The Flag in the Wind E-Book

John MacCormick

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 354

Beschreibung

Born in Glasgow in 1904, Dr John MacCormick studied law at Glasgow University and was one of the chief founding members of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 and, with the merger of the NPS and the Scottish Party, of the Scottish National Party in 1934. In 1942, he left the SNP and was instrumental in the forming the Scottish Convention which went on to produce the Scottish Covenant in 1949, upon which nearly two million signatures of support for a Scottish parliament were obtained. After a high-profile trip to the US and Canada to present Scotland's case for Home Rule he was voted Lord Rector at Glasgow University. During his stint in this position he became involved in the plot to steal the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey before going on to publish The Flag in the Wind in 1955. With a new introduction by the author's son, this updated edition of John MacCormick's seminal work examines the early years of the twentieth-century Nationalist movement in Scotland, providing an invaluable insight into people and events that help create and then shape the SNP and its campaign to secure a devolved Scottish Assembly.

Leseprobe

THE FLAG IN THE WIND

This eBook edition published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 1955 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London This edition first published in 2008 by Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © the Estate of John MacCormick, 2008 Introduction copyright © Neil MacCormick, 2008 Foreword copyright © Ian Hamilton, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84158-780-6 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-741-7

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

FOREWORD

Remember John MacCormick

IN 1948 I WAS demobilized from the armed Forces and was looking for inspiration. I found it in John MacCormick.

I met him in the street and with the boldness of youth stopped him and gave him my views. He gave me his. Soon I was lying in wait for him. Then I became a visitor to his house. He was a dreamer and so was I. Above all we dreamed of a Scotland with its old self confidence. He financed the Stone of Destiny foray and tended its aftermath. That was a minor symbolic gesture. Our next one was the Queen’s Title action of 1953. We dreamed it up one spring day on the banks of Loch Lomond.

When George VI died his daughter took Elizabeth II as her title. There never had been a first Elizabeth, except in England, and ‘the numeral’ gave great offence. It suggested that Scotland had been incorporated into England. The Stone of Destiny had brought us to the public’s attention and they looked to us for leadership. John and I raised an action in the Court of Session seeking to interdict the Queen from calling herself ‘Elizabeth II’. So far as the title went we failed. Instead we got a judgment about the nature of the Union which went far further than we had hoped. Lord Cooper, the Lord President of the Court of Session said,

. . . considering that the union legislation extinguished the Parliaments of Scotland and of England and replaced them with a new parliament, I have difficulty in seeing why it should have been supposed that the new Parliament of Great Britain must inherit all the peculiar characteristics of the English Parliament but none of the Scottish Parliament as if all that happened in 1707 was that . . . Scottish representatives were admitted to the Parliament of England. That is not what was done.

In short, Scotland had not been incorporated into England. This doesn’t seem much today. In 1953 it was revolutionary. It was what John and a few others had been saying for twenty-five years. It was a victory. Another was to follow.

A year later, on being called to the Scottish bar, I had to swear allegiance to the Crown, I refused to take the oath ‘in proper form’, that is to Elizabeth II. I was told that if I didn’t I could never become an advocate. It was a bitter, lonely time. It took more courage than anything I did at Westminster Abbey. I stuck it out until they backed down. The Queen’s title in Scotland became Elizabeth without the appendage of a numeral and has remained so ever since. What we failed to get in our legal action we now had won elsewhere. In 1954 this was a step too far. The great in the land felt that a divine institution had been tarnished and its power in some way diminished. A human sacrifice was needed.

The Royalists closed ranks. They sent me to Coventry but I survived. They turned on John. He was sacked from his partnership in the law firm he had founded. He had known of this risk and had chosen to run it. He applied to join the bar where I was already fighting for survival. In the vast portfolio of learning then required for entrance to the Faculty of Advocates he lacked one minor examination pass. It was within the power of the Dean of Faculty to grant an exemption which John, an established and distinguished lawyer, had every reason to expect. Alas the Dean too had recently been advocating reform in the Scottish constitution. If he were thought to be favouring John MacCormick he might never be made a judge. He refused the dispensation. Moreover he intimated that John would have to attend classes before he could sit the required examination. As John had until recently been Rector of Glasgow University this was a deliberate attempt at a petty humiliation. It was beyond endurance. He was left jobless. He died broken in health, but not in spirit, a few years later. I miss him still.

