WHY SCOTS VOTE FOR LABOUR
John Lloyd tells the
Prime Minister to leave well alone in Scotland
SPECTATOR readers may wonder why the sort of Scot one might invite to a drinks party still votes Labour. A 20-year exile in the effete and violent south, I felt the need to put the question to my compatriot and comrade Jimmy Reid (who writes about the matter much better than I am doing here in the current issue of the New Statesman, still only 90p and infused with all the vigour of creating a wave on whose crest it will be in the early 1990s).
Jimmy, who refers learnedly in his arti- cle to the collectivism of the clan system and the dialectic blend of individualism and collectivism produced by the Scots industrial revolution stretching across the highly populated Lowland belt, was more anecdotal in his response. He recalled occasions when, as a Communist Party official, Communist yard convener and Communist councillor (in Clydebank) he would at critical times seek a quiet inter- view with either capitalist or Conservative politician: the two would conduct a sober review of each other's respective strengths in the affair at issue, and sort something out by the time the cork was off the Glenmorangie. 'It's a village,' said he affectionately.
It has all the viciousnesses as well as the virtues of a village. But that it is more egalitarian than England seems, to one whose life has been equally split between the two countries, is beyond dispute. In part this is due to the respect accorded to education. kin Finlayson, author of a good recent book (The Scots, Constable) says that the laird and peasants' sons shared the same schooling in pre-industrial times, and that this tradition passed into the 19th century when 'education was the high road out of the slums and the miseries of hard industrial labour'. And into the 20th, too. Jimmy Reid, serving his apprenticeship on the post-war Clyde, heard older shipyard workers discuss Marx and Lenin (of course!) — and Nietzsche and Sartre, too.
On the other side of the country and on another side of the culture, my own child- hood in a fishing village of the 1950s was disciplined by every acquaintance's injunc- tion to `see an' dae weel at skule'. The village character, a retired fisherman known as Poetry Peter, stopped young and old to recite his poems, which were of the Kailyard school but infused with the proud learning of the autodidact: he was the village's oral historian before that was a discipline: and though desperately poor in the Thirties, his only son was put through university and came back to teach me and countless others mathematics. His col- leagues at the small comprehensive school which served a string of fishing and farming villages on the East Fife coast numbered in their ranks real scholars: one, Alistair Mackie — a poet well known in Scotland but unheard of outside — keeps his brain active by translating from the Greek or the Russian into a Lallans Scots so thick and rich to be beyond the comprehension of nearly all Lowland Scots.
Reid's experience and mine were alike in the respect accorded education from be- low: it was not exotic to attempt to be an intellectual, or an intellectual and a worker at the same time. Cleverness was highly prized and socially rewarded and, at school, given ruthless priority. The ideal, which sometimes was the practice, was to dissolve wealth and class before the meri- tocracy of the mind.
That's inadequate, over-mythologised and now probably not observably different from England. It is also, one might think, the kind of thing which would warm the cockles of the Prime Ministerial heart.
Yes, but of the Kinnockian heart too. Wales, after all, is a country where academic achievement beats English and Scots alike: for them, too, it was a high road out. But because in both the common experience of education was within the community rather than abstracted from it — as the English bourgeoisie very often were — it was surrounded with a collectiv- ist glow; or rather, individual achievement had to co-exist with the tension of a collectivist ethos, another of the antitheses with which the Scots love to say their souls and minds love to wrestle.
A further thought. The socialism pro- duced by Scotland has itself been oversold, partly of course by the Scots but also by others. Almost every strain of Scots social- ism is ultimately concerned to come to terms with reality: or, if the purists wish to be unkind, it compromises. James Ramsay MacDonald still waits to be exhumed from the dungeons of the socialist mind: but the 1920s 'Red Clydesiders' who became MPs — Maxton, Wheatley, Shinwell — made an impact on Parliament, as Colm Brogan remarked of them in his The Glasgow Story, 'much like that of a boxer who hits with an open glove'. The tiny British Communist Party has moved crabwise into Eurocommunist revisionism under two Scots general secretaries: Jimmy Reid, ten years out of Communism, has battled as hard in the latter part of his career against the shibboleths of the Left as he did against the citadels of capitalism in the earlier part of it; and the most conciliatory of the miners' leaders to the 'scabs' of Notting- hamshire was Mick McGahey — a man who won the admiration of the new Secret- ary of State for Health and Social Security when he was but a lad in the lower ministerial ranks of the Department of Energy, just one of the Scots miners' leader's many fans on the Right.
Socialism in Scotland became, and stays, dominant because it coped with observable realities in an observably decent and sensi- ble way. A Scots Tony Benn or Arthur Scargill would be either impossible or obscure: Mr Tam Dalyell won his radical reputation south of the border on 'English' issues. It was the London Labour Party which produced ultra-leftism by the bushel, not the douce and much more securely-rooted Glasgow Party: where ultra leftism has appeared, it has been in the anglicised city of Edinburgh, or equally briefly — in the politically pola- rised town of Dundee. Socialism remained working class: the clever professionals who serve it — John Smith, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook and others — are either of that class or must defer to it. And that class did not just achieve influence over society because it was numerically strong, but because it worked at deserving it: worked in just the same ways at a Surrey stock- broker's clever child might, with books and application, if with no expectation of a six-figure salary at the end of the road.
Whatever part of that vision of Scots socialism is true and still surviving, is worth working to preserve further. Therein lie the cultural, even moral, reasons why the Prime Minister should have the wisdom to let it alone.
John Lloyd is editor of the New Statesman.
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