A new collection of essays entitled Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class presents a range of case studies describing “the emergence and spread of mostly right-wing populism in contemporary Europe,” with each essay identifying “working class people” as a “key constituency.” The exception to this pattern is Scotland. In Scotland, the working class appears to be voting for a left-of-centre nationalism, while every other European working class has played a key role in supporting the rise of a populist and conservative nationalism. The Scots were typically European, then, in mobilising national identity at the ballot box, but they were very un-European in 2011, and even more so today, in light of the apparent absence of any trace of a conservative nationalism. It is this strange case of the missing conservative nationalism that I wish to explore in this article. More broadly, given the truism that “in most liberal democracies the middle class has been not only the dominant social group but also the main source of national leadership,” as the Scottish writer Stephen Maxwell wrote in The Case for Left Wing Nationalism, I also wish to explore why the Scottish middle class has failed to put together a conservative or populist nationalism.
Prior to the advent of the Home Rule era, writers such as Tom Nairn and the aforementioned Maxwell noted the passivity of Scotland’s middle class in the struggle, which culminated in the establishment of Europe’s youngest parliament in Edinburgh in 1999. However, insofar as “the movement for independence represents a ‘revolution of rising expectations,’” as Maxwell put it, there are traces of rising expectations impacting conservative thinkers and signs of conservative activists aligning themselves ab initio with the changing times. A pamphlet published in 1967 by the Thistle Group, for example, advocated a Scottish Parliament “which raised its own revenue and remitted a portion of it to a federal UK treasury,” while in 1968 came the Declaration of Perth from Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath, committing Scottish Conservatives to the cause of Home Rule.
Despite such early instances of conservative thinking aligning with neo-nationalism, Maxwell tells us that “only 17% of Conservative voters in the General Election had voted ‘Yes’ in the [1979] Assembly Referendum,” which would have inaugurated Home Rule a generation earlier. Attempts at innovation during the 1960s were followed by a long period of conservative opposition to the rise of nationalism. This was perfectly exemplified by the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, David McLetchie, who addressed Parliament Hall ahead of the opening of the new Holyrood parliament with these words: “Many of the people gathered here thought that they would never see this day. And let’s be honest, some of us hoped that we would never see this day.”
In order to explain how Conservative leaders could stand in the house built by nationalism while psychologically inhabiting the ‘relic’ built by unionism in 1707, it must be appreciated that there is no conservative tradition in Scotland within living memory that is not also resolutely allied with political unionism and self-consciously anti-nationalist. Despite the settlement in 1690 in favour of a Presbyterian church government in Scotland, against Tory hopes that the national Protestant church would be led by bishops (as in England), Jacobitism was an integral part of the Tory party until it broke up in the 1750s. In the 18th century, the Scots ‘political nation’ was led by its nobility, among whom there “was a sizable Episcopal/Jacobite Tory group,” as the historian Daniel Szechi writes in his 1984 book entitled Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710-14. Szechi goes on to write that in the 1710 election, “committed Jacobites took around sixteen of the forty-five Scots Commons seats.” A substantial part of the Commons was thus occupied by a group of “nationalistic Scots Jacobite Tories” who aimed to restore James Stuart to the throne, “and by restoring him, dissolve the Union.” The ensuing struggle over the basic terms of the constitution of the British Isles did not effectively end until the 1760s, and until this time, the Tories (who would be called Conservatives after 1832) were often divided in politics and political strategy until the final defeat of the Catholic House of Stuart in 1745.
The final constitutional settlement in favour of the foreign Protestant House of Hanover meant Scottish political nationalism was defeated for a century (until the founding of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights in 1853). A relationship of ‘total identification’ between conservatism and the project of Britain prevailed. Such was the integration of conservatism and British unionism that when the Liberal Party split over Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in 1886, the main beneficiary was the Conservative Party. In 1912, the Liberal Unionists, who had seceded from the Liberal Party, merged with the Conservative Party, which became the Conservative and Unionist Party.
The Scottish Conservatives’ rebranding in 1912 as the Scottish Unionist Party represented, as the political anthropologist Jonathan Evershed writes in a volume of essays entitled Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives: The Scottish Tory Party 2011-19, “the ultimate act of communion with Ulster Unionists in the context of the perceived threat to the Union posed by the passage of the Third [Irish] Home Rule Bill.” The term ‘unionist’ in Scottish political party nomenclature, then, signals opposition to Ireland having Home Rule, and, as Evershed continues, “it was this meaning that was carried in the name used by the Conservative Party in Scotland until 1965,” when the Scottish Unionist Party merged with the UK-wide Conservative and Unionist Party. Prior to 1965, then, there was no unitary UK Conservative Party, while from 1965 on, the Scottish Conservatives were no longer “a distinctly Scottish party in its own right,” as the political scientist Murray Stewart Leith observes in the same collection of essays.
Scottish Conservatives’ historical attachment to the 1801 union with Ireland explains Scottish Conservatives’ militant hostility to nationalism, even as they took their seats in the new Holyrood parliament. Rather than a ‘pure’ conservative tradition in Scotland, then, there has been a series of ecclesiastical and constitutional positions dating from the 17th century that have resulted in a ‘conserve the union’ tradition (whether with Ireland after 1801, with Ulster after 1921, and with England more recently). Thanks to this legacy, conservatism in the Scottish context has cut all ties with its pre-1690 and pre-Hanoverian roots. It is because Scottish conservatism suppresses all memory of itself prior to 1690 and 1707 that there is no conservative nationalism.
