Yet it is impossible to speak of Scotland in the 19th Century without mentioning one of its darkest faces, which has coloured the view of posterity, and of the Scots themselves, out of all proportion to the numbers of people involved. The Highland Clearances, the forcible removal of clansmen and their families from the lands they tenanted, on a road that led most to emigration, while the glens they left were repopulated by sheep, were most vigorously executed in Sutherland. It could scarcely fail to seem a bitter matter, that tens of thousands of people were driven against their will from land their ancestors had occupied for centuries. In some areas, the policy was especially brutal, notably those controlled by Patrick Sellar, the Sutherland family factor who cleared Strathnaver in 1814. Strathnaver became, and has remained, the epicentre of Highland grievances towards lairds and lords ever since. The wrath of the clansmen was fuelled by a Strathnaver stonemason named Donald Macleod, who from his exile in Canada maintained a torrent of polemic and propaganda against the Sutherland family for 40 years after the Clearances ended, and provided a basis for John Prebble’s impressively impassioned view of the story, published 150 years later.
Nothing can diminish instinctive revulsion against the Highland evictions. They can, however, be set in context. Whatever remedy was adopted, by the 19th Century the Highlands had become incapable of sustaining their population, which had increased dramatically over two or three generations. The lives of many clansmen were unspeakably miserable, certainly no rural idyll, for many years before the Clearances. TC Smout has written: ‘Nothing could be more misplaced than the glamour with which the fanciful have sometimes invested Highland society before the ’45’. In 1772 an English visitor, Thomas Pennant, described the people of the Highlands as ‘almost torpid with idleness, and most wretched; their hovels most miserable…There is not corn raised sufficient to supply half the wants of the inhabitants…Numbers of the miserables of this country were now migrating; they wandered in a state of desperation; too poor to pay, they madly sell themselves for their passage, preferring a temporary bondage in a strange land to starving for life in their native soil’. Some local Highland landowners behaved with ruthless selfishness towards their own people. Macdonald of Clanranald, for instance, received the relatively enormous income of £17,000 a year from rents and kelp on South Uist, but devoted almost all of this to his own pleasures, with small attempt to relieve the distress of tenants on his acres which, like most of the Highlands and Islands, were wretchedly overcrowded.
By contrast, the Sutherland family has received less credit than is its due for the huge efforts its chiefs made in the 19th century to improve the economy of their vast lands- building roads, farms, steadings, model industries and model fishing harbours such as Helmsdale. Paternalistic the Sutherlands may have been, and on occasion brutally insensitive. But their efforts to establish textile working and fisheries, to raise their people from poverty, were well-intentioned and honourable. Because these attempts failed, partly owing to a national economic downturn, the family is remembered only for its evictions. But what is certain is that with or without the Clearances, the old hill life in Sutherland and elsewhere was doomed. The clans constituted military societies. Once local strife and cattle raiding ceased as a way of life, the clan system was bound to atrophy, and should not be idealised.
Dr.Johnson wrote after his Highland Jaunt in 1773: ‘There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great and so general as that which has operated in the Highlands…the clans retain little now of their original character: their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued, and their reverence for their chiefs abated. Of what they had before the late conquest of their country there remains only their language and their poverty’.
A modern writer, Richard Weight, sets the Clearances in a wider historical context: ‘Although Scotland had a generally lower standard of living than England and Wales, the Union benefited the Scots throughout its 300-year history. Had it not occurred, Scotland (like its partners) would have been poorer, her Enlightenment less vigorous, her industrial revolution slower and her empire less extensive. With the exception of the Highland Clearances, ordinary Scots endured no major injustice that the English did not also endure between 1707 and 2000. No meaningful comparison can therefore be made with the Irish experience of union, in which millions were starved and killed’.
In the 19th Century, the Scottish Highlands became chiefly known to English tourists as a paradise for sportsmen and admirers of natural beauty, unsullied by much human activity save that associated with sport. Smout again: ‘The habit of assuming that the Highlanders were congenitally incapable of any effort or self-help had been ingrained in upper-class Scottish thinking since the days of James VI’. For many Scots to this day, the sight of the empty glens is less a monument to natural beauty than a reminder of the hapless people who were driven from them. Their view may be irrational and overstated. But it would be foolish to doubt the power of such images among a new generation of Scots, who have been educated to a fiercely partisan and often woefully misleading view of history- what we might call the Braveheart culture. This is intensified by some local so-called heritage centres in the Highlands today, which perpetuate a wildly fanciful view of popular grievances.
