At the ceremony opening the pipeline, Wilson had talked of ‘our oil’, but a growing number of Scots were beginning to think that it wasn’t ‘ours’, that the benefits would not be used, in the main, to help Scotland. The SNP had already, two years before, come up with one of the great campaigning slogans, ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’. It could claim in one leaflet: ‘How would you like your granny’s pension doubled? With £825 million every year from Scotland’s Oil, self-government will pay.’26
But the revenues were flowing to Whitehall and the oil companies. In response, a senior Treasury official wrote in a secret memo: ‘The Scots have really got us over a barrel here … An independent Scotland can go it alone.’ There was a ‘plausible case’, one of his colleagues admitted, ‘for arguing that [the oil] is Scottish’.27 In May 2013, the Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, admitted that the 1974–79 Labour government downplayed figures on Scotland’s oil wealth to counter nationalism ahead of the 1979 devolution referendum.28
Norway, which had struck oil at the same time, put its oil revenues into a central Petroleum Fund, owned by its citizens and controlled by the Central Bank. When the UK energy minister Tony Benn proposed a similar oil fund it was rejected by the Labour cabinet. Earlier, Benn had established the British National Oil Corporation, which he wanted to use to control the oil fields and contract them out to the oil companies, but these companies threatened to scale back their North Sea operations, and Benn had to retreat.29
In 1973, the year of the huge hike in world oil prices, the SNP created a shock when Margo MacDonald overturned a 16,000 majority to win the Govan by-election, defeating Labour, which had just announced its opposition to Scottish devolution. Stung by the reverse in Govan, Harold Wilson ordered a U-turn over Home Rule.30 Support for devolution was eventually won at a Scottish Labour Party conference in August 1974 on the basis of trade union votes.
In the February 1974 Westminster general election, called by the Heath government on the basis of ‘who rules Britain, us or the miners’, Labour scraped into government as the largest party. Its Scottish vote fell to 36.6 percent and its number of seats to forty. The key feature of the election was the SNP’s success in winning seven seats. When Wilson called another election in order to gain an overall majority, in September of that year, the SNP took the second biggest share of the vote with 30.4 percent, won eleven seats, and came second in thirty-five constituencies.31
Many on the left of Labour opposed devolution, saying it would weaken the unity of the British working-class movement. In reality this all too often reflected a loyalty to the institution of Westminster and the British state. This reached a peak in 1979 when the Labour government held a referendum on whether Scottish and Welsh parliaments should be set up. Left-wing Labour MPs such as Robin Cook, Brian Wilson and Bob Hughes campaigned for a no vote. In the event, the Scottish result was a yes vote of 32.9 percent of eligible voters to a no vote of 30.8 percent, but Labour MPs had pushed through a parliamentary amendment that a majority of 40 percent or greater was needed. The yes vote fell short of that hurdle.32 A study of the yes vote in 1979 showed it was ‘heaviest among Labour and SNP voters, younger voters and the working class’.33
The SNP blamed the Labour government for not campaigning enough for a yes vote – the prime minister, Jim Callaghan, had made one brief visit during the campaign. After the referendum he proposed ‘talks between the parties … to see if any accommodation could be reached on how to carry Devolution forward’. The SNP rejected this as not enough and moved a vote of no confidence in the government. Callaghan lost that vote and called a general election, which he lost to Margaret Thatcher.34
In Westminster it was widely believed that the ‘Scottish question’ was settled. How wrong they were.
Liberation Time
At the same time as the national question was becoming central, the women’s movement also stirred in Scotland, and by the middle of the decade, Women’s Liberation groups existed from Shetland to Galloway, with the main ones in the four big cities and on university campuses such as Stirling and St Andrew’s. The first Scottish Women’s Liberation Conference was held in 1972.35 The Glasgow Women’s Centre opened ‘up a close’ in Miller Street in 1975. At least two Scottish feminist magazines appeared, Hen’s Own and Nessie.
