Scotland

15. Devine, Scotland (21 July 2024)

by kurto

1707’s Act of Union catalyzed Scotland’s transformation from one of Europe’s poorest, most backward regions to the workshop of the world, before the postwar decline of the heavy industry undermined paternalism and consequently British sentiment. Allowing the Presbyterian church (the kirk) to continue its predominant role, in contradistinction to threat of economic sanctions and alien status in England, cleared the path for Highlander Jacobitism to be absorbed into national mythology, as the elite of American and French revolutionary wars. Post-union Scotland, a center of the Enlightenment and gateway for the world’s newly integrated primary producers to Europe, never extended into consumer products – indeed, shipping supplanted textiles: the Clyde’s deterioration could not be ameliorated. Labour lost out to resurgent nationalism, and Thatcher’s policies catalyzed abandonment (which incongruously implies England broke the statist compact).

Poor harvests over 1695-99 had induced as much as 15 percent of the population to leave for Ulster or North America, as well as producing unrest which threatened the Glorious Revolution, the island’s regimes no longer unified by monarchy. Accommodating the kirk vitally eliminated religion as a source of resistance, leaving only personal loyalty to Jacobitism – never a solid basis in a country characterized by clans. Notwithstanding uprisings in 1725 and 1746, most residents would have had more to do with the Presbyterian church than London’s House of Parliament, so education and poor relief in Presbyterian hands, as well as continuity of law, enshrined a high degree of autonomy and continuity. For the aristocratic class, there was further the prospect of free trade with the colonies as well as exemption from debt. Landowners (mainly in the Lowlands) were coming to see their holdings as assets for revenue and wealth, rather than sources of military power and authority. Union-era Calvinism was stern but stimulated interest into morality, philosophy, and science. The end of 17th century had been misleading.

Rural social structure circa 1760 was more like Europe than commercializing England. From then, however, socioeconomic change proceeded faster than the continent: by 1850, one-third lived in towns greater than 5,000, the migrants including Ulstermen, though only 5 percent of Glaswegians were Highlander. Newcomers were lured by textiles (i.e., mechanized spinning) of cotton, linen, and woold. Living standards rose over 1780-1800, but thereafter stagnated. In two generations, Gaeldom went from tribal to market-oriented society. Single-tenant farming increased, meaning shared holdings declined, as produce was more for sale at market than community sustenance. Cottars had long since declined in England, the structure of landowner, less-farmer, and landless laborers effectively in place by 1700, driven by the gentry. By 1800, rising Scottish grain yields catalyzed Scotland’s transition, bringing in year-round demand for labor and aristocratic landowners using the right to eject lessees at end of term, the rise of sheep farms also promoting displacement. However, rural landowners were forced to offer high wages to compete with urban opportunities. Highland elites, often educated in southern schools and by travel, were absorbing extra-Gael culture before Culloden. The effects of Smith and the Enlightenment were to undermine the currency of the ‘social economy’, in which wages were to be sufficient to the cost of living. Measures to pacify Scotland (e.g., military roads, confiscation of lands) played their role were complemented by changing views of indigenous lifestyles.

Indebted Highlander landowners were then replaced by well-to-do gentry. By the 1840s Scotland’s per capita income passed Ireland. Scotland’s central advantage in early 19th century was engineering on the Clyde, especially in steam engines, allied to railroad integration of Ayr, Lanarkshire, and West Lothian counties. Highland labor seasonally migrated to the south, which helped (along with subsidized emigration) to check crop failures late in the decade. Presbyterian leader Thomas Chalmers was arguably the most influential Scotsman of the century, but the church broke in 1843, ending its hold on civic matters (but also prompting internal evangelization and charity). Literacy neared 90 percent even before compulsory education and local boards arrived in 1871 (which innovation was easily adopted, there being no class connotations as with English public schools). Liberalism reigned: Conservatives won but 7 seats over 1832-68. Nationalism was subsumed though culture persisted. The fetish of Highlandism was promoted by Romanticism, taking in identity without threatening the state. Home Rule, which split liberalism, the party being too far to the left for landed interests, threatening to commercial interests, and disquieting for Ulster migrants in the west. The Crofters war of 1880 (rent strikes, ‘raiding’ aka squatting) was notable less for agrarian violence than its purchase among urban southerners as well as similarities with Ireland. Following Gladstone’s Irish Land Act of 1881, Scotland too prohibited eviction at the end of rental tenure (blocking clearance), established boards for setting rents and payment for rental improvements, and otherwise set up the state as the primary force in the Highlands and the islands. (Public policy in the west Highlands and west Ireland were often similar.) In 1897 ‘congested districts’ boards came in to promote improved agricultural practices, financing of infrastructure, land redistribution, education, and assistance for fishing and weaving. The trend culminated in 1919’s Land Settlement Act (eminent domain for returned WWI soldiers, funds to convert squatters to landowners). Such measures were effective for the symptoms but not depopulation in the face of declining fishing and stock prices.