Sixty and more years ago there were few people who stood up for Scotland. The Stone itself might have been the end of John yet he took the risk. We both knew there was even greater risk in attacking royalty. I was young and would survive, but John was middle-aged with a family to support. The great and the good feared him as a danger to their mediocrity. They smothered him to death.

His son Neil describes elsewhere in these pages how John was a good father to his children. He was much more than that. He was father to the Scottish nation we know today.

Remember John MacCormick

Ian Hamilton

August 2008

INTRODUCTION

JOHN MACCORMICK WAS BORN in 1904 and died in 1961. Through his short life’s work, he contributed greatly to transforming Scots’ self-understanding of their own country and its potential place in the world. There were two main phases of this. The first ran from 1928 through till 1942, when he played a decisive part in establishing first the National Party of Scotland (1928–34)1 and then, by merger with the Scottish Party, the Scottish National Party, which has since 2007 become the governing party in the Scottish Parliament. This indeed represents a massive growth from the condition of the still rather small and electorally unsuccessful SNP of the 1930s.

The second phase followed a schism in the SNP in 1942, with the subsequent foundation by John MacCormick and his associates of the Scottish Convention as an all-party and non-party umbrella organisation for Scottish Home Rule. After the end of the 1939–45 war, the Convention organised a series of widely representative Scottish National Assemblies, and at the 1949 Assembly, the ‘Scottish Covenant’ was launched. This was an engagement among its signatories to do ‘all within our power’ to secure a re-established Scottish Parliament for Scottish affairs, and it achieved within two years signatures from something approaching two thirds of the Scottish electorate. This was a remarkable feat of consciousness-raising, though it was not immediately effective in prompting more than a considerable expansion of administrative devolution to the Scottish Office.

Two high-visibility events occurred during and in the aftermath of the main Covenant campaign. One was the removal of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster, in which MacCormick played a significant part, especially after the arrival of the Stone in Scotland. The second, in 1952–3, was the challenge mounted to the numeral ‘II’ chosen for the title of the new Queen, Elizabeth, on the death of her father, George VI, in 1952. The challenge to this by MacCormick and Ian Hamilton in the Court of Session, and the celebrated judgment by Lord Cooper in MacCormick v Lord Advocate, shook to the core prevailing British constitutional theory. It raised real doubts about the absolute sovereignty of Parliament in light of the potentially binding effect of the Treaty of Union of 1707 in its provisions in favour of Scottish laws and institutions. The case remains after fifty years a landmark in our constitutional law and history.

These – together with the election of MacCormick as Rector of the University of Glasgow in 1950 – are highlights of this book, The Flag in the Wind. It needs no extended introduction to lead the reader into MacCormick’s own account of them. What may be more to the point is to say a little about what manner of man this was. I come to the task in the privileged but also partial position of being his son – my parents had four children, Iain, me, Marion and Elspeth, and because of the early death of his brother Donnie, a fellow nationalist, our father became a closely involved uncle to cousins Donald and Alistair also. Especially during family holidays, we functioned to a large extent as a family of six siblings.

We were a happy family. My mother, Margaret Miller, was a tower of strength to us all, and created space in which, for all his huge workload between his legal practice and his politics, my father remained a very engaged dad to his children. The incidence of two world wars made us an extended family with three aunts unmarried and one widowed. My maternal grandmother lived in a large house in Bothwell with a huge garden. There we ran wild during weekends, and in those parts of the school summer holidays when we were not away for a month in Bunessan in Mull or Killin in Perthshire or at the long-term favourite holiday place of Tayvallich in mid-Argyll. Dad made kites and flew them with us, once bringing down the telephone wires as a consequence of over-zealousness. He made balsa-wood gliders and taught us how to make more elaborate planes from kits you could buy in Glasgow’s Argyll Arcade. We had terrific games with toy soldiers and spring-cannons that could fire wire nails at lead soldiers without danger to boyish eyes or limbs. We went on picnics to Loch Lomond or Loch Lubnaig or Inverkip in summer weekends, being fortunate in possession of a car, usually a rather rickety one, in the years of Hitler’s war and the ten that followed it. Above all, there were boats – three beautifully made model yachts devised and built by Dad, and rowing boats that we rented along with the holiday house when we were in Mull or Tayvallich, and in which we learned to be safe boat people and to be self-reliant in the rough waters of Loch Sween or Loch na Lathaich.

