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In a situation of mass unemployment, some Scots looked for a scapegoat (as the Germans had done). The Catholic Irish were Scotland’s equivalent of the Jews. Extremist Protestant groups were established in Edinburgh and Glasgow; they were committed to reducing Catholic participation in public life. Surprisingly, the allegedly middle-class city of Edinburgh, and not working-class Glasgow, became the scene of street battles involving thousands of people in the mid-1930s.
The Protestant Action Society, under the leadership of John Cormack, won one-third of votes cast in the 1936 local elections in Edinburgh; three years earlier in Glasgow, Alexander Ratcliffe’s Scottish Protestant League won 23 per cent of the poll. This proved to be the high point of Protestant extremism; events overtook them. The prospect of war in Europe against Nazi Germany turned local politics into a mere sideshow. Moreover, if a war was to be fought for democracy, it would have been the utmost hypocrisy to support systematic discrimination against a part of the population on the basis of their ethnicity and faith.
Let’s dance away our problems
Organised opposition to welfare cuts or sectarian conflict were only some of the ways the workless reacted to the depression. One way out was escapism, in the form of the following:
Movies:
According to some estimates, 80 per cent of the young unemployed went to the cinema at least once a week.
Dancing:
This was the age of the dance hall. Scotland’s cities were struck by a dance craze in the 1920s and 1930s and the
palais de danse
was packed every night of the week.
Sport:
Dog racing and, of course, football were popular. Hillwalking and mountain climbing also became popular among the unemployed, with clubs like Craig Dhu, Ptarmigan and the Lomond emerging in the 1920s and 1930s. Cycling was another way out from the polluted cities. One cyclist from Dundee spoke of Saturday afternoons in which cycling clubs would gather at the gates of Camperdown Park like ‘great flocks of colourful birds’.
Incremental improvements
Bad as things were, there were some improvements in living conditions. The fall in food prices saw living standards improve for those who had work, but advances in nutrition, better health standards and housing legislation that increased the level of public sector accommodation and improved the supply of basic amenities worked together to improve living conditions even for the unemployed.
In the 1930s, the infant mortality rate in Aberdeen fell by over one-third in the age group 0 to 5 years, which put it on a par with Dundee, but still above Edinburgh. Children in Aberdeen who survived beyond their fifth year also experienced a small increase in weight and height. In 1928–29, a typical 5-year-old in Aberdeen would have weighed 18.3 kilograms (40.3 pounds) and measured 104.6 centimetres (41.2 inches); ten years later, the respective figures were 18.5 kilograms (40.7 pounds) and 106.7 centimetres (42 inches).
The increase in public sector housing was an important factor in bringing down the infant mortality rate. Between 1919 and 1939, two-thirds of new house building was in the public sector, compared to only 26 per cent in England. A move from an overcrowded, squalid house to a council flat was a dream come true for many slum dwellers.
As one Aberdeen tenant put it, ‘When we got a shift to Froghall Road we thought we were in a mansion.’
Council housing was of a much higher standard and better equipped with basic amenities, such as a bath, than that at the lower end of the private sector, but rents were higher. In Dundee, rents for council houses amounted to nearly half the average textile worker’s wage. So, only the better paid could afford the new homes. For the poor, the slum was still the only option.
Getting Back to Work
International events threw a lifeline to the economy. The rise of an aggressive and confrontational Fascism in Germany and Italy created tensions with the European democracies. War became a strong possibility in the late 1930s, which drove up armament production.
War materials of all kinds – from warships to tanks to uniforms – were needed, and Scotland was well placed to take advantage of this changing economic situation. Unemployment fell to around 15 per cent in 1939, and although this was 5 per cent higher than the UK average, people were begi
The revival of the Scottish economy only underlines the fact that war is good for business. But was war a blessing or a curse? On the one hand, it halted a process of change away from the Victorian economic model to the new consumer-based industries; on the other hand, it brought a welcome if temporary return to prosperity. The transition of the economy was postponed, but when it arrived in the decades after the Second World War, it would make things harder to bear.
