in 1929, replaced the kirk. The Liberals fell apart and in 1922 Labour broke through, dominated by miners' MPs but headed by left-wingers from the 'Red Clyde'.

Quite different, and so small-scale in its units of organisation as to come in under the radar was the Scottish renaissance which began in the middle of the 1920s under a remarkable figure: Christopher Grieve, Hugh MacDiarmid a fine lyric poet and critic but possessed of a mission to drag the country on to its feet as a European nation. MacDiarmid was hopeless at politics but as dramatic as Carlyle as a mobiliser and cultural liberator. Other writers clustered round him: Eric Linklater, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sorley MacLean. Culturally, this investment would pay off in five decades, but politically the prospects for nationalism were near-hopeless.

Nationalist elements articulated many of the legitimate grievances that people had about the situation that depressed region found itself in, but political nationalism, in the shape of the National Party of Scotland, founded in 1928, made little progress. The rise of the Labour party under its Scots leader, Ramsay Macdonald, was little compensation.

More spectacular, though equally fruitless, was the General Strike of May 1926, when railwaymen and dockers came out, from Caithness to Galloway , in support of the miners, whose wages were to be cut. It was well-behaved and totally unsuccessful, although it diverted the working class from direct action into the building up of Labours control of Scottish local government. They took over Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee by 1935, where they would remain dominant for three generations longer. This was enabled by the rapid and distinctive reorganisation of up to 60% of Scottish housing through state intervention in its finance and its ownership by local authorities, a policy begun by the most constructive of the Clydesiders, John Wheatley, during the brief Labour government of 1924.

A much stronger Labour minority regime was elected under MacDonald in 1929, but was almost immediately hit when the Wall Street Crash ended the USA s post-war boom. The Cabinet struggled with mounting unemployment, but refused to back expenditure cuts in 1931. MacDonald (under Royal pressure) formed a National Government largely of Conservatives, which slaughtered his old party at the October election. He then started talking about possible devolution, probably prompted by his adviser John Buchan. The leaders of business reacted in horror the following year, but one of them, the Clydeside magnate Sir James Lithgow, played an important role in creating institutions of economic devolution such as the Scottish National Development Council. In fact, with the growing Scottish National Party (1933) in the background, non-political nationalism had a good decade, when elsewhere in Europe the term had a very nasty meaning indeed.

Rearmament curbed the worst of the depression after 1935, but non-party nationalisms hour would in fact come with war. In this Scotland was in an important strategic position. Firstly in 1940 it became a base for Norwegian and Polish loyalists, driven from their country by the German blitzkriegs. Secondly, after 1941 it hosted the Americans, first with lend-lease aid, then as US planes and troops arrived; Prestwick became Europes busiest airport. Thirdly, after Russia joined the allies. Scots naval bases and sea lochs became the junctions where convoys were marshalled for the eastern front. Churchill made an inspired choice in Tom Johnston, once his foe as a socialist journalist on the Clyde during the World War I munitions struggle. As Secretary of State he promoted what became the National Health Service in Scotland and backed regional planning and the building of a great hydro-electric scheme in the Scottish highlands, carried out between then and the 1960s.

Johnston gave the bipartisan move for reform, seen in the Beveridge Report of 1942, a strong Scottish accent. But on the whole the experience of the war, and the heroic leading role of London, Churchills city, created a general ethos of Britishness which took a generation to fade away. Clement Attlees Labour government, elected rather surprisingly in 1945, though its success in Scotland was less sweeping, added to this with the Welfare State, the National Health Service and the nationalisation of the service industries: coal, electricity and gas, steel, docks, aviation, buses, railways. The Scots were generally grateful, but a bit breathtaken by the centralisation involved, and there was a large-scale though short-lived nationalist reaction, the Covenant movement, directed by John MacCormick, earlier first Secretary of the SNP. Its greatest coup was to kidnap the Stone of Destiny and transfer it from Westminster Abbey to Arbroath in 1950. In the midst of all this, on the Isle of Jura, George Orwell was writing a book about how much freedom depended on language and history: 1984. Around him the Gaelic language was dying out.

In 1951 Labour decreed a Festival of Britain, to be held in London, then fell from power. The Churchillian return match was the Coronation of Elizabeth, followed by British and world tours. Victoria's Balmoral was reborn in a more photogenic way, but the magic didnt last.