After its earlier strife and as the franchise extended in 1832, 1867, and 1918, the political survival of conservatism demanded adapting to the changing electorate—from a ‘reactionary’ Toryism among the Scots peerage prior to 1832, to a middle class ‘progressive’ conservatism after 1867, and a post-1918 working class ‘populist’ conservatism that remained electorally attractive until the 1960s. Indeed, so well did conservatism embed itself among the social classes in the era of the Empire that the middle class and large swathes of the working class were able to identify with the constitutional status quo in an unquestioning manner. This happy integration only had to become reflexive and defend itself with the advent of the ‘swinging ’60s,’ and then the arrival of the affluent 1980s and 1990s, and the solvent of unprecedented freedoms that followed.
The near-total identification with a geopolitical and cultural order on the cusp of being swept away meant the political hegemony enjoyed by conservative unionism was similarly about to be swept away, insofar as the Conservative Party during the period 1967-1999 became in many ways misaligned with the new affordances of material affluence, above all with the rise of neo-nationalism.
Rapid cultural change, such as precipitous de-Protestantisation (the Church of Scotland has fewer than 300,000 members), has had political and constitutional consequences, as the various Protestant churches functioned ab initio as the pre-political glue that unified British people around a shared common history and identity. Historically, then, as the sociologist Michael Rosie notes in his book entitled The Sectarian Myth in Scotland: Of Bitter Memory and Bigotry, the Conservative Party in Scotland has been “reliant upon Protestant support”; indeed, “89 per cent of Conservative voters in 1959 were Protestant compared to 79 per cent in 1992.” De-Protestantisation meant that political conservatism increasingly became an elderly Protestant politics, and so we may say that for an older generation of conservatives, becoming nationalists was sociologically highly implausible, as it would require a cultural apostasy from an inherited Protestant and British identity, while only a younger generation of conservatives could find an accommodation with nationalism.
It should be borne in mind, of course, that the 1960s and ’70s represented a serious existential crisis for all political ideologies and inherited worldviews. The rise of neo-nationalism in Scotland and Northern Ireland took all ‘progressive opinion’ (unionists, Marxists, socialists, and social democrats) by surprise. If it took until 2014 for the Scottish Conservatives to fully commit to the Home Rule era, signalled by proposals for substantial new tax-raising powers for the Scottish Parliament, the fact is that Liberals, Social Democrats, and Socialists were busy polishing their progressive agendas and were just as much late-comers to nationalism. Educated opinion was embarrassed by a reactionary resort to ‘medievalism’ that was beneath their liberal self-understanding and their modernist historical consciousness. Asking progressives—whether those of the Left or Right—to harness the post-1970s affordances of freedom, affluence, and education in order to restore a long-dead parliament and resurrect from oblivion the Scots as an exclusive political community was too much for most Conservatives, Liberals, and Socialists.
On the first of May 1997, there occurred an ‘extinction level’ event when the conservatives in Scotland were wiped off the political map. For the first time in its history, no conservative candidate was elected; a fall into oblivion all the more remarkable, as Maxwell observes, given “the plausibility of the [Scottish Unionist] party’s claim to be the party of ‘all the nation’ until the 1970s.”
After nearly 25 years of the Home Rule era, however, there are signs of a radical rethink of political conservatism. When Annabel Goldie stood down as Conservative Party leader in 2011 (after the SNP won an absolute majority in Holyrood and a mandate for an independence referendum), Murdo Fraser announced his leadership bid to secure a mandate to create a new centre-right successor party to the Scottish Conservative Party. This proposal won support from most Scottish Conservative MSPs but was defeated when Ruth Davidson won the leadership contest in order to defeat Fraser’s plan to re-invent political conservatism.
Under the leadership of Davidson (2011-2019), Scottish Conservatives saw electoral revival and success. However, this was very much a unionist success. The 2014 independence referendum had divided the electorate into nationalist and unionist camps, and this new political fault-line meant many people who would never have done so voted Conservative in 2016 and 2017. The Conservatives presented themselves as the only effective opposition to the SNP, and their campaign slogan of “No 2nd referendum” appealed to every unionist voter anxious to avoid another long and divisive referendum. Davidson, then, was electorally successful because of her failure to re-imagine conservatism. A fundamentalist unionism sat happily with a radical progressive liberal agenda, and under her leadership, Scottish Conservative MSPs not only failed to break with the progressive Holyrood consensus but became active participants.
This means that the gap that exists in Scottish politics for a political party that is both conservative and nationalist remains to be filled—that is, a nationalist conservatism that embraces full sovereignty while rejecting some of the new freedoms and new rights associated with progressive liberal individualism.
In a follow-up article, I will explore how younger generations of nationalists who are also social conservatives are re-imagining conservatism and will not settle for the repression and neutralisation of pre-1690 and pre-union Jacobite history. I will explore a new phase of conservatism that is emerging not from the current Conservative Party in Holyrood but from various nationalist groupings whose desire to secede from the authoritarian liberal programme of the SNP spectacularly burst into public view during the SNP leadership contest in March 2023. The disentangling of nationalism from liberalism and conservatism from unionism, then, will be the subject of the next installment.