Our large double top flat home at 2 Park Quadrant in Glasgow’s Park district overlooked Kelvingrove Park towards the magnificent side view of Gilbert Scott’s Glasgow University. Beyond lay the Kilpatrick and Campsie Hills and the more distant Argyll and Perthshire mountains, with cityscape and Clydeside cranes in the middle foreground. Scotland in miniature, I have often subsequently thought. Not inappropriately so, for my father’s deepest commitments were always to Scotland – the people, the history, the philosophy and poetry, the land and landscape (of which for a while he showed himself a more than competent amateur painter). Home was both a political base with phone often ringing, and a place of hospitality both to political friends and associates and to the extended family. So there was always surrounding talk and often a buzz of excitement about whatever was current in the news and whatever the Covenanters were currently agitating about – the closure of Clyde piers, or of West Lothian shale oil, for example. If you were a small boy or young teenager interested in political affairs, simply assuming the role of an unobtrusive listener gave a great political education in a very particular kind of politics.

Despite his justified public reputation for being the douce and impassive Glasgow lawyer, the master of compromise in committee and a pursuer of the practical rather than the ideal, a gradualist rather than a fundamentalist in his approach to Scottish self-government, MacCormick was a romantic in his soul, a lover of philosophy and poetry, fascinated in the history of his country. He was very much of Gaelic Scotland in family background, though boyhood in Stepps and education there and at Woodside School in Glasgow made him also appreciate the lowland Scot, as he did all the more after marriage to Margaret Miller. He wrote occasional poetry all his life and even, long before their political fall-out, had an encouraging correspondence with C M Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) about some of his youthful poems. One of these, in Scots, for which he had a particular penchant himself was about his sense of a personal destiny, and has a strong ring of Calvinism in it. This was despite his own renunciation of the Church, whose creed he could not recite with honesty though he remained deeply monotheistic in attitude and very much a subscriber to liberal Christian ethics – but he was much more a liberal than anything else in his world view. There may be more of Kant than of Calvin here:

I dinna fear the storm,

For the wind can speak tae me

O’ a life that has nae form

But my ain stramasherie.

I dinna fear the daurk

For the nicht is kind tae me

Wha hae done sic fearsome wark

As I’d gar nae man tae see.

I’m no afeart o’ God,

Though He kens a’ things, they say,

And in his fist he’ll haud

Our doom on judgement day.

But aye I fear mysel’,

For in me there’s a voice

Coming from Heaven or Hell –

I canna tak my choice.

His sense of being driven by the inner ‘voice’ made him decisive and even on occasion headstrong, despite the lawyerish aspect of his reputation. To read of the moment of schism at the SNP Annual Conference in Edinburgh in 1942 is to be transported to a high moment of anger and emotion and a decision welling out of pent-up frustration. Again, to read of the decision he took in cold blood to assist the highly risky venture of trying to take the Stone of Destiny from Westminster and then the cloak-and-dagger part he played in the aftermath of its success is to see somebody willing to take high risks in the cause of what by his own voice was right, regardless of personal consequences. The same was true in the narrow world of Glasgow solicitors’ practice when it came to challenging the establishment over the Queen’s title, not just as a matter of political judgement but also at the level of fundamental constitutional law. These adventures in the end cost him his partnership in the firm Stewarts Nicol MacCormick and Co., which he had founded originally on his own and subsequently by amalgamation in 1947 with two other practices in Glasgow. His attempt to be admitted as an advocate at the Scottish bar in Edinburgh after doing the required ‘year of idleness’ was rejected by the Faculty of Advocates. The Dean of Faculty refused to waive any of the examination requirements in favour even of an established and obviously highly competent courtroom lawyer – a competence that had been strikingly revealed when he argued his own case as leading petitioner in MacCormick v Lord Advocate. Some commentators and historians have written slightingly of MacCormick in comparison with other figures of prominence in the national movement. It seems doubtful, however, if any of the others paid a price in terms of personal fortune remotely equivalent to that he paid for following his voice.

