WHAT SCOTLAND WANTS
By A. S. WALLACE
The Motherwell by-election returned the first Scottish Nationalist after some thirty contests spread over seventeen years. Allowance must be made for the known fickleness of that seat. and for Unionist abstentions due to the party truce. But it is significant that sixty per cent. of the electors on service took the trouble to vote by proxy, and that Dr. M'Intyre had many letters of encouragement from the war fronts. That shows a mood in the younger voters with which all candidates must reckon. This success, following on the high poll of their • chairman, Douglas Young, in the Kirkcaldy Burghs last year, has encouraged Nationalists to put forward at least nine candi- dates at the General Election. Whether any large part of the elec- torate has troubled to work out the full implications of the policy of Dominion Home Rule which they advocate may be doubted. In its origin their movement goes back half a century, but Scottish dissension about the -shape reform should take has always blocked its way.. The first Home Rule Association was formed in 0386 .with Cunninghame Graham and Augustine Birrell on its committee, and three years later the first Home Rule Bill was introduced. The prin- ciple of reform had the blessing at one. time or another of Gladstone, Rosebery, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald. Since 5889 it has been before the House of Commons no fewer than 25 times. But conventional party loyalties have always intervened to prevent even the most considerable of the many measures from reaching Committee stage.
The likeliest of them, in 1927, was drafted as the result of a widely representative National Convention" in which Members of Parliament, local authorities and the trade unions took part. It was talked out on its second reading, and from the indignation that followed the defeat the present National Party was born. The interest then taken in Home Rule by the Scottish electorate was sufficiently strong to provoke a long and stern manifesto from its opponents. A number of peers, a sprinkling of university professors and an impressive body of leading industrialists assured the Scottish people that the economic life of Britain is so closely interwoven that anything menacing its unity would spell disaster for Scotland. This is the document to which the Nationalists, recalling a disgraceful incident in Scotland's War of Independence, delight to refer to now as the " Ragman's Roll." We may yet see the issue of another such rebuke and warning, for again complaint of Scottish government has been coming, not only from the Nationalist ranks, but from city and county authorities, Chambers of Commerce, trade unions and even social and cultural bodies that normally do not concern themselves with politics.
The Nationalist Party, as such, has so far had little following. Its publicity methods and anglophobe propaganda have been re- garded sometimes with amused indulgence, more often with im- patience, by the bulk of serious. Scots. Its chairman, Douglas Young, a tall, bearded young man with a disarming courtesy and a profound knowledge of the history of small nations, is a scholar, a poet, and something of an eccentric. He has twice got himself into gaol for refusing " direction " in the war years from a Government which, he maintains, is exercising powers over Scots that the Act of Union does not warrant. The recent discovery by the Member for Motherwell that a custom of the House of Commons was an outrage on his principles is fresh in memory.
Realisation that such detachment in the face of ,world catastrophe could do no good to Scotland's cause led a large section of the Nationalist Party, headed by its former Secretary, J. W. MacCormick, to secede early in the war and form a new body, Scottish Convention. This aims at securing a common measure of agreement on reform among Scots of all parties. It has produced its own plan for self- government as a basis. It is issuing invitations to a National Assembly to be held in June. It will put forward no candidates, but will try to extract from all a promise to further its aims if elected. It. includes in its membership many well known Scots, including Sir John Boyd Orr, M.P., who is chairman of the Aberdeenshire branch.
Since reform was last an issue in Scottish politics there has been one major change in the scene. The transfer in 1937 of a large part of the executive government of Scotland to St. Andrew's House in Edinburgh was a concession to national sentiment. It has made the Scottish departments more accessible, and Edinburgh more truly a capital. The Secretary of State has taken full advantage of the improvement. For a parallel to the impression Tom Johnston has made on his country one must go back a century to the " benevolent despotism " of Henry Dundas, Lord Melville, the " uncrowned king of Scotland." Johnston himself has described his office as " this Pooh-bah business, this conglomeration of sixteen offices in one person," but that has not prevented him from pressing, often with success, measures that make for the revitalisation of Scottish life at a score of points. He has had, throughout the war years. the backing of an unofficial Council of State composed of former Scottish Secretaries of all parties, and that in itself has opened a new chapter in Scottish political history.
A limit to the powers of even the most energetic Secretary of State is, however, soon reached. Scotland, for instance, is well forward, on paper, with Regional Planning. The whole of the Clyde Valley area, controlled by 17 local authorities, comes under the survey made by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, while in Central and South Eastern Scotland 14 local councils have entrusted Mr. F. C. Mean and his staff with the shaping the future of the area. In all, three- fifths of the population of Scotland are affected by these plans. But in the East the problem of providing new townships to meet the opening of new coal seams is bound up with building a road bridge over the Firth of Forth, and in the West the full development of Prestwick Airport as a focal point for a Scottish aircraft industry is looked on as k test case of the Government's sincerity about spread- ing work. Both projects have been cold-shouldered in London. As a result the impression is widespread that (to quote the Glasgow Herald on the morrow of the Motherwell poll) " Whitehall regards Scotland as a distant province a little more important than Socotra, and a little less entitled to modern communications than Sierra Leone." That impression will have to be reckoned with by all Scottish candidates.
As to the remedy sought there is as yet no common agreement. Scotland should be as free to manage her own affairs as New Zealand or Eire, say the Nationalists. The more moderate devolu- tionists would reserve to the Imperial Parliament Foreign Affairs, Defence, Customs, Currency and The Post Office ; but argue that if a Scottish Parliament had the free disposal of the country's share of United Kingdom revenue she could make a better attack on her gravest social problems, among which a housing congestion six times worse than that of England is foremost. There are some who think the scope of the Scottish Grand Committee might be sufficiently extended to relieve pressure at Westminster and secure better govern- ment for Scotland, and others who urge that a mere subdivision of the Secretary of State's many duties would be a sensible improve- ment. On one thing only is there complete agreement, that the " drift south " that made a derelict area of so much of Scotland between the wars must not recur. The seeker after a Scottish seat who has not a convincing plan for preventing that will play into the hands of the successors of that forthright Edinburgh dame, in The Heart of Midlothian, who remarked that " when we had Parliament men o' oor ain we could aye peeble them wi' stanes if they werena guid bairns, but naebody's nails can reach the length o' Lunnon."
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