Michael Forsyth interview
September 28, 2009 by David Torrance · 2 Comments
A rare interview with the former Conservative Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth in the most recent edition of Holyrood Magazine, in which he shares his views on Maggie, Alex Salmond and a future Conservative government.
National Archives of Scotland
September 28, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
To the National Archives of Scotland this morning to have a look through some of the 4,000 Scottish Office files which have just been declassified by the Scottish Government in a welcome revision of the 30-year rule to something approaching, in effect, a 15-year rule, meaning that almost all government files covering the period 1979-94 will eventually be released to the public and, of course, geeky researchers like myself. Pictured right is Minister for Parliamentary Business Bruce Crawford, a former Scottish Office civil servant himself, looking at an old devolution file from 1978 (picture courtesy of NAS).
You can reach the Scottish Government press release by clicking here, while the Sunday Express has already carried a sneak preview of files relating to a proposed takeover of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the early 1980s. There are also stories in Tuesday’s Herald about the Pope’s visit to Scotland in the early 1980s, and in the Daily Telegraph about North Sea oil and independence, although the latter isn’t new.
Labour conference
September 28, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
Interesting speech from Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy at today’s session of the Labour Party conference in Brighton, pointing out, somewhat inconsistently given other Labour rhetoric about how unpopular Mrs Thatcher was in Scotland, that David Cameron is less popular than Thatcher was north of the border, and referring to current Scottish Tory candidates as ‘Thatcher’s grandchildren’. Highlights of Murphy’s speech below.
Wherever I go in Scotland I am in awe not just of the beauty of our country but the brilliance of our people. Our cities that have helped shape the world can still have their best decades ahead of them. Visiting our islands and seeing the wind and wave power technology of the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland and in Aberdeen which we want to be the renewable energy capital of Europe. On the River Clyde hundreds of apprentices I met making Britain safer by building Royal Navy ships. Parents I listen to balancing all the pressures of modern life and putting their children first. Scotland’s pensioners who worked hard and saved hard to make Scotland all that it is - probably the most powerful small nation on earth. And we are stronger, fairer and more self-confident. But after repairing decades of Tory damage we still have a lot to do to build on our success.
Of course we have so much in common across the UK but there are also many differences – that’s the nature of devolution. But the one big choice over the next year is the same – Labour government or Tory government; Gordon Brown or David Cameron; Gordon’s experience or the most superficial Tory leader in modern history. And David Cameron wants to make the Tories a one nation party again – but that nation isn’t Scotland. In Scotland David Cameron is even less popular today than Mrs Thatcher was in the 1980s – but he is no less a threat to Scotland ‘s families and our economy. And the Scottish Tory candidates are probably the most hard-line in living memory. They think the only problem with the 1980s was that their party didn’t go far enough in cutting back the welfare state and they can’t wait to finish the job. Back then they allowed generations of Scots to get stuck on the dole and would have done the same in this recession because they opposed Labour’s £500 million investment to prevent the newly unemployed from becoming the long term unemployed.
Of course Labour will cut costs, but we’ll protect frontline services. However, the Tories would make savage cuts immediately, they would risk the recovery. Because they believe in small government; in the politics of sink or swim and in the politics of your on your own. Today’s Scottish Tory candidates are Mrs Thatcher’s grandchildren. And Scotland ‘s distrust of the Tories isn’t just because of what they did in government in the last recession but because of what they have said in opposition throughout this one. They are probably the only opposition party anywhere in the world demanding that their government does less to help those on modest and middle incomes during this global recession. In Scotland they are hated by many for their past and distrusted by most because of their present. The Tories still don’t get Scotland . But Scotland gets them. And doesn’t want them back. It will take an enormous effort from us but we have the team to do it. I am delighted to introduce Labour’s Leader in the Scottish Parliament and Scotland ‘s next First Minister Iain Gray.
Question Time 30th anniversary
September 26, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
The first edition of BBC Question Time was repeated on television last night to mark the programme’s 30th anniversary. Chaired by the wonderful Sir Robin Day, guests include Michael Foot and Teddy Taylor, who was then without a seat in Parliament having lost Glasgow Cathcart in the general election a few months before. He doesn’t look too thrilled when Sir Robin informs the audience that he would almost certainly have been in the Cabinet as Scottish Secretary had he not had a “little local difficulty” in Glasgow…
Best of the Blogs
September 20, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
My most recent posting, on history repeating itself re: Mrs Thatcher being airbrushed out of history, made it to Scotland on Sunday‘s Best of the Blogs section.