So an account of the man has to include a judgement about his courage and readiness to face adversity, and should acknowledge that these were formidable. This also involved courage in the face of pain, for he suffered throughout his adult life from painful and occasionally agonising stones in the kidney, and also in his last years from a very irritating form of dermatitis. The stones in the kidney could be partly alleviated by a citric acid-based lemon cordial that brother Iain used to make for general use in the house. But latterly at least MacCormick resorted more and more to alcohol as a necessary analgesic for the sheer pain he suffered, and the combined effect of liver and kidney disease carried him away in mid 1961 just before his fifty-seventh birthday. As his friend Professor Andrew Dewar Gibb said in his eulogy at the funeral in Glasgow University War Memorial Chapel, he was a man of rare courage in the face of illness and pain, who frequently went out campaigning and addressing meetings when others would have taken to a hospital bed. Dewar Gibb also said this in conclusion of his address:

John MacCormick has . . . gone from amongst us, but he has left his name indelibly written in the history of the country he loved so devotedly.

This is not the place or the time to speculate whether his opinions will prevail or fail utterly. But of this I am sure. If in time to come a new and different Scotland comes to be erected, the work and the name of John MacCormick will be in it as the headstone in the corner.

Well, a different Scotland has been erected. We live in new times in the twenty-first century. Since 1999, we have had a Scottish Parliament sitting in Edinburgh, still as a ‘home rule’ or ‘devolved’ parliament, yet even as such a transformational force in our society and indeed, in its very being, an expression of a transformed self-understanding of Scotland and its people. Since May 2007, the Scottish National Party under the leadership of First Minister Alex Salmond has formed the government in that parliament, and over its first year in office made great progress in the judgement of most observers of the Scottish scene. The contrast with October 1961 is a striking one.

It has certainly turned out that both the political ventures on which John MacCormick embarked were essential forerunners of the journey Scotland took since his death. The Scottish Parliament would not have come into being without a strong cross-party commitment to the project, such as achieved through the ‘Constitutional Convention’ established in 1988. Probably without the external catalyst of, and potential threat from, the Scottish National Party, the Convention itself might not have sufficed. And certainly, when it came to the referendum campaign of 1997, it was vital that the SNP brought its full weight in with Liberal Democrats, Labour and non-aligned forces to secure the greatest possible – and a more than adequate – majority for establishing a parliament with some tax-varying powers, and with full-hearted popular support behind it. Truly, it took both what one might call the ‘Covenant tendency’ as represented in the Convention, and the ‘SNP tendency’ as represented in the clear stand-out for a more fundamental long-term solution, to bring about the first great transformation of Scotland’s place in the UK and the wider world since 1707.

Moreover, the reader of Flag in the Wind who attends to the appendix containing the Covenant association’s ‘Blueprint for Scotland’ will there discover a document that remarkably prefigures a great deal of what is in the Scotland Act 1998, the constituent charter of the current Scottish Parliament. What the Covenanters envisaged and asked for in 1949–51 is more or less what Scotland eventually got in 1999. In that respect, the concluding prophecy of The Flag in the Wind has been fulfilled, albeit over a longer stretch of time than its author foretold:

Flags as well as straws show the way the wind is blowing. Movements of the spirit, springing from the most deeply rooted sentiments of the people, can never be denied their goal. There is no doubt in my mind that long before the end of this century the Parliament of Scotland will once more be opened with ancient pomp and ceremony and that in this new age the representatives of her people will make her a valued partner in the British Commonwealth and an ideal ground for experiments in human progress. The promise implicit in her long history will yet be fulfilled.