Jenny Donaldson was a feminist and socialist active in Edinburgh at the time. She recalled: ‘The Scottish womens’ movement had a great deal to contend with. Like our English sisters, we were confronting issues and prejudices over women’s role, and specifically over equal pay, abortion, nursery provision, and discrimination against women in employment[, which] was normal.’36
In 1967, the Abortion Act was introduced as a private member’s bill by the Scottish Liberal MP David Steel, and came into force the following year. In order to receive an abortion, a woman needed the consent of two GPs, which was far from easy in the west of Scotland where many doctors opposed abortion on religious grounds (not just Catholics but many Presbyterians). The legislation came under attack in 1975 when the Labour MP for Glasgow Pollok, James White, introduced an abortion amendment bill that would lower the time limit for legal abortions. In response, the National Abortion Campaign was formed. In Edinburgh the NAC brought together a wide base of feminists, and was very active, as Jenny Donaldson recounts:
Taking a page from the history of the suffragettes, the Edinburgh NAC group stormed and disrupted labour and militant political meetings demanding that our fellow male socialists discussed the issue of abortion as central to women’s rights and did not brush it aside as a moral issue. At the time Robin Cook MP [Labour MP for Edinburgh Central] accused us of undermining the Scottish working class as given a choice working class women would not have so many children. We increasingly became involved in mass protests and demonstrations as the rise of the attacks on the 1967 Abortion Act took place.37
Along with others who described themselves as socialist feminists, Donaldson was also active in support of the Working Women’s Charter, which campaigned for a wide range of social and economic demands in pursuit of women’s liberation, and also pressed for greater involvement of women in the trade unions. The campaign was taken into factories, housing estates and community groups across Edinburgh, culminating in a large, well-attended conference by women active in trade unions and community groups.
The Scottish Women’s Aid Federation was formed in 1976 and has been combating domestic violence and aiding women suffering abuse ever since. The extent of domestic violence was truly awful, with one survey carried out in 1980 finding that 25 percent of all serious assaults were carried out by men on their partners. It also found that while most women then left the home, a significant minority did not because of their economic dependence on the man or because of the stigma still associated with doing so.38
The Gay Liberation Front had a brief existence in Scotland. In 1972, the Scottish Minorities Group (later renamed the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group) was formed to campaign for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Scotland (the law had been changed in England in 1967). In 1975, Edinburgh City Council refused permission for SMG to put up a name plate outside its newly bought premises in Broughton Street, stating that ‘a homosexual colony might develop’ and that it would drive ‘normal people’ out of the area.39 At this stage the SMG was mainly made up of gay men but lesbians were beginning to organise, and eventually a conference in Partick, Glasgow, led to a Scotland-wide lesbian–feminist movement. Eventually, in 1980 the law banning sex between males over the age of 18 in Scotland was repealed.
Scotland was changing in the 1970s. Scottishness had been overwhelmingly male in the past; now that was changing. Not as fast as might be desired, but there was no going back.
FOURTEEN
The Thatcher Years
In 1987, the Proclaimers (twins Craig and Charlie Reid from Auchtermuchty) took ‘Letter from America’ to number three on the UK music chart. The duo were nationalists and the record sleeve featured a Highland couple
at the time of the Clearances superimposed on the interior of the recently closed Gartcosh steel works. The lyrics list the factory closures, and compare the devastation of the Highland Clearances to job losses under Thatcherism. Though the analogy was stretching things a wee bit, it caught the mood of the times.
The list of closures in the 1980s included Singer in Clydebank, Goodyear in Glasgow, Monsanto in Ayrshire, Massey Ferguson in Kilmarnock, BSR in East Kilbride, Wiggins Teape pulp mill in Fort William, Peugeot Talbot’s car plant in Linwood, the Invergordon aluminium smelter, Caterpillar in Uddingston, Burroughs in Cumbernauld, Plessey in Bathgate and Rowntree Mackintosh in Edinburgh.1 Multinationals like Timex and Hoover shed thousands of jobs. In the first two years of the Thatcher administration Scotland lost a fifth of its workforce. There were still fifteen coal mines when she was first elected, just two when she left office. The jute industry in Dundee died, and with the closure of Ravenscraig in 1993 (under her heir, John Major) steelmaking came to an end.