The long corrosion of Scotland’s prosperity- and self-confidence- began in the years between the two world wars. The country experienced a short-lived economic resurgence between 1939 and 1945, but thereafter its fortunes declined steadily. The traditional heavy industries which made the country great for almost two centuries- coal, steel and shipbuilding- first languished, then found themselves on a path towards extinction. Despite considerable efforts by successive Westminster governments, no new Scottish industries came close to matching the wealth-generating powers of those that were fading. Beyond mortification and a sense of national impoverishment, Scots felt a deeper pain of fallen pride. In the last 30 years of the 20th Century, these sentiments went further. They grew into bitter anger towards their southern neighbours and the government far away at Westminster. The English at first seemed merely indifferent to Scotland’s misfortunes- which amounted in some regions to tragedies. But with the coming of Mrs.Thatcher’s revolution, it seemed to many Scots that the Tory government was deliberately creating policies- the cutting of regional aid, the slashing of subsidies, the sale of nationalised industries- which precipitated closures of Scottish plants and factories. ‘With the precise and good intentions of a nurse’, writes Richard Weight, ‘Mrs.Thatcher unpeeled the fiscal bandages which British governments since the 1930s had placed on Scotland and Wales, in an effort to heal the wounds of industrial decline’. With mounting rage, in the 1980s Scots perceived this most English of prime ministers pursuing policies which were making southerners rich, yet which seemed destined to ruin the Celtic extremities of Britain. In 1987, a Times cartoon suggested that Mrs.Thatcher had altered Shakespeare’s lines to read: ‘Cry God for Maggie, south-east England and St.George’.
As early as 1973, Lord Crowther’s Commission on the Constitution observed that while the Union could not be held responsible for the economic problems of the Scottish and Welsh peoples, English attitudes to their neighbours could not fail to foster discord: ‘Although there is no ill-will or intended discourtesy in the attitude of the English people, people in Scotland and Wales are irritated by it. It fails to recognise the special character of their separate identity, of which they themselves are keenly conscious and proud, and at the same time it implies that the resentment they feel arises only because they are living in the past, and getting agitated about something which is no longer important’. All the frustrations identified by Crowther became more passionate a decade later, in the Thatcher era. Many Scots saw a Tory government apparently abandoning Scotland to its fate. They perceived an English prime minister indifferent to the political, social and economic consequences of her policies north of the border. It can be argued- indeed, it was argued by Mrs.Thatcher- that Scotland as much as England needed to break free of the old centrally-directed Socialist dependency culture, and this was true. But the northern kingdom faced great and special difficulties in doing so. English Tories seemed cruelly insensitive to consequences. Mrs.Thatcher and her colleagues appeared to treat Scotland not as a nation with its own heritage and culture, but as a mere loss-making subsidiary of England plc. More and more Scots asked themselves, as they had not done for 300 years, what the Union was bringing to their country. Across the Irish Sea, they saw an independent Ireland becoming rich for the first time in its history, on the back of huge financial subventions provided by Europe. Why should not Scotland follow the same path with equal success ? This was a proposition that suddenly seemed to some Scots both emotionally and economically tempting.
Political scientists and historians have written a lot in recent years about the decline in any broad British sense of identity. The traditional common pillars of Britishness- empire, the monarchy, the mother of parliaments, sporting loyalties, the Protestant church- and we should not omit the shared experience of two world wars- have faded in significance or disappeared altogether. For several decades now, people in all parts of the United Kingdom have been actively or passively questioning identities, and often gravitating towards new ones. A survey a few years ago by the Nuffield Foundation found that 85% of the Scots and 63% of the Welsh think of themselves in those terms rather than as British, while only 34% of dwellers south of the border likewise identify themselves as English. Strikingly, most of the Celts who still speak of themselves as British are over 50. Being British is also a predominantly middle-class idea. 68% of working-class respondents in Scotland claim to think of themselves as Scots rather than British, against 51% of middle-class respondents. A survey of young Scots found that 75% felt antipathy towards their southern neighbours, describing them as arrogant, aggressive, untrustworthy.
The resurgence of Scottish nationalism, which began in a very modest fashion in the 1960s, rapidly gathered pace amid Scotland’s economic woes of the 1980s and 1990s. Even among those who possessed no wish for outright Scottish independence, a desire grew for devolved government, for Scotland’s right in some degree at least to manage its own affairs. The English seemed to have failed the country. Westminster appeared intolerably remote. For many years, the Labour Party opposed even limited Scottish self-government, because this seemed to run counter to Labour’s nationwide political interests, and to represent a surrender to the increasingly feared Nats. The Tories likewise set their face against devolved government. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the Conservative Party remained extraordinarily insensitive to mounting pressures from Scots who perceived themselves impotent victims of British economic and social policies which offered only grief north of the border. As Tory support in Scotland fell steeply in the 1980s, especially after Mrs.Thatcher’s disastrous use of the nation as a test-bed for her poll tax, some of us became convinced that for the Tories to espouse devolution offered the best, if not only chance of stemming the separatist tide. Both Ian Lang and Malcolm Rifkind, the two most prominent Scots in the Cabinet, were privately convinced that devolution would and indeed must come before there could be any chance of a Tory revival in Scotland. Yet they made no progress in convincing their English colleagues that Scottish sentiment and political ambitions must be treated with respect. John Major in 1995 denounced devolution as ‘one of the most dangerous proposals ever put before the British nation’. I remember asking a leading English Cabinet member shortly before the 1997 election how on earth the Tories could govern Scotland if by some freak of fate they won the national poll. It seemed likely that the Conservatives would be left without a single seat north of the border, as indeed they were. Surely, I said, a government in which Scots possessed no Commons representation could not expect to rule Scotland on a colonial basis ? My friend gave a theatrical shrug and said: ‘The Scots will just have to put up with it’.
