A People's History of Scotland (38 page)

In 1979 … we realised that if we were going to do it properly we needed a piper and we went away and reformed the band … we took every German gig we could get. The money was better there, but also we got a much more sympathetic listening in Germany, simply in terms of the eclectic places we would play. [Having a piper] … gave us more of a platform for agents to book us in places like Germany and Belgium and Holland, because the
booking platform wasn't, ‘here's another band for a good night out', it was, ‘here's a band that's got something unique and Scottish'. And so, to a certain extent you were expected to conform to that but by and large, that's where our tastes lay anyway and that's what we wanted to do.
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By the 1980s Runrig, Capercaillie, Ceolbeg and others were playing electric instruments and performing their own compositions. Donald Shaw was one of the founders of Capercaillie, at Oban High School in 1984, and says of their music: ‘Capercaillie have been credited with being the major force in bringing Celtic music to the world stage, and their unique fusion of Gaelic culture and contemporary sound has always stretched boundaries in their quest to keep the music evolving.'
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The band contributed seven tracks to the musical soundtrack of the 1995 Holywood film
Rob Roy
, with the singer Karen Matheson also appearing in it, performing unaccompanied.

Runrig was formed in April 1973 as a dance band but soon shifted to performing contemporary Gaelic songs. As their success grew, the record company encouraged them to include songs in English. That led to much criticism from their Gaelic fans but it meant commercial success followed. In 1989, their album
Searchlight
reached number eleven in the UK album chart, selling 60,000 copies in the first week.

Some Scottish artists moved on. Billy Connolly became part of the British establishment, a long way from his days mixing with the Young Socialists in Glasgow. In the late 1960s he had formed the Humbelbums with Gerry Rafferty, who also rose to international stardom. When Rafferty died in 2011 his former manager Michael Gray wrote: ‘… he retained a healthy scepticism not just about the music industry but about society, money and politics in general. His background was soaked in Scottish socialism and poverty, his mind sharp and his personality acerbic, and he wasn't going to be dazzled by the glamour of success.'
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That has been true for many of Scotland's great artists over the decades.

Thatcher's Legacy

In early 2012, when the Thatcher biopic
The Iron Lady
opened, the
Daily Record
sent a reporter to test the reaction to her in Motherwell. Carol Ann Perkins, a full-time carer, told them: ‘My dad worked at Ravenscraig all his life. The closure was horrific. All these hard-working men were lost without jobs. My dad was very lucky to get another job but lots of men couldn't find work. People found it hard to feed their children. I just don't think people here will ever forgive Margaret Thatcher for what she did and how she did it.'

Firefighter Craig Reid, forty-one, said: ‘There were so many jobs lost, especially among the people living around here. Even now, twenty years later, you can still see the aftermath. People don't recover quickly from losing their jobs and livelihoods. I don't think people will ever forgive what Thatcher did to us.'
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The response would have been similar in Liverpool, Newcastle, Doncaster or Coventry, but there was a different conclusion in Scotland. Thatcher had enjoyed no mandate in Scotland, people had not voted for her, and the response was a shift towards self-government (devolution) and, for some, independence. In the 1997 Westminster general election, the Tories were wiped out north of the border. Because of the proportional representation system they were able to maintain a presence in the forthcoming Holyrood parliament but only as a fringe party.

On a wider level, Christopher Harvie pointed to the demise of the Unionist cause by contrasting opposition to the creation of a Scottish parliament in 1997 and that to the 1932 Home Rule Bill:

Hundreds of grand, mainly Glasgow-based capitalists – shipbuilders, steelmakers, coal-owners – along with noblemen, clergy and university principals, had signed the notorious ‘Ragman's Roll' [a reference to the Scottish nobles who capitulated to Edward I] protesting at any move toward a Scottish parliament. Sixty years later the grandson of one of the original signatories, Viscount Weir, could only get a dozen or so – including two elderly Tory
clergymen, the novelist Alan Massie and the singer Moira Anderson – to declare against devolution.
¹⁰⁷

Something profound had happened during the Thatcher-Major years. The Tories had ceased to be a force in Scotland, which meant the political set-up and debate was very different to that in England. After protesting and striking, and failing to shift the ‘Iron Lady', ordinary Scots had increasingly seized on a Scottish identity as a badge of resistance. This identity was seen not in terms of Empire and military glory but as representing a society with more social democratic values than that south of the border, while institutions once deemed the epitome of Britishness, such as the BBC, now added ‘Scotland' to their title north of the border. Even the
Sun
had to describe itself as ‘Scottish'.