Harman’s office Thatcher U-turn
September 16, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
History repeats itself. BBC Online reports that Harriet Harman’s officials have been forced to change a government fact sheet celebrating ‘women in power’ because it did not name Margaret Thatcher.
Something similar happened back in July 1978, before Mrs Thatcher had even become Prime Minister. A Labour peer called Lady Birk, the then environment minister, had organised an exhibition in Westminster Hall to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the equal voting rights for women. George Younger, the Tory MP for Ayr and not yet Scottish Secretary, wrote to object that a picture of the Conservative Leader was ‘tucked away as though she was nobody’. The exhibition was hastily altered and George forwarded Lady Birk’s response to Mrs Thatcher. ‘I can only say “Well done!”’, she replied. ‘Very well done!’
SNP: The Turbulent Years 1960-1990
September 16, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
Tonight sees the launch of an interesting new book by the former SNP Leader Gordon Wilson. SNP: The Turbulent Years 1960-1990 isn’t packed full of political indiscretion, but it is the first – as far as I know – detailed account of the party’s often tumultuous period leading up to the election of Alex Salmond as leader. I’ll be reviewing it for the next edition of the Scottish Review of Books.
Below is a press release issued by the SNP yesterday:
Queen’s Intervention in Scottish Politics Recalled in Former SNP Leader’s New Book
The unprecedented intervention of the Queen in Scottish politics during a period when the SNP had 11 MPs and was rising high in the polls is recalled in a ‘personal history’ of the SNP from the 1960s to 1990 written by former party leader Gordon Wilson which will be launched tomorrow [Wednesday 16th] in Edinburgh.
The episode, which provoked constitutional crisis in 1977, was sparked when the Queen made a speech in Westminster Hall – the ancient part of Westminster where William Wallace had stood trial – to make a direct attack on the nationalist movement by stating that she had been crowned Queen of the United Kingdom. It later transpired that the reference had been added by the Queen herself, despite the long-established protocol of the monarch not intervening in domestic politics. Deputy Parliamentary Leader Gordon Wilson’s first instinct had been to overlook the remark but Western Isles MP Donald Stewart, Parliamentary leader of the SNP group at Westminster had already launched a counter-attack, publicly warning the Queen that her rule was based on consent of the Scottish people.
A few months later, the monarch visited Glasgow and took the highly unusual decision to parade through the city with the Household Cavalry. This unexpected move raised suspicions that the Queen was making a further political statement and perhaps even attempting to play the ‘Orange’ card, a possible explanation for the event taking place in Glasgow with its greater loyalist support than in Edinburgh.
Thirty-two years after these events, Wilson reflects that “when the main aim of a political party is attacked by a supposedly neutral monarch, it is significant… (and) also a reminder that the British State was not taking the challenge lying down.”
‘SNP: The Turbulent Years 1960-1900‘ covers three decades of political turmoil from the party’s leanest years at the end of the 1950s to the start of the 1990s when it was poised to become a power in the land. The book offers a detailed and insightful commentary on those crucial years, written in a direct, punchy style enlivened with many telling anecdotes.
Other incidents covered include the internal schisms within the party in the mid-1980s when members of an internal left-wing pressure group, the 79 Group (including present First Minister Alex Salmond) were expelled from the party.
The book is certain to be of interest to SNP supporters and all who are interested in Scottish politics and will prove an invaluable source book for academics and commentators on modern political history.
Former party leader Gordon Wilson, who represented Dundee East in Westminster from 1974-1987, joined the party as a law student and his earliest impact was as Director of Programming for the clandestine Radio Free Scotland, keeping one step ahead of the broadcasting authorities and the police.
The book sets the scene with the crucial knife-edge vote of confidence in Westminster on 28 March 1979 which brought down the Callaghan government and led to the electoral crash of the SNP at the subsequent General Election. Early chapters from the early 1960s cover the party’s struggle to make an impact and get broadcasting coverage. Structural changes within the party, necessary to allow the party to develop and win elections, are also covered as is the political campaigns on Scottish Oil and the party’s internal schisms of the 1980s.
As MP and party leader, Gordon Wilson had access to the inside track at key moments in Scotland’s tumultuous political rollercoaster ride through these momentous years and the book benefits from access to official SNP records and personal recollections of all the key players. It’s the essential inside story of the growth of the SNP from protest movement to mass party for government.
The book will be launched at a reception in Edinburgh on Wednesday and there will be a number of book-signing sessions including one at SNP Conference in Inverness in October.