From 1979 to 1983 the economy was in recession, but there was a growing belief among working people that Thatcher was prepared to see unemployment grow as a way to cow the trade unions and demoralise working-class communities. Sterling was kept at a high rate of exchange, which meant UK exports were more expensive, and interest rates too were high, meaning the cost of borrowing or servicing debt was also high. These combined factors hit industry hard. Thatcher made clear she wanted to see the survival of the fittest, with unprofitable firms being allowed to go to the wall, and that she was not concerned if the industrial sector shrank, because Britain’s priority was in financial services.
Her free-market prescription for reversing Britain’s long-term economic decline was music to the ears of big business. But she was also able to tap into considerable dissatisfaction with Labour’s performance in office; the James Callaghan government oversaw a bigger fall in welfare spending than she achieved, as well as a greater fall in earnings.
In the 1979 general election, the Tory vote was not inconsiderable but Thatcher could not claim victory north of the border. Tories there took 31.4 percent of the vote (across the UK the figure was 43.9 percent), returning twenty-two MPs. Labour took the greatest percentage, 41.6 percent, giving them forty-four MPs.
There was considerable resistance to the jobs slaughter of the early 1980s across Scotland. Young unemployed Scots joined Right to Work protests and the People’s March for Jobs, which were staged at Tory Party conferences in Brighton, Blackpool and elsewhere. The Labour Party called a march for jobs in Glasgow at the beginning of 1981 that drew 150,000 people. On 1 December 1981, Plessey announced the closure of its Bathgate plant. Unemployment in the town stood at 21.2 percent for men and 19 percent for women. The shop stewards led an occupation of the plant by the mainly female workforce.
A women worker recalled: ‘One of the achievements was that women were able to speak up for themselves, women that I would never have dreamt would have made a contribution at a union meeting, all had an opinion to give … it puts a backbone into people.’2
Commenting on the solidarity that saw £5,000–£6,000 raised each week in donations together with workplace and street collections, another woman worker commented: ‘This is what gave the women the will to fight on … they felt that to stop fighting wasn’t only letting themselves down, it was letting down that whole labour movement as well. If we’d been left on our own, I don’t know if we would have lasted eight weeks.’3 The plant was eventually sold by Plessey to a rival and kept open.
In February 1981, shop stewards sat down to meet management at the Lee Jeans plant in Greenock, owned by the giant American VF corporation. Despite full order books they were told the plant was to close. The owners wanted to switch production to Northern Ireland, where government grants were available. The union convenor, Helen Monaghan, recalled: ‘They were very determined. We offered a threeday week or job sharing, just so that the work would stay in Greenock.’4
The workforce suspected something was up because orders were being rushed through. On being told of the closure, Monaghan put in place a plan to barricade the factory entrance. Margaret Wallace, then a twenty-year-old machinist, recalls the day the occupation began: ‘There was a build up to it. We had an idea something was going to happen, but I don’t think we expected what was to come. We were excited; it was just like a mission, and we just went along with it.’5 Catherine Robertson, just nineteen during the occupation, said, ‘It was very daunting. Just being so young and something like that happening. You didn’t know things like this would happen; you didn’t know it was going to be so big.’6
On that first evening they realised they had not arranged for any food. Margaret Wallace and a male colleague went onto the roof through a skylight and shinned down a drainpipe to go for fish and chips. On their return with 240 fish suppers they were stopped by police but allowed to carry on when they explained they were occupying the plant.