The Labour leaders Tony Blair and Donald Dewar believed they could put a cap on this by creating a Scottish parliament and that a majority of Scots would accept devolution and reject independence. That would not prove to be the case. The years of Tory rule in the 1980s and '90s represented a fundamental break in Scottish politics and life. Prior to Thatcher, Scottishness for most was something restricted to the terraces of Hampden or Murrayfield. After her rule, it came to be seen by more and more Scots as something separate from Britishness.

Thatcher was a devout Unionist, yet she did more than any other British politician to undermine the unity of the British state.
¹⁰⁸

O
n 11 September 1997, 74 percent of Scottish voters said ‘Yes' in a referendum on whether to establish a Scottish parliament, with 63 percent voting additionally to give it limited tax-raising powers. Tony Blair, elected as head of a New Labour UK government earlier that year, was no enthusiast for devolution and had been heard to say that a Scottish parliament would have no more powers than a parish council in England.
¹
In the spring of 1997 he stated, ‘Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP, and that's the way it will stay.'
²

He had to swallow his beliefs because, first, he needed to be elected and every vote north of the border counted, and, second, all the main parties in Scotland and most of wider society now backed the creation of a parliament in Edinburgh. Blair was ressured by his Secretary of State for Scotland, Donald Dewar, that by granting devolution it would remove the rationale behind support for the SNP and independence. He was to be proved wrong about that, as were the architects of the new Scottish constitution in their design of the new political system.

The system of voting chosen for Holyrood elections, the additional member system, was designed to stop any one party gaining an overall majority. It combines first-past-the-post constituency MPs topped
up by representatives elected on a proportional share of the vote across the wider regions of Scotland. It was described by Donald Dewar as ‘the best example of charitable giving this century in politics,' meaning Labour would have expected a permanent majority on a simple first past the post. Instead, a party could get an overwhelming majority only if it polled more than half the total Scottish vote. However, that was introduced not to damage Labour but to stop an SNP victory, seen by the Westminster parties as a stepping stone to separation, and to ensure coalition governments.
³

Labour would rule in Scotland, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, from 1997 until 2007, when the SNP emerged from that year's elections as the largest party at Holyrood and Alex Salmond formed a minority government. In 2011, the unthinkable happened and the SNP won overall control of the Scottish Parliament. Labour had also lost overall control of local authorities outside Glasgow.

Nevertheless, the first major issue to impact on Scottish society was but the latest chapter in an old story.

We're Gonnae Stop the War!

The decision of the Blair government to participate in the US-led wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq met with opposition from a majority of the Scottish people. On 15 February 2003, as US-led forces prepared to invade Iraq, Scotland was part of a global demonstration, initiated the previous autumn by the European Social Forum in Florence, which was attended by a strong Scottish delegation.

For the 15 February demonstration in Glasgow, the number of trains travelling to the city were doubled to cope with demand. People were still leaving the starting-point at Glasgow Green as marchers at the front reached the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) car park two miles away. Protestors filled the streets along the length and breadth of the route. Some 150,000 people marched that day. More than 600 people marched through Lerwick in the Shetlands.

Tony Blair was due to address the conference but the Scottish Labour leadership re-arranged his speech so that he was in and out of Glasgow before the march started, let alone reached the SECC. Addressing the crowd, the city's Lord Provost, Alex Mosson, said: ‘We are saying quite clearly, and we are the voice of the majority, that we don't want this war. If Tony Blair can't hear our voices from the SECC, then he will hear them in Downing Street.'

The Rev. Alan McDonald, convener of the Church of Scotland's Church and Nation committee, reported that parishes across Scotland were expressing ‘horror' at the prospect of war. ‘Our concern is for the ordinary people of Iraq, who are not “collateral damage”, but are the men, women and children who will be underneath the incoming bombs and missiles. No matter how smart the weapons are, no matter how sophisticated the targeting is supposed to be, it is the children, women and men who will suffer and die, as they always do in modern war.'

