Scotland the Brief

Part 3: Choosing a Future
20 Black Oil, Iron Lady

Oil was found in 1969 in the Montrose field 100 miles off Aberdeen, discoveries multiplied and in 1978 the black stuff was being pumped ashore. It rose to a first peak in 1986 and a second in 1999 and at its highest it covered about 5% of UK gross product. The Norwegians had nationalised production straight off in Statoil, and by 2007 their GNP per capita was more than $ 90,000. Scotlands was about half that, which would not have surprised the Nationalists who had made the running in publicising the new resource but by 1974 had been outwitted by the Labour Party, which promised devolution and an oil fund but in fact shrewdly divided Scottish opinion. A devolution bill was laboriously put through Westminster by James Callaghan and John Smith, but failed at a referendum in 1979.

Three months later Mrs Thatcher took power, and lasted until 1990. In an episode of black farce, the oil-propelled petropound shot up to nearly $40 a barrel, driven further by the first Iran-Irak Gulf War, and the high interest rates with which the trainee monetariste hoped to cut the money supply. This priced British manufactures out of export markets, and chopped over 20% of Scottish manufacturing.

In Scotland Thatcher was hated, and not just by her opponents. That bloody woman or TBW as Scots Tories referred to her, destroyed her own party. From 26 MPs out of 73 in 1979 they fell to 22 in 1983 and to 10 in 1987. In fact her Scottish Secretary George Younger cleverly manoeuvred to keep many Scots interest groups happy, for instance by fighting to keep the Royal Bank Scots and for the Scottish steel industry, while the Labour party and the SNP convulsed themselves with internal strife. But subsidies to housing were cut, much of the stock sold off to upwardly-mobile tenants, and the numbers living in poverty rose from 10% to 25% of the population. Drug use soared in former manufacturing areas, traumatised by factory closures, and inept decision-making led to an increase of HIV infection. Irvine Welsh transformed this into Scottish urban gothic in the notorious Trainspotting, and became very wealthy. If you were a man and lived in the most depressed ward in Glasgow, Calton, you would on average die before you reached 60.

The bright spots in the economy were two, the first of which would ultimately prove a mirage. Silicon Glen meant the swathe of hi-tech manufacturing which extended from Ayr to Aberdeen. It grew rapidly but was concentrated in screwdriver manufacturing of mobile phones and computers which could easily be transferred elsewhere if works had to be re-equipped or the labour force grew stroppy. The Irish Republic meanwhile concentrated on software, and prospered: about two-thirds as wealthy as the Scots in the 1970s, by 2000 it had gone ahead. By then, part of the Glen remained as the shiny shells of new, empty factories. In financial services Edinburgh built on Youngers rescue of the Royal Bank and made huge sums out of Thatchers and Majors privatisations and the boom in mortgages when she sold off council houses. Banking expertise was one reason why Scottish entrepreneurs such as Brian Souter of Stagecoach and Moir Lockhead of First Group made huge inroads into bus and rail privatisation.

But the Scots voters had got their act together and voted tactically to put Conservatives out, successfully in the 1987 election; activists then set up a Constitutional Convention to plan for an agreed scheme of self-government. This first met in 1989 and was steered by its Convenor, the Rev Canon Kenyon Wright, into producing a report acceptable to Labour and Liberal parties, the SNP having stayed out. This granted devolution, which the majority of Labourites wanted, and proportional representation for the new parliament, an old LibDem cause. The era of single-party dominance would, if Labour won the next election, go into eclipse.

The churches whom Canon Wright represented had already gone that way. They had still registered record numbers of adherents in the 1960s, but thereafter declined rapidly: protestant churches first, but soon followed by the Catholics. Neither church had taken women seriously, although they had traditionally been the people who kept congregations together. Now they had more interesting things to do education, careers, cooking, sex, writing hyper-best-sellers and left in droves.

hat did burst forth like a pent-up tide was a cultural movement of remarkable quality. In terms of history, criticism and creative writing nothing quite like it had been seen since the days of Burns, Scott, Galt and Hogg, ranging from the roman policiers of Ian Rankin via the realism of William McIlvanney and Allan Massie to the experimental fiction of Alasdair Gray, the drama of John MacGrath and Liz Lochhead, and the late recognition of Sorley MacLean, the greatest Gaelic bard since the 18 th century.