By 1901 2 of 4.5 million lived in towns, where lifestyles were segregating into bourgeois vs working class. Council boards were tasked with fitness and welfare following revelations of poor health of Boer War soldiers. Nascent Labour was reformist not revolutionary, prior to the Red Clyde’s World War I emergence. Lloyd George’s Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 (and follow-on acts for ‘slum clearance’, etc.) shaped Scotland’s 20th-century cities: the free market was replaced by subsidized building and activist council management, which bodies received £9 per capita per annum for maintenance. Reformed universities started down the path to Hegelian curricula, social exclusion (e.g., sons of pastors), and Oxford-trained administrators. In the rural Lowlands, 1/5 of all lands to changed hands, aristocratic landowners too selling to tenants (though Scotland in the 1970s was still highly concentrated, 1/3 of holdings being greater than 20,000 acres, land taxation having declined since 1945). Lowlands laborers often ‘flitted’ around the region, encouraged by one-year employment contracts which came with (spartan) housing for the married; in the interwar era, men commonly went out Friday nights so women could share a hot bath. Voting rights for women were seen to favor out-of-power Conservatives (!).

The Beveridge report raised postwar social expectations. The Marshall Plan and Labour’s policy of export promotion sustained Glasgow: 15 percent of the world’s tonnage was made on the Clyde over 1948-51. WWII’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, a former Red Clyde man, was charged to head off wartime unrest and became the century’s best Scottish leader. The Scottish TUC dropped Home Rule during the 1950s. Decolonization never really made an impression on Scotland inasmuch as decoupling had already taken place with devolution to the dominions. The Scottish National Party won its first seat in 1967 in Glasgow. Heath’s Industrial Relations Act triggered growing unrest. The first Home Rule vote in 1979 narrowly missed: though only 1/3 had voted, the populace was divided. Thatcher paradoxically increased working-class dependency on the state while alienating popular sentiment: she is midwife to 1997’s successful referendum, which granted authority over all but foreign and (macro) economic policy, social security, and television broadcasting.

Later chapters read less like history than sociology. Devine never offers a solution to the question of Scottish selfishness, why the country which benefit so greatly from English ascendancy should have so readily abandoned its neighbor. Perfidious Albion indeed.

3. Devine, Union or Independence (15 Feb 2020)

by kurto

            Narrates the course of nationalism in Scotland since the Glorious Revolution, showing the strength of British ‘unionism’ through 1950 and the rise of Caledonian separatism in the 21st century. The shortcomings of the dual monarchy, dueling parliaments, and the threat of Catholic France prompted 1707’s Act of Union. In the first two-thirds of the 18th century, the merger was fragile because the treaty was subject to revision in Westminster. The revolt of 1715 was more serious (but less famous) than that of 1745; however, weak political leadership aside, the Presbyterian church was never willing to re-seat the Catholic Stuarts. After the Malt Tax riots of 1725, Walpole commissioned the personal authority of the Earl of Islay (later the Duke of Argyll, to be succeeded by Henry Dundas), in exchange for parliamentary support: the Scottish learned to play the game of patronage. England’s contemporary expansion meant Scotland had struck a good deal, in the author’s view, and quickly expanded trade to the West Indies, North America, and India under the cover of the English navy and (lack of) tariffs. The Seven Years’ War channeled the clans’ militarism, the Scots proving highly loyalist during the American and then the French Revolution. Scottish Enlightenment figures also were unionist, and so too capital Edinburgh although Glasgow was more imperialist.