The marchers included sixty-year-old Brenda King from Barnton in Edinburgh, who was accompanied by her husband, Alan. She said, ‘I think the war is about oil. If they grew carrots, we would not bomb them. We have not been involved in a protest for a long time. But it is such a clear issue and we feel it is important.'

Sinclair Laird, forty-eight, from Hamilton, said: ‘You can see the number of people that are against this war. This is the first time I have felt this animated in a long time. I think if we have a democratic government it will have to pay some attention to the public's opposition to this war, which is being echoed by protests around the world today.'
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One of the songs sung on that day, to the tune of the Italian resistance song ‘Bella Ciao', went, ‘George and Tony, dae ye know we're gonnae / Stop the War, Stop the War, Stop the War, War, War! / Tell George's crony, wee Berlusconi / That we're gonnae Stop the War'
⁵

As the Stop the War Coalition became established in Scotland, it was able to develop new alliances that included not just the trade unions, the broader left and sections of the Labour Party, but sections of the SNP, the Green Party and representatives of the Muslim community as well. The opposition of the SNP leaders to the
invasion of Iraq (but not Afghanistan) and to the ‘anti-terror' laws put through by Westminster meant the nationalists were able to win significant support among the younger generation of Scottish Muslims, whose parents had traditionally voted Labour.

While Scots were demonstrating in huge numbers against one war, others would die in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rose Gentle from Pollok in Glasgow helped found Military Families Against War after her son was killed by a roadside bomb outside Basra in Iraq: ‘Gordon was a nineteen-year-old, he had no idea where Iraq was, he thought he was going for peacekeeping … He wasn't killed by weapons of mass destruction, which is why he was sent.'
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The Longest Industrial Action Since 1984–85

The longest strike in Scotland since the miners' strike of 1984–85 involved nursery nurses across Scotland taking action. It ended with the last group of nurses in Glasgow going back to work after fourteen weeks of all-out strike.

The strike was the final chapter in a fight for decent pay that had been going on for over two years. Prior to the strike, the top rate of pay for a nursery nurse was £13,800. Despite increased responsibilities, they had not been regraded for sixteen years. The strike became a battle for national pay and conditions after the Labour-dominated association of local authorities in Scotland (Cosla) told the nurses that new deals would have to be settled with individual councils. These three bodies were all Labour-controlled. Carol Ball, a nursery nurse and the union convenor said, ‘the employers are desperate not to come to a national agreement. The support for the strike among nursery nurses is as strong as ever. The message we have got from national delegates' meetings and from local mass meetings is that people want a decent national regrading and pay deal. Getting that is now all about solidarity.'
⁷

The strike action was very solid, with the strikers throwing up new and innovative tactics. More than 4,000 marched in Glasgow at the beginning of the strike. Over 2,000 demonstrated at the Scottish
Parliament in Edinburgh. When Cosla refused to come to the negotiating table to discuss a national deal, more than 2,000 nursery nurses marched, with a table, to the Cosla offices. Over 1,000 marched through Ayr during the Easter holidays. In Glasgow there were unofficial demonstrations where strikers were joined by parents and supporters. The majority of parents refused to cross picket lines, and many were involved in picketing and raising support. The strike challenged New Labour's drive to break up national pay structures and to introduce performance-related pay.

‘Other workers know what is at stake,' reported Jill McNaughton, a striker from Dundee, ‘that's why wherever we have gone to get support it has been forthcoming. And the level of involvement in the strike through picketing, marches and sending out delegations means we deserve to win.'
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Liz McCulloch, a striker from East Ayrshire, explained: ‘At root this is about New Labour at Westminster, the Scottish Parliament and in local authorities trying to bully low paid-workers out of what is rightfully ours.'
⁹

In the end, the union leadership of Unison decided a national agreement was not possible, to the anger of many strikers, and went for local deals. The Glasgow nursery nurses in particular felt they were left to fight alone. Kate, a Glasgow nurse with eight years' experience, stated: ‘We wanted social justice over pay and working conditions. What we got instead was being starved back to work.'

