Fifty years ago this month, a group of leftwing Scots gathered in the Golden Lion hotel in Stirling for the inaugural conference of a new political party. The “Scottish Labour party” had formally split from Labour at the beginning of 1976, driven by disillusionment over the party’s timid proposals for a new Scottish assembly. They were led by the firebrand MP for South Ayrshire, Jim Sillars, who promised to take Scotland’s Labour tradition back to its roots in both socialism and home rule.
Sillars’ new party was a media sensation in Scotland, and quickly joined by public intellectuals such as Tom Nairn, Hamish Henderson and Neal Ascherson. It offered something new and exciting: a fusion of the two movements that were battling for Scotland’s soul in a decade that had already been defined by electoral clashes between Labour and the Scottish National party. The party struggled, however, to enthuse the working-class voters on whom Sillars had gambled his future.
It did attract a handful of Trotskyist activists from the International Marxist Group, and at the October 1976 conference, Sillars orchestrated a heavy-handed purge of the far left, causing proceedings to degenerate into near-violence. At one point, a member of the party’s national organising committee summoned up Ayrshire’s mining heritage against the “entryist” threat, yelling: “We should get our fucking pit boots on and wade into them!” Andy Burnham was not quite as forthright earlier this month, when, midway through the SNP’s conference in Aberdeen, he delivered his own speech in Motherwell, offering to cooperate on further devolution within Scotland. The conference itself was far more peaceful, the SNP having already shed its “fundamentalist” wing with the breakaway of Alex Salmond’s Alba party (which Sillars, it’s worth noting, also endorsed).
The National Economic Council meeting on Friday between Burnham, John Swinney and the Welsh first minister, Rhun ap Iorwerth, emphasised the shared agenda of three governments seeking to combine devolved power with reindustrialisation – precisely what the SLP was calling for in 1976. But the SLP, which never recovered from its public meltdown in Stirling, made another contribution to the cause that matters intensely to the relationship between Burnham and the SNP. Keen to make national self-determination palatable to socialists, Sillars’ party sought to remove any hint of separatism from its politics by embracing the new European Economic Community, arguing for “independence in Europe”.
With goods, people and services moving freely across borders, independence would no longer mean separation, but simply real equality between self-governing, co-dependent nations. After the SLP’s collapse, Sillars found his way into the SNP, rising through the ranks to become deputy leader in 1991. The SNP made some of its first breakthroughs in the 1970s as a Eurosceptic party, distinguishing itself from the three pro-EEC Westminster parties by campaigning against membership in 1975 with the slogan “No voice, no entry”.
But by the 1990s, it had completely reversed this position, helped by the new European Union’s growing emphasis on the rights of small nations and minority cultures. The SNP’s newfound Europeanism reflected and reinforced that of the country it came to govern. It was helped, too, by Scotland’s tendency to define itself against English politics, which became more Eurosceptic over the same period.
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