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Any day now I expect New Labour to resurrect the hoary old claim that a
vote for the SNP in May could herald a return to Tory government at Westminster. Should Scotland elect an SNP administration at Holyrood, with the help of other independence-supporting parties and individuals, Gordon Brown would find it difficult to convince the rest of the UK that he is fit to govern when his party can’t even win in their own back yard.
It is now well over quarter of a century since Labour lost to the Tories in 1979, a defeat which ushered in 18 years of Tory rule. In Scotland, we took the brunt of Thatcherism at its worst. The poll tax and the rundown of Scotland’s industrial base were our reward for not voting Tory with the rest of Britain.
The Labour Party, in a state of shock, blamed the 11 SNP MPs for bringing down the Callaghan government in a vote of no confidence. SNP canvassers today in Labour heartlands still encounter this oft-repeated lie.
It strikes me that many of our younger supporters, many of whom were not even born at the time, may find difficulty in countering these taunts of New Labour’s Tartan Tories. The facts, of course, are very different and no amount of Labour spin, then or now, can conceal the fact. From March 1974 until April 1979 the SNP consistently supported the slim Labour majority. Had the Labour whips managed to rein in their own anti-devolution MPs the Labour government could have survived until the autumn of 1979.
Before the election in 1974 the Labour Party promised to set up a Scottish Assembly which would be “powerhouse with cash and authority” and although the Scotland Act was passed by both Houses of Parliament and adopted by Scottish voters in the referendum of March 1979, it was repealed (unconstitutionally) by the House of Commons after the general election of
May 1979.
The referendum result was the catalyst in the demise of the Labour government. In his memoirs, Time and Chance, the then prime minister Jim Callaghan noted: “In his [Michael Cox, Labour’s chief whip] view, the difficulty within the party was much greater than any from the Scottish National Party, and the whip’s judgment was that the government could not rely on the votes of Labour members from the north if we moved to reject the repeal order… we could lose the vote.”
In short, Labour backbenchers, including Neil Kinnock, Brian Wilson, et al, would have preferred not just to see, but to participate in, the demise of their own government rather than honour Labour’s manifesto commitment to the Scottish people by establishing the assembly which Scots had already voted for in the referendum.
The extent to which some Labour anti-devolutionists were prepared to go can be summed up in the words of Patrick Cosgrave in his book The Lives of Enoch Powell when he wrote “Confidential exchanges took place between Thatcher’s aides and a number of Labour backbenchers hostile to devolution.”
The survival of the Labour government was therefore in the hands of its own MPs. If Callaghan’s government had pushed ahead with the assembly legislation, it would have been supported by the SNP in parliament. The reason it did not do so is because it became clear that a substantial number of its own MPs were prepared to vote against it.”
The SNP did not “let in the Tories” - the Tories got in because the English voters, following the
“winter of discontent” abandoned the Labour Party and turned instead to the Tories and Margaret Thatcher. Labour’s anti-devolution zealots such as Kinnock were well aware that a Thatcher victory was on the cards, and at least implicitly preferred this scenario to the establishment of a Scottish Assembly and the survival of their own government at least until the autumn.
Nearly a quarter of a century was to pass before the establishment of the Scottish Parliament which the people of Scotland had voted for all those years before, and although today many of those MPs who campaigned so vigorously against that parliament now accept its existence there are still those who make a career out of knocking it and telling us that we are an economic basket case.
Those of us in the independence movement will continue to work to extend the powers of the Scottish Parliament and expose the myths of those determined to undermine not just Holyrood but the confidence of the Scottish people.
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