The Scots will just have to put up with it…This English view has, I think, been at the root of much grief in the relationship between the two countries over the past generation. For too long, the English have treated Scotland as a mere region of Britain, not as a nation. Of course it is true that the wealth and population of this island are overwhelmingly concentrated in the south. But anyone with an awareness of Scottish history and culture and past grievances could anticipate that if Scotland was seen to be taken for granted by the English, and indeed sometimes treated with contempt, then all the raw sensitivities and frustrations which lie so close to the surface in the northern kingdom would burst forth. And so, of course, they did, with the rising tide of Scottish Nationalism.
I was among those who strongly supported Tony Blair’s introduction of devolved government for Scotland. To do this seemed to offer the best, if not only chance of stemming the separatist tide. I do not believe that Scots resentment about the perceived remoteness of Westminster government would have gone away. Many of my English Tory friends still argue that devolution was a huge folly; that the erratic, often foolish behaviour of the Scottish parliament since 1999 demonstrates that its creation was a mistake from the viewpoint of both kingdoms. It is often emphasised by critics that in the 1997 referendum, only a minority of the overall Scottish electorate voted for devolution. Yet even in energetic democracies, many useful and important things have to be done on the backs of minorities. True, the first years of the Scottish legislature have been pretty wretched. Yet how could one expect that an entirely new body would spring fully-fledged from the egg, and at once behave in a mature fashion ? It seems premature to abandon hope for Scotland’s parliament, merely because of a poor showing in its inaugural term.
There is a real argument for suggesting that if the Scottish Parliament was granted more power, and especially more fiscal responsibility, it might behave in a more responsible fashion, and its voters would act more assertively to make it do so. If it possessed more authority on matters of substance, it might be less eager to indulge in gestures, and above all to give up dissipating its energies on old-fashioned class war issues. It was probably inevitable that some such follies would take place, when Scots were at last given some influence over their own destinies, with generations of media-fuelled grievances to address. But it is sad to see so much done and said in the Scottish parliament today which reflects retrospection, an obsession with the past, when it seems essential for the country and its legislature instead to look to the future. I still cherish hopes that with the passage of time, the Scottish parliament will come of age, and will eventually show itself worthy of the nation it represents. In the short term, albeit in the most back-handed fashion, it has already achieved one important purpose. Opinion polls today show that the Scottish people’s eagerness for independence, for absolute rule by their own politicians, has been dramatically dampened, perhaps even decisively checked, by their experience of the Edinburgh parliament thus far, and the recent European election results seem to confirm that shift of opinion.
Many people express dismay, indeed fierce anger, about the behaviour of their elected representatives. The £350 million bill for the Edinburgh parliament building has become the most potent symbol of the Scottish executive’s incompetence and profligacy. Scottish voters vent their disappointment to anyone who will listen, that so little of substance or tangible benefit to the country has so far emerged from the experiment in self-government. The Parliament’s most headline-catching acts have been gestures to address historic resentments against the old ruling class- the ban on foxhunting and land reform- rather than measures which seek to take Scotland forward into the 21st Century. The proposal seriously considered by MSPs, to impose sanctions upon any Scottish pub or restaurant which failed to allow breast-feeding in public, did almost as much damage to the image of the institution as the chronic corruption within the Scottish Labour Party. The behaviour of MSPs, the ‘McPygmies’ as some English newspapers have styled them, has prompted widespread derision in the south. In an age when political parties throughout Britain are dismayed by the poor quality of candidates willing to offer themselves for public service, this problem is especially evident in the first generation of MSPs. The Labour Party and the LibDems must accept considerable responsibility for their failure to send more good people from Westminster to assist the formative years of the Edinburgh Parliament. The Tories, of course, had no choice, because they had no Scots to offer. But the other parties professed enthusiasm for devolution, while woefully failing to provide practical support to assist the parliament’s birth pangs.