Others were angrier still, as another Glasgow nursery nurse, Janice, made clear: ‘I think that Unison should hang their heads in shame. Many of us made big sacrifices to go on strike but they pulled the rug from under us. We were committed to win but they gave in too easily. I don't know why this happened but I do know that they were not at all happy when we voted to stay on strike in Glasgow.'
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Nursery nurses were left with pay offers that varied widely between councils, with a gap as far apart as £8.76 and £10.46 per hour in some cases. Most of the offers made by local authorities were at the lower end of the scale. The unions largely remained tied to Labour and all too often put loyalty to the party before the interests of their
own members. One union official, not wanting to be identified, admitted: ‘The reality is that when the chips are down Scotland's union leaders put the Labour Party's interests first.'
¹¹

When the SNP took charge of the Scottish executive in 2007, one senior trade union official admitted that the new administration bent over backwards to consult with the unions and contrasted that with Labour, which effectively shunned them.

The World's Leaders Visit Scotland

For five days in 2005, the sun shone on Edinburgh as protesters gathered in the capital to counter the G8 gathering of world leaders, including George W. Bush, at the luxury Gleneagles Hotel. They were supposedly discussing reducing poverty in Africa but the protesters had heard their promises before.

On 2 July, some quarter of a million people from across Scotland and Britain gathered for a Make Poverty History march and rally. It was organised by a broad coalition of NGOs, religious bodies, youth organisations, trade unions and more. Many protesters carried banners emphasising one or other key issue – ‘Drop the Debt', ‘Fight Poverty Not War' or ‘Stop Climate Chaos'.

Tracy Sabatini from Glasgow brought her two children, Stephano, nine, and Louisa, seven, on the march. ‘The children understand people in Africa are dying,' she said. ‘Hopefully, after experiencing an event like this, when they reach adulthood they will know how to fight for justice.' Rebecca Njeri's group Stand Up for Africa works for just that, by raising funds and campaigning. The sixth-former from London said the day had been ‘lovely'. ‘We've met people from different places and the support from the people of Edinburgh has been wonderful. All we're saying to the world leaders is we all have the same feelings; let's treat people equally.'
¹²

The singer-songwriter Billy Bragg won over his audience when he sang, ‘You know where you are with the New World Order – right up the arse of the USA.' Earlier he had told the crowd, ‘If in a year's time nothing has changed, you know who to blame … It will be the fault
of those eight men – the leaders of the G8. We need to send a message to those eight men – “We know where you live”.'
¹³

The next day saw 5,000 people attend the G8 Alternatives counter-summit in the Usher Hall to discuss alternatives to neo-liberalism and hear a wide range of anti-capitalist campaigners from across the globe.

Sunday 3 July also saw the Stop the War Coalition organise a march down the Mound and to the top of Calton Hill, where they staged a ‘Naming of the Dead' ceremony, with protesters taking turns to read out the names of Iraqis and Afghanis killed in the US-led wars. A Glasgow teacher, Linda O'Mahaney, took part explaining: ‘These people are being forgotten, the Iraqi dead aren't even being counted. There are a number of people whose children have died up there and we wanted to go with them. It seems to me it is absolutely incredible that in a city like Edinburgh you can't even join a march up a road. We're going to try to catch them up though.'
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Other protest actions during this time included a protest at the Dungavel detention centre, housing refugees facing deportation, and a blockade at the Faslane Trident base.

Five days of protest against the G8 culminated on 6 July with a march from Auchterarder to Gleneagles Hotel. At 9 a.m. the organisers, G8 Alternatives, were told by police that the march had been cancelled because of ‘public safety' concerns. Police roadblocks sought to stop transport reaching Auchterarder. The organisers meanwhile had telephoned an array of MSPs, MPs, trade union and community leaders to get them to protest. The STUC and the Fire Brigades Union lodged protests. The police backed down initially by saying 2,000 could march, and then caved in completely.

Gill Hubbard of G8 Alternatives said, ‘I'm sure all of you will agree that this would have been a travesty of democracy if we were not allowed to protest against the warmongers. We're on this side of the fence, they're on that side of the fence. Which side are people on? The people of Scotland are on our side, we are going to march and we are delighted about that.'
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