Stands Scotland where it did?
Robert Stewart
A CENTURY OF THE SCOTTISH PEOPLE, 1830-1950 by T. C. Smout Collins, (15
The trouble with the social history of nations is that it is hard to make books out of it. The narrative element is necessarily weak and without it the old-fashioned, and proper, notion of the historian's business — explaining how we got here from there — gets left behind. Nor, given the discrete portions of a people's past with which the social historian deals, is it easy to bring analytical coherence to the business with- out being a Marxist or the victim of some other whimsy. Professor Smout has no axe to grind, and though his book is essentially a collection of essays on selected topics, readers of his earlier volume will be de- lighted that he has written such an admir- able sequel, lively, opinionated, mercifully free of jargon and wonderfully free of statistics. Professor Smout is in danger of being had up by his fellows as a belle- lettrist. Even when his accounts are not entirely satisfactory, of religion, for exam- ple, which skirts round the quarrel be- tweeen belief and unbelief, or of love and marriage, which is a bit of a run-through, he is both clear and balanced (the Veto crisis of 1843 has rarely been so succinctly put) and entertaining (the passage on courtship by 'bundling', sleeping together wrapped round in separate blankets,is a charming diversion to modern ears). Professor Smout's century, or so the title says, lasts from 1830 to 1950. In fact, the book is markedly weighted in favour of the years before 1914, and it says little that will find favour among those Tories who have for some time been urging us to return to Victorian values. It is, indeed, one of the strengths of this survey that time and time again it leads us to ponder aspects of contemporary public policy. We are to believe, for example, that certain trade unions are doing themselves and the nation great harm by their reluctance to welcome technological change. Yet ever since the 200 per cent increase in profits for the cotton masters in the early 19th century brought a five per cent increase in wages for the operatives, British workers have learned, as they have not had to learn so savagely in Scandinavia, Japan or the United States (where Henry Ford deliber- ately paid his workers enough so that they could buy a Model T), that whatever the benefits of industrial change they are not likely to flow to them. The Scottish indust- rial revolution, like the English, was founded on cheap labour. We are led to believe, too, that state action in fields such as housing needs to be trimmed back. Professor Smout does not have kind things to say about the record of council housing in Scotland. Housing associations on the Scandinavian model, not more council estates, are what we need. Otherwise working-class self-respect will continue to dwindle into a carping, demoralised defer- ence to bureaucratic expertise and omnipo- tence. The queue at the Housing Depart- ment allocation desk became, in the late 1940s, the main manifestation of the New Jerusalem.' But if we look to the Victo- rians for guidance they will not give us Thatcherite recipes. Municipalisation in Glasgow in the late Victorian period, before a 'new ideological and party' note entered the city's affairs, achieved magnifi- cent results in such matters as slum clear- ance, the provision of health services and the opening of libraries and museums to the public, precisely because the extension of municipal services was agreed to by a middle class 'fired by a combination of civic pride and exasperation at the ineffi- ciency of private enterprise'.
Surprisingly, in view of its vaunted repu- tation, the Scottish educational system receives harsh criticism, and it is Professor Smout's judgment that we are still paying for our inability to slough off Victorian attitudes. The 19th century opted for a `meritocratic', not a 'democratic', system, one nurtured in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the prevailing fear of social unrest led the ruling classes to regard a minimal instruction as all that was neces- sary to secure property against cataclysmic upheaval, and the habit of regarding education as a restraining rather than a liberating activity is still with us today.
In the twentieth century, Scottish education has been marked by the same attitude that branded it in the nineteenth, which regarded it as a matter of low social priority once the perceived needs of the middle classes had been attended to, and once a channel had been opened for a limited number of working-class children to use secondary school and university as a means of upward social mobility . . . If there are in this country too many people who fear what is new, believe the difficult to be impossible, draw back from responsibility, and afford established authority and tradition an ex- aggerated respect, we can reasonably look for an explanation in the institutions that moulded them.
That is the closest Professor Smout comes to hectoring. For the most part his moral tone is cool. He notes the evidence of nutritionists that the physiques and teeth of Lewis crofters have declined since 1945 as the consumption of junk food has risen and remarks that 'it would be absurd and condescending to say that their quality of life had thereby deteriorated.' Making moral judgments across the gulf of years is a chancy business, after all. Making histor- ical judgments has its own risks. Nowhere is Professor Smout more interesting than in his musings on the failure of Scottish nationalism. From its romantic begin- nings, modern Scottish national conscious- ness has displayed the 'dualism' found also in Breton France, Catalan Spain and French Canada. Walter Scott, who did much to awaken it in the first place, was the most unionist of unionist Edinburgh Tories. Even in the heady days of 1848, the year of revolution in Europe, Scottish Chartism fought, not for national liberty, but for reform at Westminster. In good times the 'lesser consciousness', the feeling of being Scotch, is denigrated as regional- ism; in bad • times it expresses itself as serious nationalism, causes alarm and wins concessions.
It is an irony of Scottish history, however, that every effective concession by the centre to the periphery — for example the establish- ment of the Scottish Office in 1885 to meet the needs of Scotland to have properly framed legislation, or the establishment of the Scottish Development Agency in 1975 to direct government assistance into the Scot- tish economy — has resulted in the tighten- ing of bonds between the centre and the periphery.
Why an irony? It is more likely that what the Scots want, and have always wanted, is a fairer union, not a separation. The Irish nationalists, after all, treated every conces- sion from Pitt onwards as a spur to greater efforts — and one more grand power- sharing concession in the North and they will at last scent final victory.
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