Jerusalem Postponed: The Politics of the Interwar Years
The political order underwent a peaceful revolution in the interwar years in Scotland as the once-dominant Liberal Party imploded. The once-insignificant Labour Party had become the dominant political force in Scotland in the 1920s, but that dominance was eroded by the Tories in the crisis-ridden 1930s.
Fractures within the Liberal Party
For most of the 19th century, Scotland was dominated politically by the Liberal Party (see Chapter 14), but the First World War helped put an end to that. The war created divisions within the leadership and a feud developed between H.H. Asquith and Lloyd George, which continued into the immediate post-war years.
As a result of this feud, the Liberals split into two parties, and the impact was far-reaching:
National Liberals:
They allied themselves with the Tories (known in Scotland as the Unionists) and were led by Lloyd George.
The Liberal Party:
They were the true heir to the pre-1914 party and were led by Herbert Asquith.
The impact on the Liberal Party was far-reaching – they fought the followers of Lloyd George in 1918 and again in 1922 in the general elections.
The split had a number of effects that weakened the Liberal Party in the UK generally and in Scotland in particular:
Divisions led to expulsions and a loss of membership and finance.
The Irish vote, which had traditionally gone to the Liberals, was transferred to the Labour Party as a result of the savage way the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin had been put down by British forces while a Liberal government was in office. The Irish lost faith in the Liberals after that.
The Liberal Party also failed to co
The decision of the Tories in the 1922 general election to put the issue of protectionism to the electorate saw the Liberals come together to fight on the issue of free trade. Differences were forgotten as core Liberal beliefs were under threat. This began a process of healing, which was accelerated by Asquith’s failure to hold on to his seat in the 1924 general election, clearing the way for Lloyd George to become party chairman. However, by the time the divisions in the Liberal ranks were healed, it was too late; the political wilderness beckoned. The party won only 40 seats in the 1924 general election.
In contrast to the failing fortunes of the Liberals, both Labour and the Tories saw their support grow dramatically in Scotland in the 1920s.
The rise and fall of Labour
Labour had benefited from the electoral changes in 1918. Most of the new voters were working class, so that meant that Labour had a bigger potential pool of voters to draw on. In particular, women and Irish Catholics flocked to Labour in large numbers. The impact was seen in the 1922 general election, when the Labour Party won 10 out of 15 parliamentary seats in Glasgow. The successful MPs were dubbed by the press as the ‘Red Clydesiders’. By 1929, Labour was the largest party, wi
Although popular with Scottish voters, there was growing internal strife (sound familiar?) within Labour over the role of the leadership and the political direction the party was taking, particularly when in government. The experience of being part of a minority government in 1924 and again in 1929, dependent on the support of other parties to get legislation through Parliament, only added to the dissent within the Labour ranks.
Coming from some of the most disadvantaged parts of the UK, the Clydesiders wanted to see a much more determined attack on the problem of poverty, while the Labour leadership under Ramsay MacDonald placed more emphasis on making the party part of the mainstream of the political system. In practice, MacDonald’s approach meant reassuring the middle classes of the moderate nature of Labour’s economic and social policies. Thus, a growing chasm between left and right began to appear within the party – a chasm that, in time, became too large to bridge.
Matters came to a head during the lifetime of the second Labour minority government. As far as the Scottish left were concerned, all Labour seemed to be doing was propping up a capitalist system that had failed (the millions of unemployed people provided eloquent testimony to this point of view). The Labour government proved incapable of solving the economic crisis. As a result, MacDonald and Philip Snowden, the chancellor, decided to form a government of national unity with the Tories and Liberals – the great betrayal in Labour’s eyes.
After this, in 1932, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) decided to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, describing it as just another party of social reform. The breakaway of the ILP meant that Labour in Scotland had to rebuild itself almost from scratch because, in many ways, it had relied on the ILP for its organisation and ideas. How much it relied on the ILP can be gauged from the fact that in 1929 out of 68 Labour candidates in Scotland all but 1 were members of the ILP.
Although the leader of the ILP, James Maxton, was optimistic about the future of the new organisation, in reality disaffiliation consigned it to political oblivion. By the end of the decade, the ILP existed pretty much in name only.
And along came the Tories