I add only two remarks: I was deeply proud to attend that ceremonial opening as one of Scotland’s then Members of the European Parliament. Dad would have been pleased, too,2 for after 1958 he came to see that the European Community (now ‘Union’) was another theatre, additional to that of the Commonwealth, in which Scotland had a role to play that would eventually be taken, as taking it we now are.

The Flag in the Wind is an inspiring read for all who rejoice in Scotland’s new flourishing in circumstances of a partial self-government that seems destined to extend itself steadily further. It expresses the vision of one man, who was indeed one among many, but for a time foremost of the many, who foresaw the possibility and did much to make it an actuality. He was a fine man and this is a fine book.

Neil MacCormick

August 2008

PREFACE

IN THE PAGES which follow I have told the story of the growth of the National Movement in Scotland from the time of the foundation of the National Party in 1928 down to the end of 1954. In writing it, however, I have done so deliberately from a personal point of view, believing not only that it would thus be of greater general interest but also that it would have been impossible for one of the main participants in the events described to do otherwise with fairness. It would have been foolish to try to maintain an appearance of objective impartiality which I could not genuinely feel.

It therefore follows that what I have written cannot be an exhaustive history of the movement. For example, since I resigned from the Scottish National Party in 1942, I have known no more about its internal development than any other outsider and I could not pretend to tell its story, or expound its present aims and policies.

It also follows that I have depended largely on personal recollection and while I believe that all my facts and dates are correct I apologize in advance if anyone should complain of error.

Because I believe that my theme is more than solely of Scottish interest I hope that my book will find English as well as Scottish readers. Apart altogether from any question of Scottish nationalism, there is a fundamental matter in the political development of the United Kingdom which should give cause for wide concern—that is the increasing rigidity of our two major political parties, their almost complete joint monopoly of the modern means of public communication, and the powerful discipline which they are able to impose upon their members. The growth of any considerable minority is so handicapped as to be almost impossible, and yet it is only through growing minorities that beneficial changes can come.

The rise of the national movement in Scotland during the last thirty years from very small beginnings to the point now where it can exercise at least some visible influence on the policies of the two parties is, therefore, a matter of encouragement for all who would preserve the good health of democracy. It is a story of a very small David battling with two Goliaths and slowly pushing them against their will in the way he wishes to go.

My thanks are due to the publishers of the Economist and of the Scotsman for permission to reprint the articles which appear in the Appendices.

J. M. M.

CHAPTER ONE

IN ONE OF HIS letters Robert Burns spoke of the “strong tide of Scottish prejudice” which flowed in his veins. I suppose that most of the ideals which we cherish and rationalise derive their first strength from some such tide of prejudice. For my own part, I cannot remember any time even in my childhood when I was not conscious of a strong feeling of pride in Scotland and of at least a vaguely realised idea that somehow my own country had been thwarted in the fulfilment of her destiny. Events recorded in school history books which seemed in no way to disturb my classmates or my teachers caused in me an uneasy resentment. When I read of the Saxon Princess Margaret who fled from the Norman Conquest and married the Scottish King Malcolm Canmore I thought of her as an overbearing prig rather than as the Saint she afterwards became. She certainly seems completely to have dominated her husband. Nearly all their sons were given Saxon rather than Celtic names. Her refusal or her inability to learn the Celtic language of her husband’s court and her introduction of hordes of English churchmen to Romanise the Celtic Church, laid the foundations of that extraordinary myth which centuries later was to justify a false feeling of racial division among the Scottish people.

I disliked intensely the Norman adventurers whom Margaret’s son David introduced into Scotland and with thorough partisanship I completely disbelieved the statements of historians that many of our greatest Scottish families were descended from them. I was a firm adherent of the theory that both the Bruces and the Stewarts were of Highland origin and I can remember the pleasure with which I learned that even Shakespeare in Macbeth accepted as true the story that the Stewarts were descended from the chiefs of Lochaber.

