Nationalist Parties - Professor Vernon Bogdanor FBA

ladies and gentlemen this is the fourth lecture in a series on the British political party's previous lectures have been on the three major parties the Conservatives labor and the Liberal Democrats parties which seek to govern at Westminster this lecture is on nationalist parties in Ireland Northern Ireland Scotland and Wales the non English parts of the United Kingdom whereas with Ireland parts of what was once the United Kingdom and at the end of the lecture I shall discuss why there has not been an English Nationalist Party and whether UK is or perhaps it might be better to say was in view of the tribulations of that party where the UK was an English Nationalist Party but first what is a nationalist party nationalist parties play a different role from the three major parties we have so far considered in two particular respects the first is that they do not seek and could not in any case achieve power on their own at Westminster and they could not do that because obviously the majority of Westminster constituencies are English so they can't win an election as the Conservatives Liberal Democrats and Labour hope to do indeed apart from the unionist parties of Northern Ireland they don't really wish to play any part in the affairs of Westminster except to secure the independence of their countries they are in a sense being sent to Westminster to say that they do not want to be there once the independence of their country has been secured they would of course no longer send MPs to Westminster now in the case of the shin Thane party in Ireland which in the 1918 general election won almost every seat in Ireland outside Ulster they went even further they refused to send any MPs to Westminster at all since they did not recognize its authority over Ireland they proceeded to set up their own parliament the Doyle in Dublin and the British government in turn refused to recognize that Parliament and fought a war to try to subdue it but in the end Ireland did achieve independence in 1922 and Irish nationalists regard the Parliament they set up in 1918 which from a British view was unlawful as a legitimate Irish parliament and today the modern Sinn féin party in Northern Ireland also refuses to recognise Westminster and its MPs do not take up their seats there now the second way in which the nationalist parties differ from the three major parties is that there are parties not of ideology but of identity the Scottish nationalists for example oppose the conservatives and labour not because they are too left-wing or to right-wing but because they are not Scottish enough and they seek and win supporters from all sides of the political spectrum from those in the northeast of Scotland who might otherwise vote conservative and from those in the Glasgow conurbation who might otherwise vote Labour the Labour Party have attacked them as tartan Tories while the Conservatives have called them socialists in disguise but these attacks missed the point they are both and neither and perhaps if Scotland did become independent the SNP might split into a left-wing Scottish party and a right-wing one in Ireland once it obtained independence the nationalist parties split not admittedly on economic issues but on a constitutional issue the issue of whether Ireland should be a republic or continue to recognize George v as the king of Ireland and that was the basis of the conflict between the two main parties in Ireland FINA Foyle and FINA gale in the early years of Irish independence but until they have achieved independence nationalist parties do not necessarily need to be united on the economic issues which form the staple diet of the political debate of the major parties they need to be united only on the need for the independence of their countries now the first nationalist parties which Britain new were in Ireland and the history of Ireland offers a graphic illustration of the problems and difficulties of a nationalist movement Winston Churchill once asked how is it that she Ireland has fourth generation after generation to stop the whole traffic of the British Empire to debate her domestic affairs something which perhaps to reason may would echo but perhaps the answer to Churchill's question was given by mr. Gladstone in the 19th century when he said the long vexed and troubled relations between Great Britain and Ireland exhibit to us the one and only conspicuous failure of the political genius of our race to confront and master difficulty and to obtain in a reasonable degree the main ends of civilized life now Ireland came to send MPs to Westminster as a result of the Act of Union of 1801 that act was secured by corrupt means and by a promise which was to be broken the Irish were promised that if they abandon their own Parliament Catholics in Ireland who of course formed then as they still do the vast majority of the population would be emancipated but Catholic emancipation was vetoed by George the third since he believed it was contrary to his coronation oath which required him to maintain the Protestant religion emancipation was not secured until 1829 and as so often in Irish Affairs concessions came too late to achieve goodwill despite Catholic emancipation and despite the fact that the majority in Ireland were Catholic the Church of Ireland the Church of the Protestant minority remained the established Church there until 1869 and between 1829 and 1869 there was of course the Great Famine in in which a million people died and a further million emigrated cutting the Irish population by between 20 and 25 percent the famine was blamed understandably but to some extent unfairly upon British rule but as the Queen said when she visited Ireland in 2011 with the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish it had