Scottish Review of Books
November 17, 2009 by David Torrance
The latest edition of the Scottish Review of Books carries a review by me of two recent books on the SNP, Gordon Wilson’s SNP: The Turbulent Years 1960-1990 and Tom Gallagher’s The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland under Nationalism. Review follows:
The Scottish National Party – ‘Scotland’s National party’ – deserves a good history. Peter Lynch’s 2002 attempt is succinct but doesn’t quite capture the essence of the SNP, while the remaining literature of academic surveys and memoirs by leading protagonists similarly fail to hit the Nationalist nail on the head.
SNP: The Turbulent Years 1960-1990 by former leader Gordon Wilson falls somewhere between the two and is perhaps the best account of the party to date. Lucidly written with balance, humour and an unfailing eye for detail, Wilson calls it a ‘personal history’. Thankfully, it is much more than that.
The title, however, is curious. The SNP has certainly had its fair share of turbulence, most notably between 1979-82 when internecine strife nearly split the party in two, but then so do most parties. It also implies that the post-1990 period has been an oasis of stability, which the experience of John Swinney’s leadership would surely contradict.
Beginning a little dryly with the 1960s, Wilson charts the party’s progress towards the breakthrough that was the Hamilton by-election in 1967. This is occasionally self-indulgent, for example there is a whole chapter on the SNP’s battle for fair coverage on the airwaves, but also informative. ‘In the sixties,’ asserts Wilson, ‘the SNP unquestionably held the lead in innovation and presentation.’
Indeed, many of Scottish politics’ most memorable slogans and images have come from the SNP, especially the ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ campaign of the early 1970s, covered in some detail by Wilson. Indeed, his chapters on the 1974-79 Parliament – which remain shamefully under-examined – are perhaps the highlights of the volume.
A lot, however, is not intended for the general reader, in particularly digressions into the excruciating protocol of debates, motions, sub-committees and amendments so beloved by the SNP. This is an inevitable by-product of Wilson’s diligent use of the party’s archive – not to mention fresh correspondence with former colleagues – currently held in the National Library of Scotland.
Valuable pen-portraits of the Nationalists’ leading players punctuate the text. Margo MacDonald ‘was a charismatic personality who had under-played her professional family origins by adopting a broad Glaswegian patois’; Willie McRae was ‘a brilliant Glasgow lawyer with a colourful, larger than life personality and a huge capacity for spell-binding rhetoric’; while Donald Stewart was ‘one of life’s individualists, socially conservative and surprisingly radical at times’.
Wilson does not overplay the ‘personal’ aspect of his history, which is one of the book’s many strengths. When he does, the result is refreshingly frank. ‘In the last two years of my stay in office,’ he writes of a late 1960s bout in office, ‘partly as a response to fatigue, I became autocratic.’ There’s also a wry humour. ‘On 15 September 1979, my political luck ran out,’ says Wilson. ‘I was elected Chairman of the Scottish National Party. It was not the inheritance I had hoped for.’
If there is a weakness, then it is one shared by most SNP memoirists: a failure to adequately explain an unflinching belief in independence. Wilson begins with that as an end in itself, and then works backwards. Indeed, he even acknowledges this by concluding that ‘independence will come, although its shape may change in an ever closer inter-locking world. And who can tell what event will force the issue.’
In the 1960s that ‘event’ was industrial decline; in the ‘70s North Sea oil; and in the ‘80s ‘the hammering of Scotland by Mrs Thatcher’. But the SNP’s belief in independence predates them all, with each new event simply slotted into a pre-existing narrative. Come independence, says Wilson, ‘Scotland will live again and the SNP’s vision of the New Scotland fulfilled.’ But what that vision has been, and is, remains unclear.
Wilson, however, usefully dispels some myths, not least Labour’s charge that the SNP always voted with the Tories from 1974-79, while propagating others’ – the notion that the Poll Tax was deliberately ‘tested’ on Scotland, for example, and that Gavin McCrone’s now infamous Scottish Office memo on North Sea oil was deviously ‘hidden from public view.’ Surely Civil Service advice, by its very nature, remains hidden from public view?
Tom Gallagher, meanwhile, also indulges in some silly conspiracy theories in his book, The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland under Nationalism, the first published account of the SNP in Government. Not only does he imply sinister links between Scottish Nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, Alex Salmond (Gordon Wilson’s successor as SNP leader) is accused of throwing ‘a political lifeline to Milosevic’ through his broadcast condemning NATO action in Kosovo prior to the May 1999 elections to the Scottish Parliament.
This is a shame, for Gallagher makes many reasonable points about the SNP, its leader and the Scottish Government. Yet these are lost amid a rambling narrative that strays all over the place, lacks a consistent theme or coherent chronology, and often descends into caustic asides. Balance is much needed when it comes to contemporary accounts of the SNP, but it also needs to be credible.
Gallagher concedes that his book ‘is likely to be viewed as a spoiling operation written by someone who is deeply hostile to the concept of national self-determination’ (he voted SNP in 2007), but instead claims that ‘it is because of the lack of a firm challenge from his [Salmond’s] conventional opponents, or even the existence of a set of alternative viewpoints within the SNP, that I have gone ahead and written this book’.
Nevertheless, Gallgher’s conclusion is not without value. ‘As long as the SNP remains convinced that true freedom consists of liberation from ‘foreign’ control and that what comes next is of secondary importance,’ he writes, ‘it is poised to repeat painful errors committed in many newly independent states over the last fifty years.’ Gordon Wilson would obviously disagree, but perhaps a future scribe will plug the historical gap by covering both points of view with a complete, and balanced, account of Scotland’s party.
SNP: The Turbulent Years 1960-1990, by Gordon Wilson (Scots Independent (Newspapers) Ltd)
The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland under Nationalism, by Tom Gallagher (Hurst & Company)
DAVID TORRANCE
ENDS
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