I find it difficult to discover any personal reason for this early development of Scottish sentiment. My father and mother were both Gaelic-speaking Highlanders but the history books which in those days were purveyed in Scottish schools regarded the Highlanders as only recently emerged from utter savagery and had invented the “Scotchman” who was just a northern Englishman in disguise.

Certainly at home I was taught a proper pride in race and I can still recite the genealogy of all four of my grandparents back for many generations, but the race to which I belonged was dispossessed and the Scotland of which I read in school was not my people’s inheritance.

I must, therefore, frankly admit that my earliest notions about Scotland were quite irrational and that all my life I have been biased towards a view of Scottish nationhood which is inconsistent both with her present position in the United Kingdom and with the idea, until recently so prevalent, that Scotland was just another like the kingdoms of the Heptarchy which had been merely laggard in uniting with the rest.

There is something to be said for the belief that at the right time and in the right place ideas enter men’s minds from a collective unconscious. There is a unity of purpose behind the diverse actions of men working sometimes inexorably towards a goal which has been felt rather than foreseen by those who move towards it. What I sensed as a child, what seemed to be a personal and private reaction to events, was, in fact, a symptom of a widespread change of spirit which was taking place all over Scotland in the early years of the twentieth century.

The change was at first manifested in a new reading of our history. The work of men like Principal Rait of Glasgow University and Professor Watson of Edinburgh showed that the nineteenth-century conception of a divided Scotland was wrong. The evidence of place-names, of folk-lore, of tradition and of recorded fact all pointed to a new idea, that the essential core of the Scottish people had remained racially unchanged through all the centuries since Calgacus had defied the Roman legions of Agricola. True, there had been importations from many sources, especially among the aristocracy. Equally true, the dominant language in a great part of the Lowlands changed slowly through the centuries from Gaelic to an Anglican dialect. Yet so strong was the memory of racial unity that many years after Gaelic was forgotten in the south-eastern districts it was still commonly called lingua materna, the mother tongue. There were many feuds and divisions, internecine strife and sometimes civil war, but these were the symptoms not of racial diversity but of political and religious faction. Time and again, when the essence of the nation’s life was threatened by conquest, unity was recovered and men of north and south, of east and west marched together to defend their own.

The rediscovery of a sense of common purpose and essential unity was the necessary prelude to a national reawakening. It was followed soon by a new budding of literature, of art and of music, the expression however individual in its terms of a new consciousness of national identity.

At first thought, it might well seem surprising that such an awareness of nationhood should come to life in Scotland after more than 200 years of close union with England. The Treaty of Union of 1707 which amalgamated the Parliaments of the two countries had as its avowed object the merging of the two kingdoms till they should be indistinguishably one, and during a large part of the nineteenth century it looked as though the object might be achieved. After the Napoleonic wars Scotland settled down to the business of getting rich quick. Parliament and government were far away in London, but their functions in those days were not such as to make them much felt in the economic and social life of the people. The politics of Church government were of far more immediate and direct concern to the ordinary man than were the politics of the United Kingdom. Sentimental pride in the achievements of Scottish regiments in the Imperial wars was a sufficient sop to an uneasy national conscience and, in any case, if it could not be proved it could, at least, be asserted that the Scot was just a different kind of Englishman. North Britain became the postal appellation of Scotland and seemed to be a suitable name for a country which had become a mere province of its neighbour.

Yet, out of almost imperceptible beginnings, an immense change has already taken place, a change which has affected all classes of the people and which, whatever its final outcome, is bound to influence the future political development not only of Scotland but also of the British Isles, and the Empire and perhaps of Europe as well. For better or for worse, the experiment which began in 1707, of completely fusing two distinct nations and making them one, has failed and now the task of statesmanship is to devise a new and better form of Union which will not deny to either party the right to be itself.

That the rebirth of national self-respect which is summed up in the change of Scotch back to Scots should give rise to the development of a national movement aiming at some measure of self-government was inevitable and it is with the growth of that movement that I am concerned in this book. I have myself grown up with the movement, almost as part of it, but, so far as my narrative is a personal one, it is only so because we are still living in the midst of the events which I shall describe. I cannot pretend to any impartiality in my judgement either of men or of affairs, but I believe that the prejudice or bias to which I have already pleaded guilty is one which will increasingly display itself as an important factor in the life of Scotland as a whole.