            Pessimists thought Scottish culture would be assimilated in the 1800s, but to the contrary Victoria identified with Scotland and the Highland military regiments were high status in imperial symbology. (World War II units were mixed, unlike the WWI, perhaps the last great unionist phenomenon.) The Scottish Burgh Act of 1833 devolved town management to the bourgeois, extending the remit of Europe’s most devolved region-in-state. But the Disruption of 1843, over clerical appointments, demonstrated Scottish identify was brittle. After the establishment of the Scottish Office in 1885 power began reverting to London. Over the long 19th century (1825-1936), 2.3 million Scots emigrated, among the highest totals in Europe, most to the US, Canada, or Australia – a phenomenon counter to expanding industrial economy which the author does not address.

            The Depression persuaded the Scots to prioritize employment, welfare, and personal security. Scottish workers were highly unionized because of manufacturing’s predominance, and simultaneously its economy was statist.  The war was seen to validate central planning (while nationalism was associated with Nazism). In the postwar era, which occupies the majority of Devine’s work, nearly 90 percent of new housing to 1965 was guilt by government, the highest outside the Soviet bloc: supplies available to private firms were limited and public costs subsidized. By 1960, the British empire was no long so important to the industrial economy of Glasgow and west-central Scotland. Further, imperial history fell out of favor in the academy: theories of ‘internal colonization’ arose with the takeover of Scottish concerns by England and American companies. Politicians were judged by delivering spoils of state. The Tories lost the loyalties of Presbyterians and the middle class, while Catholics (from Ireland) remained Labour voters. The roots of the party’s decline predated Thatcherite ‘neoliberalism’. Further the military, monarchy, and later Westminster (undermined by Brussels) fall in status.

            Between 1979-81, 20 percent of Scottish industrial jobs were lost; but 1 in 3 worked in government and the region was receiving outsized grants under the Barnett formula. Thatcher sometimes showed restraint (as in preserving the Ravenscraig steel plan), but economic dislocation combined with Tory hierarchical politics made her the ‘greatest Scottish nationalist’. After 1987 the ‘democratic deficit’ – no Conservative MPs in Scotland – set in motion campaigns for devolution and then independence. The infamous poll tax actually originated in Scotland, and brought in a year early to stave off rising land taxes, but was seen to undermine autonomy. Thatcher didn’t cause devolution but accelerated it: since Conservatives were historically the party of union, Labour became heir to the ‘natural party of government’ and the Scottish National Party (SNP) the alternative. The 1988 Claim of Right for Scotland drew Labour into a pro-devolution position, and resulted in a constitutional convention which the Tories and SNP skipped. 1997’s Labour win produced a referendum on a Scottish parliament in Holyrood, which won 75 percent of the vote. Donald Dewar performed credibility albeit briefly as the first First Minister, particularly in recasting the terms of reference to encompass all powers not specifically reserved to Westminster.

          Without devolution the SNP could not have stablished itself. Unique in regarding residence, not culture, as sufficient for Scottishness, the party failed in 2007 but triumphed in 2011 as Labour suffered the long-term effects of union membership losses, Catholics achieving parity, and general resentment of state spending (which accounted for up to 75 percent of Glasgow economy) being controlled in London. In the 2014 referendum, set against the backdrop of the Global Financial Crisis, democracy flourished despite the ruling out of a ‘devo max’ option. Labour sided with unionism, to its subsequent discredit. Questions surrounding Scotland’s putative currency hurt the ‘yes’ campaign; the establishment lined up against. Despite pulling level in the final days, the referendum lost 55-45. Symbolic concessions from prime minister David Cameron followed, but the Tories were again unrepresented after the 2015 election, and Scotland next voted to stay in the European union.

          From the Earl of Islay’s time – and perhaps earlier, originating in the Highland clans? – Scotland seems to have absorbed patronage and corporatism: in the 21st century, it resembles the eastern Länder of otherwise market-oriented Germany, crossed with the separatism of Catalonia. Citing political science research, Devine notes that when controlling for class, the Scots distinguish themselves by identity in the same ways as the English, but not by political values. He might have done more to draw this thread over the past three centuries, perhaps touching on language and legal tradition. The narrative is elliptical but clear, although tending into polling numbers and other political science artefacts.