been done differently or not at all now once household suffrage was secured in Ireland in 1885 it became clear that almost the whole of Catholic Ireland favoured if not independence at least Home Rule almost every constituency outside Ulster returned Irish nationalist MPs belonging to the Irish parliamentary party and this party held at least 80 seats out of 103 in Ireland at every general election between 1885 and 1914 and for much of that period it exerted a virtual stranglehold on Westminster politics now Ireland was of course governed during this period by conservative or liberal administrations but whichever it was the key Irish officials were bound to be in the hands of the party which had only minority support in Ireland this meant that Irish representatives could play no part in the government of their country the constitutional implication of the Anglo Irish Union of 1800 had been the legal equality of Ireland with Great Britain but to most Irish people the relations seemed one of subordination now when in 1884 Gladstone was preparing to expand the franchise his Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt feared that there would be declared to the world in larger print what we all know to be the case that we hold Ireland by force and by force alone as in the days of Cromwell only that we are obliged to hold it by a force 10 times larger than he found necessary we have never governed and we Nev shall govern Ireland by the good of its people in 1908 at a time when the Liberals were reforming the government of Ireland an American commentator said while Scotland is governed by scotch men in accordance with Scottish ideas Ireland has been governed by Englishmen and until recently in accordance with English ideas and a leading liberal John Morley told an audience in Manchester in 1902 that the government of Ireland was and I quote the best machine that has ever been invented for governing a country against its will the administration of Ireland was primarily by Protestants and men committed to the Union an Irish magistrate reminiscing in 1951 gave a not unfair verdict when he declared that we are governed from London by people who know little about our country but who ruled it fairly though in the English interests through an oligarchy in Dublin and Ireland was an exception in the developed Empire in being ruled not with the consent of the governed but paternalistically and two paternalism was added a mixture of coercion now in 1885 which was the first election in Ireland after household suffrage the leader of the Irish party Charles Parnell declared there was just one plank in his party's program and that was Home Rule that was a clear policy but the party faced a tactical problem should it cooperate with the Liberals or retain complete independence from both British parties cooperating with the Liberals offered the hope of securing Home Rule through parliamentary methods but at the cost of compromises which might make the party more remote from the people it represented and indeed the more the Irish party got bogged down at Westminster the greater the gap between its MPs and the public in Ireland now some in the Irish Party repudiated alliance with the Liberals which they regard as a sacrifice of independence and they said the Irish party should act as an independent opposition putting pressure on both parties the argument between these two schools was never really resolved but in 1885 the Irish party held a balance in a Honnold parliament and sought to discover which of the two British parties would concede the most and the consequence was Gladstone committing liberals to Home Rule and as a result in - later hung Parliament's in 1892 and from 1910 the Irish party was in alliance with liberals sustaining liberal government's in power in the hope of getting Home Rule and the influence of the Irish party was seen most graphically after 1910 when liberals depended on them for their majority because the Irish refused to support the liberal budget lloyd George's famous people's budget of nineteen nine which was full of radical proposals that had been turned down by the House of Lords and the Irish said they wouldn't support the budget unless liberals agreed to curtail the absolute veto of the House of Lords and the outcome was the 1911 Parliament act which substituted for the absolute veto a mere suspensory veto that is a time-limited veto and that still exists but it was reduced from two sessions to one session in the Parliament act in 1949 so the Irish party has left a permanent mark upon British politics and upon the British constitution by limiting the power of the House of Lords a limitation which of course still remains the Irish party left a further mark on British politics it was the first party which introduced stringent party discipline into our politics it enforced a kind of democratic centralism on its MPs of a kind which I suspect mr. Corbyn would envy the Irish party was also the first to organize the payment of MPs it paid a salary to its MPs and that was necessary to enable the small traders and farmers on whom it depended to sit in Parliament in the days before state payment of MPs and it used this payment of members to enforce discipline because in return for the payment candidates had to sign an undated letter pledging themselves not publicly to oppose either inside or outside Parliament any decision reached by that party even if the decision went against the MPs constituency interest and the MP would be required to resign if a majority of the party thought the pledge had been broken the pledge was in the following form I pledged myself that in the event of my election to Parliament I will sit act and vote with the Irish parliamentary party and if at a meeting of the party convened upon du notice especially to consider