CHAPTER TWO

IBECAME INVOLVED in politics by accident, as the result of an unpremeditated intervention in a University debate. I had first matriculated in Glasgow University in 1923, and, as a law student, I was under the necessity of serving an apprenticeship in an office in the city while taking classes first in Arts and then in Law. There was, therefore, very little opportunity for taking part in the corporate life of the University and for several years it never occurred to me to do so. One evening, however, I was induced by a friend to go up to the Union to hear a mock Parliamentary debate. The debating hall in the old Union in Glasgow University, which is now, alas, given over entirely to women students, was modelled on the House of Commons, and Parliamentary debates were carried on there on Friday evenings with all the pomp and ceremony, and with probably greater eloquence than in the Mother of Parliaments itself. There was on this occasion more room on the Labour Opposition benches than on the Government side and for this very practical reason my friend and I found ourselves at least temporarily among the supporters of the Labour Party.

During the period for open debate there was a sudden lull in the proceedings. The Speaker of the House had twice made it plain that anyone not on the Front Benches who cared to rise would catch his eye but for the moment no one accepted his invitation. My companion nudged me in the ribs. “I’ll bet you’re scared to get up and speak,” he muttered. Without a moment’s premeditation, spurred by that whispered challenge, I rose to my feet and found myself, to my own intense surprise, declaiming in a firm and clear voice, “Mr. Speaker, sir, you have given me three minutes in which to address the House. In these three minutes I shall endeavour to save Scotland and the Empire from the ruin which my friends across the floor have made all but inevitable. . . .” I cannot remember what followed, nor even what was the subject of debate, but these few words, the first I had ever uttered in public, remain as clearly printed in my memory as if they had been learned from some lesson or spoken by someone other than myself. For three long minutes I continued to harangue the house, astonished and not a little pleased at having discovered an entirely unsuspected fluency. My remarks were punctuated in proper style, both with laughter and applause, and when I sat down I knew that, for some extraordinary reason, I had made a hit with that highly critical student audience.

A few minutes later no less august a person than the Leader of the Opposition himself—the President of the University Labour Club—was at my side congratulating me and asking me to join the Labour Club Committee. I hesitated. “Look here,” he said, “our Treasurer has just resigned and I’ll get you nominated for the job. It’s most important, and you’ll be Secretary next term.” Thus, lured by the sudden prospect of high office, I accepted, and I have been involved in politics ever since! From then onwards I was a regular Front Bench speaker at the Union debates and soon, indeed, was elevated to one of the most coveted positions in the student hierarchy—Convener of Debates.

At that time the Independent Labour Party was the active missionary force in Labour politics in Scotland and its organiser, Willie Stewart, and his assistant, James Carmichael, were always on the lookout for new speakers. A natural recruiting ground was the University Labour Club and, before long, I was enrolled as a member of the Glasgow City Branch of the I.L.P. and was active as a propagandist all over Scotland and even in Northern Ireland and the North of England. Socialism in those days was not the doctrine of the State-planned economy which it has since become. The I.L.P. had inherited much of the old Radical tradition of Scotland and for the most part as a street-corner missionary I was expected not to expound the theories of Karl Marx but merely to give expression to the general sense of injustice and aspiration for a better way of life which were very natural feelings among the workers of Clydeside in the years between the wars. Although I had begun without any strong political convictions I found it easy to accommodate myself to I.L.P. propaganda and thoroughly enjoyed the almost religious atmosphere of enthusiasm in which we all worked.

For eighteen months I remained a member both of the University Labour Club and of the I.L.P. Looking back, I suppose I was well on the way to a political career, but of that I had no thought. I was still in my early twenties, and I was in it for the fun of the game as much as because I believed that there were many wrongs to be righted in the world. There was one item on the party programme, however, about which I soon became enthusiastic and around which I began to build most of my propaganda speeches—Home Rule for Scotland.

