Without Quarter: A Biography of Tom Johnston by Russell Galbraith

Author:Russell Galbraith [Galbraith, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political
ISBN: 9781851587612
Google: 941nAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 319223
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Published: 1995-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In all his many parliamentary campaigns between 1918 and 1935 Tom Johnston included Home Rule for Scotland as an important part of his personal manifesto. He did so from a belief that the ‘Imperial Parliament was so increasingly being choked with world affairs that it had little time for attention to Scots domestic problems’.

Johnston had been a member of the Scottish Home Rule Association, founded by his old friend and business associate, R.E. Muirhead, since 1918. He spoke in favour of two Home Rule Bills which foundered in the House of Commons, in 1924 and 1927, and, almost a decade after the second debacle, he launched the London Scots Self-Government Committee with the aim of converting the Labour Party to outright support of a Parliament in Edinburgh.

As a historian, with pride in his roots, he never forgot that it was only in Scotland that ‘the onrush of the Roman legions was stopped, and that here they had to build defensive walls for themselves against the Caledonians’. Readers of his autobiography were also reminded that the armies of Bruce and James IV defied not only the English enemy, but the dread curse of papal excommunication.

Similarly, it pleased him to recall how, in the days before the Union, ‘when an English lawyer called Attwood published a book wherein he maintained that England had direct superiority over Scotland, our Parliament in Edinburgh ordered copies of his book to be burned by the common hangman’. Not that Johnston could be counted much of an admirer of the Auld Scots Parliament which continued to meet in Scotland’s capital city until 1707 – unless his claim that it was venal, corrupt, despicable, servile to the Crown and tyrannical to the people is ever allowed to serve as an endorsement for anything.

The country never lost a national Parliament in 1707, Johnston claimed: its departure to London simply rid the people of Scotland of a feudal oligarchy. And, Johnston argued waspishly in his History of the Scottish Working Classes, whatever some publicists, intent upon propagating the idea of Scottish Home Rule insisted, its absorption, to form a British national Parliament at Westminster, was certainly not a calamity for Scotland.

As perceived by Tom Johnston, this was no benign national institution sitting in Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall. Following the Reformation, and prior to 1610, Parliament was controlled by an executive, called the Lords of the Articles, who were chosen thus: ‘the nobles chose eight bishops, who in turn chose eight nobles, and the 16 thus chosen selected eight barons and eight burgesses’. Once the Lords of the Articles had been elected at the start of each session members of Parliament were free to return home. But in 1610 the power of the nobles, the bishops, the barons and the burgesses to elect the Lords of the Articles was withdrawn and replaced with a system of 33 Parliamentary representatives nominated by the sovereign. It was this nominated caucus, Johnston explained, which was bribed out of existence 100 years later, in as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.