After that the workers got organised. For seven months the women, in shifts, remained in occupation. Machines were maintained and regularly oiled and the £1m worth of jeans in the factory were kept safe. Visitors and occupiers were searched as they left, to ensure nothing was taken. Meanwhile, Wallace and Robertson travelled the country, raising solidarity and much-needed money. At the Scottish TUC they received a standing ovation. Pat Clark was then a shop steward in the nearby shipyard:
As platers’ shop steward in the local Scott Lithgow shipyard I recall chairing a meeting on the morning of 6 February 1981 during which workers had little interest in the business of the meeting but were more concerned about what we should be doing to support ‘the sit-in’ … Having agreed in our yard to a weekly levy of 50p to support the occupation, we raised this with the joint shop stewards’ committee and in virtually no time every shipbuilding and engineering worker in the Lower Clyde was having 50p stopped from their wages every week.7
He pointed out: ‘It should never be forgotten that this took place after the defeat of the national steel strike. The traditionally militant Chrysler car plant at nearby Linwood closed at the same time with no fight. Thatcher was in the process of seeking to destroy the trade union movement. On 30 April 1981 thousands of shipyard workers downed tools and attended a rally at the factory. This was the date when the redundancy deal was to be confirmed and rumours spread that attempts would be made to forcibly end the occupation.’8
That did not happen and Helen Monaghan addressed the rally, saying, ‘We didn’t know when we occupied the factory where the help would come from, but we hadn’t long to find out. Without the support of trade unionists we wouldn’t have lasted this long and with your continued support we’ll keep fighting.’9
In August 1981, after almost seven months, a management buyout kept the factory open and the 140 workers still sitting-in won back their jobs. Thirty years on, Monaghan spoke of her pride in the way the action was carried out: ‘We were determined. It wasn’t easy, but it had to be done. We started it, and we were very determined we would be there until we heard something different.’10 Margaret Wallace’s message three decades on was ‘You can win. Stick to your guns and don’t be scared of the management.’11
The occupation at Lee Jeans was the exception: workers took industrial action against job losses and closure. More typically, announcements of closure would be met first by a protest but then a sullen acceptance that workers could not win against the free market and the power of multinationals. So on 8 April 1983, the Edinburgh Evening News reported:
The entire workforce of the Henry Robb shipyard, threatened with more than 400 redundancies, marched through Leith on April 8, 1983 in a bid to raise public support for their fight to save jobs.
In total, 850 workers marched from the gates of the yard – the only surviving shipbuilding yard on the Firth of Forth – to a rally at the Old State Cinema in Great Junction Street.
They were led by union leaders who were appealing for solidarity in the fight against redundancies, which were threa
tened after British Shipbuilders said it wanted to shed 9000 jobs from its yards throughout Britain.
The picture accompanying the article shows young workers, likely apprentices, carrying placards saying, ‘Don’t Bring the 30s Back’.12 Despite the march, the yard shut.
The Great Miners’ Strike in Scotland
The 1984–85 miners’ strike was the decisive confrontation of the Thatcher years. It was not entirely unexpected in Scotland, which lost 40 percent of its mining jobs between 1974 and 1984.13 In the early 1980s, the National Coal Board’s Scottish management took a hard line, closing pits and attacking union organisation. In early 1981, the NCB announced it was closing fifty pits across the UK because of the recession. Cardowan in Lanarkshire, and Highhouse and Sorn in Ayrshire were on that list.14
Miners across Scotland responded by walking out on strike. On 16 February, Mick McGahey said that pithead meetings should be convened to make the strike official. Within two days every Scottish pit was out – 19,000 miners in all. They were joined by 30,000 more in England and Wales.15
When the national executive of the NUM agreed unanimously to recommend a ballot of all members for a national strike, the government announced an unexpected U-turn that same day over the closures.16 The miners had won that battle but there was more to come. In November 1982, the NCB produced a new hit list of fifty-five pits set for closure, of which five were in Scotland: Cardowan, Highhouse, Sorn and now Killoch in Ayrshire and Kinneil in West Lothian.17
The Scottish NCB director, Albert Wheeler, pushed through the closure of Sorn and Highhouse before turning on Cardowan in May 1983. The NUM delegate there simply declared, ‘This is our Alamo’. When Wheeler arrived to announce the closure he was pinned against a wall and kicked and punched.18 The Cardowan men went on strike but Mick McGahey argued that, following Margaret Thatcher’s second electoral victory that year, they could not win.19 The Cardowan miners – defending their ‘Alamo’ – fought on, in the face of a five-week lockout in July, before the campaign to preserve the pit was abandoned on 26 August.20
A People's History of Scotland Page 29