Ever since the days of Keir Hardie the I.L.P. was committed to support that proposal. Many of the Party’s best-known speakers were professed believers in the need for a Scottish Parliament. Men like Tom Johnston, the late Rev. James Barr, James Maxton and many others, while they seldom gave Home Rule a foremost place in their thoughts were genuine in their attachment to the idea and even Ramsay MacDonald himself had in his early days been Secretary of a London Scottish Home Rule Association. I think that most of them had a special sentimental compartment in their minds and it was there that they cherished as a somewhat distant dream the idea of Scotland governing herself. Many of them had begun their political life as Liberals in the Gladstonian tradition and Home Rule was inherited along with other items of the Radical faith. As the years went on and as positions of power and influence opened up to them, they gradually forgot their Scottish sentiment and like so many other Scotsmen of their time concentrated their energies in a Party loyalty which far transcended national considerations.

Perhaps because I suspected that some such tendency was already in evidence I began to feel uneasy in my membership of the Labour Party. The more I thought about things the more I became convinced that Scottish Home Rule was the one great reform which must be lifted above all party interests and was also the reform most likely to effect an immediate and tangible improvement in our Scottish conditions of life and to fill our people with a new morale. In the summer of 1927 I was sent to accompany John L. Kinloch who was at that time Labour candidate for Argyll, on a propaganda tour of the Island of Mull. Although I had been born in Glasgow my family came from Mull and Iona and because of my connections with these islands it was thought that I could be useful in breaking new ground for the Labour cause. For two weeks Kinloch and I went round the island addressing meetings in every clachan. He was as keen a Home Ruler as I was myself and nearly all our speeches were devoted to this topic. We found our audiences were far more sympathetic to it than they were to Socialism and our own conversations after meetings were increasingly turned upon the subject.

I was little more than a youth, new to politics and impatient to get things done. Kinloch was middle-aged, a teacher both by profession and by vocation, and he had been for years a leading speaker for the Labour Party in Scotland. But for his complete personal integrity and his ignorance of the art of wire-pulling he would by then have had a safe Labour seat in Parliament. Instead he was throwing himself wholeheartedly into the difficult task of pioneering for Socialism in the Highlands. Repeatedly I asked him the question uppermost in my mind, whether the Labour Party if it came to power would give priority to Scotland’s claims. Though his natural Party loyalty as well as his loyalty to friends of a lifetime made him hesitate to say so I soon gathered that he had little real faith in the Party’s eagerness to carry out its Scottish programme.

“Give it a chance,” he would say. “If people like ourselves keep prodding from behind we can keep the Party up to its promises. Besides, there’s no other way. The Tory Party is against it. The Liberal Party is out of the count. The Labour Party is the only Party of reform and we must work through it.” But I was not satisfied, and by the time we returned to Glasgow I had made up my mind to leave the Labour Party and to do whatever I could to make Scottish Home Rule a live issue and an issue which would transcend the differences among Tories, Liberals or Socialists. No doubt I was evincing the audacity of youth. There were others in Scotland of like mind with myself but, at that time, I knew nothing about them and had never even heard of their activities. So far as I was then aware, at the age of twenty-two I was going to embark on the extraordinary adventure of creating a new movement and throwing out a challenge to the parties then entrenched in power. When I got home the first person to whom I confided my intentions was my mother. She had been a lifelong Liberal, a devotee like many other Highland people of Lloyd George, and she had always poured friendly scorn on my Labour Party activities. “Now she’ll be pleased,” I thought, “when I tell her that I’m going to resign.” Unknown to me, however, she must have been cherishing secret ambitions of a political future for me. When I told her what I was going to do she bristled suddenly.

“Home Rule for Scotland, indeed!” she exclaimed. “That died at Culloden. You’ll be daft if you throw your future to the winds chasing that old dream.”

Then almost wistfully she added, “Home Rule—if only we could get it! What a great thing it would be for Scotland!”

CHAPTER THREE

MY FIRST TASK