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Anyone who, in
years to come, wishes to know the essentials of the story of the SNP,
will find that there are some pretty clear milestones or landmarks in
that story. There is the underlying sentiment for nationhood, part
historical and part the legacy of nineteenth century liberal Europe’s
respect for national self-determination. Then there is the
organisational factor and the formation of the National Party,
followed by ups and downs over the years as the infant party struggled
to survive and strengthen. Obvious landmarks are the by-election
victories in Motherwell in 1945 and in Hamilton in 1967, with
election-fighting reaching a kind of plateau with the gaining of a
permanent Parliamentary presence in the 1970s. From that point we move
to devolution, and only time will tell if we are on a flowing current
to freedom or on the calmer surface of a duckpond.
Peter Lynch knows the Party,
having participated in many of its activities, and his book should now
be essential reading for all who seek to understand. His chapter
headings indicate an accurate and perceptive awareness of events and
their importance and he tells his story briskly and without fuss. He
is in fact one of these authors whose voice you can hear in your
imagination as you read his words. The trouble is, that most sentences
and paragraphs encourage some comment or observation, and a reviewer
must guard against writing the equivalent of a companion volume.
What we can do is to offer a few
footnotes to points
which Dr Lynch might have passed over with the light touch of a young
man while an older man with a memory jogged might wish to linger
awhile. He is wholly correct to see a dearth of money and
support as a constantly recurring difficulty, and he is so right in
seeing how the Party suffered as it tried to grow while Fascism
swaggered and brayed and battered all over Europe, and while the
British media lumped together as "Nationalists" most political
villains in the public eye. Against this background it should be clear
why the Party chose and has always maintained as its name Scottish
National Party. The choice was deliberate, and members might usefully
be reminded of why it was made. With similar logic one of our
recurring dissident groups in 1955 chose to be the Nationalist
Party of Scotland, and again there was significance in the choice.
The largest ever rival
organisation was Scottish Convention developing into the Covenant
Association whose comparative stature dwarfed the SNP throughout the
late ‘40s and early ‘50s, going a fair way to stifle the party, and
restricting it to mere survival until the Covenant’s course was run.
You can read of these matters as we trudged along what Dr Lynch calls
"the Long Road". One small item might be of interest. The dispute
between Covenant and Party focussed to a great extent about the
merits or otherwise of election-fighting. I have no witness, and l do
not know how far he had persuaded his colleagues but when in 1954 — on
the last occasion I saw him — I told John MacCormick that I had been
invited to be the SNP’s candidate in Stirling, he advised me to
delay acceptance, because the Covenant
Association, in a change of policy, would be
nominating candidates and entering the election field. It seemed to me
that this tended to confirm the long-term wisdom of the Scots National
League and its political descendants within the SNP.
Another group whose relations
with the Party were
sometimes a bit tense, was the Scots National Congress. Members of
this body were in due course excluded from the SNP, not because, as Dr
Lynch believes, it "began to resemble a political party" but
because its leaders had publicly appealed for help to Mr
Malenkov, current Soviet leader, and the SNP’s enemies
made gleeful use of this folly.
The Congress episode can
usefully remind us of the importance of personal relationships in our
story. Dr Lynch is splendidly right in his assessment of the damage
done by those he calls "wild men and women" all of whom were electoral
liabilities to the party.
Personality emerges
later as Dr Lynch examines the Party’s misery after 1979. He has in
one phrase put his finger on the cause of some of our worst times.
"Who was not elected
at the 1974 General Elections was almost as important as who was
elected". He is brave to have made his judgment public, and I hope he
will stick to it. For what it is worth I will always remember the
stricken look on the faces of some NEC colleagues when Douglas
Henderson summoned the newly-elected MPs to join him in a private
meeting to plan entry to Westminster. There were some impolitic egos
in the parliamentary group, and several bruised and frustrated egos in
the NEC, and the spreading hostility between the two laid down the
pattern for the bitter disciplinary fight of the early 80s. Attempts
to legislate a solution to the rivalry failed, as they were
bound to do. Observe how things run better now when the NEC is an
organisational body while the political campaign is carried by the
MSPs. That was always inevitable once a parliamentary group was
numerous enough.
Anyway, thanks Peter
for intelligent frankness on this and throughout your book.
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