Island Stories by David Reynolds

Author:David Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

TOWARDS A DISUNITED KINGDOM

The events of 1914–18 redefined both Britain and Ireland for most of the twentieth century; it was only in the 1990s that what we might call the Great War settlement finally came apart.

In Scotland and Wales the patriotic sense of Britishness generated by that conflict was reinvigorated by the Second World War. Scots and Welsh shared in the national narrative about Britain’s ‘finest hour’—perpetuated in the 1950s by the string of war movies. This was a period of vigorous economic growth, in contrast to the interwar slump which had hit Scotland and Wales especially hard. The interventionist economics of both Labour and Conservative governments for a quarter-century after 1945 also made the Union seem directly beneficial through a nexus of state subsidies, welfare benefits and public housing—not to mention employment in ‘nationalised industries’ such as British Railways, British Steel, the National Coal Board and the National Health Service. Even rural areas benefited: by the 1950s the Forestry Commission had become Scotland’s largest landowner.76

Not until the 1960s and 1970s, when Britain’s defeated rivals Germany and Japan bounced back economically, did the war dividend run out both economically and psychologically. The Scottish and Welsh economies—built on coal, steel, shipbuilding and other heavy industries—became seriously uncompetitive. In this harsher climate, nationalist politics had more appeal: in 1970 the SNP finally won a seat at Westminster in a UK general election, while Plaid Cymru dramatically cut Labour majorities in hitherto safe constituencies.

The nationalist resurgence took different forms in the two countries, however. In Wales the dominant note was cultural, especially the survival of the Welsh language. In 1900 over half the population spoke Welsh, by the 1960s barely a quarter, but the Language Act of 1967 gave Welsh equal official status with English. Nationalist feeling in Wales was mainly concerned with ‘the preservation of a disappearing way of life’, whereas Scottish nationalism was more aggressively about ‘building onto recognised institutions new ways of asserting distinctiveness from England’. Scotland’s separate systems of law and education that had survived from 1707 were important platforms for this project.77

It was in Scotland that pressures for devolution became particularly insistent, aided by the rapid demise of the British Empire in which the Scottish contribution in manpower, finance and trade had been hugely disproportionate to the country’s size and population. The tartan-clad Scottish regiments were now being steadily disbanded but they had enjoyed ‘unchallenged prominence in Scottish society as symbols of national self-image’.78 Also important was the decline of Scottish support for the Conservative Party, which in Scotland titled itself ‘Unionist’ until 1964. Anxious to undermine the growing appeal of the SNP, in 1979 a weak Labour government arranged a referendum on devolution in Scotland and Wales, which failed to win the necessary majorities.

During the 1980s, however, the Thatcher government’s aggressive privatisation of nationalised industries and drastic spending cuts hit especially hard in Scotland—where a third of the employed population still worked in some way for central or local government. Despite her rhetorical enthusiasm for the Union,

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