ENDS
Jim Murphy saves Benbecula
September 16, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
Jim Murphy triumphs again, at least according to Lorraine Davidson in The Times, an article in which Scotland’s resident expert on the Scottish Secretaries is quoted…
St Andrew’s House 70th anniversary
September 3, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
The Scottish Government has marked the 70th anniversary of St Andrew’s House (opened the day after war was declared on 4 September 1939) with a special page on its website, and by launching a fascinating flickr site with hundreds of images of Thomas Tait’s building over the decades. The Historic Scotland website also features a beautifully-detailed history of the controversy surrounding its construction, St Andrew’s House: An Edinburgh Controversy 1912-1939, by David Walker. Friday’s Scotsman also has a feature on the building by yours truly.
Scotland’s War
September 3, 2009 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
There’s a good piece by the historian Tom Devine in today’s Scotsman to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. It covers the role of the wartime Scottish Secretary Tom Johnston, acknowledged – as Devine notes – by many “as Scotland’s greatest-ever Secretary of State”.
The Times on Wednesday also carried a short panel by me on the wartime Minister of Health, Walter Elliot (also a former Scottish Secretary), who initiated the evacuation plans. This isn’t online, so my fuller article is reproduced here:
It was, according to its instigator, a bigger operation than the transportation of the Expeditionary Force to France. The date was September 1, 1939: Evacuation Day, the biggest voluntary movement of people in British history.
The memory of that day is etched in the memories of thousands of women and children who moved from their urban homes to countryside billets two days before Britain declared war on Germany, yet few people remember that the administrative feat was initiated by a Scot.
Walter Elliot, the MP for the Kelvingrove division of Glasgow, was a progressive Conservative polymath with interests ranging from agriculture and science to literature and foreign affairs. Following two years as Scottish Secretary, Neville Chamberlain appointed him Minister of Health in May 1938.
The Munich Crisis was just months away, a political controversy which found Elliot strangely indecisive. Despite coming under immense pressure from colleagues to resign over Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler, Elliot remained in the Cabinet, instead pursuing a more subtle line of resistance to foreign policy.
Robert Boothby later reflected that “Munich broke the spring” in Elliot, although he remained an effective minister. In September 1938 he anticipated the task at hand in a letter to a friend. “This big billeting migration will be the first and most pressing duty if anything comes,” he wrote, “and much more difficult, really, than mobilization.”
The responsibility for evacuation became Elliot’s via a circuitous route. If people were to be uprooted from their homes then they had to go where there were houses; housing was in the Ministry of Health’s remit, thus Elliot found himself landed with a daunting administrative task.
It wasn’t until November 1938 that he was able to establish an Evacuation Department, staffed by secondees from the Board of Education and large local authorities. There were to be four classes of evacuees: schoolchildren, mothers with young children, pregnant women and blind people. This totalled nearly 1,500,000 people so the project, as Elliot’s biographer observed, “was not just a minor decanting”.
Seventeen thousand volunteers acted as billeting guides during “Operation Pied Piper”, while schools were evacuated as units along with their teachers. The evacuation exercise began on 1 September 1939 and concluded, fortuitously, on the morning war was declared two days later. Almost everyone reached their new homes on time.
Remarkably, the evacuation scheme was also entirely voluntary: nobody was compelled to leave, although the impending realities of war meant most had little choice, not least children. The UK was divided into three areas: evacuation, reception and neutral. Moving people from “evacuation” to “reception” areas was the major logistical challenge.
On the designated day “special notices” were posted at railway stations across the country while a “Great National Undertaking” was declared. Elliot tried to make reassuring noises. The decision to move people, he said, was “a precautionary measure in view of the prolongation of the period of tension” and that “no one should conclude that this decision means that war is now regarded as inevitable”.
Parents were advised to send their children to school with hand luggage including “a gas mask, a change of underclothing, night clothes, house shoes or plimsolls, spare stockings or socks, a toothbrush, a comb, towel, soap and face cloth, handkerchiefs and, if possible, a warm coat or mackintosh”. Newspapers reported the following day, perhaps a little too loyally, that everything had gone without “a hitch”.
The exercise also brought Elliot’s egalitarian instincts to the fore. He was determined, according to his biographer, “that there should be no favouritism and that poor people who had to go by train should be as well looked after as rich people who could go by road”.
Rich people, of course, had more options than those in the inner cities. Some decamped to hotels for the duration of the war; others moved to the Dominions. For the rest, crowded trains and administrative confusion followed the initial uncertainty of the evacuation. Many “reception” areas were overwhelmed.
Nevertheless, Elliot had made a major contribution to Britain’s readiness for war, yet when Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940 he was not among its members. Whatever his administrative gifts, Elliot’s mistake in career terms had been his decision not to resign in the late 1930s, something the new premier could not forgive.
ENDS