the question it be determined by resolution supported by a majority of the Irish party that I have not fulfilled the above pledges I hereby undertake to resign my seat so we see that momentum is not a recent invention the problem with such a disciplined party was that because it muffled genuine differences he had tended to stifle debate and its later years the parties seemed to lack vitality nevertheless it remained on the whole a parliamentary party adhering to constitutional methods it accepted that Parliament was the institution through which redress of Irish grievances was to be obtained and that influence has remained even after the collapse of the Irish party and can be seen in a liberal parliamentary character of the independent Irish State but perhaps the party was only conditionally constitutional it's great leader Charles Parnell declared in 1889 that if our constitutional movements were to fail if it became evident that we could not by parliamentary action and continued representation Westminster restore to our land the high privilege of self-government I for one would not continue to remain for 24 hours longer in the House of Commons at Westminster the most advanced section of Irishman as well as the least advanced have always understood that the parliamentary party was to be a trial and that we did not ourselves believe in the possibility of maintaining for all time and incorruptible and independent Irish representation at Westminster now after the death of panel in 1891 there was dissociation in Irish nationalism between the constitutional element and the popular element Parnell alone had been able to reconcile the two the Irish Party got bogged down at Westminster the Liberals seemed to absorbed them and they would seem no longer an independent source in Ireland they came to be outflanked by a more radical party the shin Fane party now the shin Fane party was formed in 1905 the words shin Fane mean ourselves alone and the aim of shin Fane by contrast with the Irish party came to be complete independence and Republic and shin Fane was to replace the Irish party after the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 even though it was arising which view in Ireland supported but our opinion was revolted by what it saw the brutal British method of suppressing it by executing its ringleaders and in the next general election in 1918 shin vane 173 of the hundred and one Irish constituencies and the Irish Party just seven the rest of the seats primary and Ulster were won by unionists in 1921 Ireland won her independence and the 26 counties which formed the Irish Free State now the Irish Republic ceased to send MPs to Westminster Winston Churchill declared mischievously that the two supreme services which Ireland had rendered to the M were her accession to the Allied cause at the beginning of the war and her withdrawal from the Imperial Parliament at its end Islands withdraw from Westminster was a benefit to Britain since it made a hung parliament much less likely between 1885 and 1914 four out of the eight general elections resulted in a hung parliament in which the Irish held the balance of power now the settlement of Ireland provided for the partition of Ireland six counties in Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland but some in Ireland refused to accept partition and they formed the core of a new shin vein party which still exists demands a united Ireland and fact selections in both parts of Ireland now the independence of Ireland did not resolve the Irish question which now shifting to Northern Ireland where it's remained and the conflict there between the majority unionists predominantly Protestant and the minority nationalists predominantly Catholic and again this conflict was graphically described by Winston Churchill in a book he wrote shortly after the first world war he said then came the great war every institution almost in the world was strained great empires had been overturned the whole map of Europe has been changed the mode of thought of men the whole outlook on affairs the grouping of parties all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall we see again the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and tyrone emerging once again the integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the Cataclysm which has swept the world and perhaps to reason may thinks the same now the conflict in Northern Ireland is an existential one in that it's a conflict as to whether it should exist at all there is not the basic consensus which is needed for a democratic state to be effective to the question do you want to remain in the United Kingdom the two communities give different answers the Nationalists say no they say they belong to the Irish nation and that being Irish is incompatible with being British but the unionists say yes they say that they too are Irish but being Irish is perfectly compatible with being British just as Scottish unionists say that being Scottish is perfectly compatible with also being British so the unionists say they belong to the British state and the British nation so the conflict a fundamental one over national identity now it's sometimes wrongly said that Britain is composed of Four Nations indeed those who believe that devolution would lead to the breakup of Britain said that with devolution Britain was fast becoming for nations and a funeral but neither of the two nations represented in Northern Ireland sorry neither of the two traditions represented in Northern Ireland believes that Northern Ireland is a nation they differ on which nations Northern Ireland is a part of a unionist by definition cannot favor an independent Northern Ireland but says that she belongs to the British nation and the Ulster covenant of 1912 which insisted upon the separateness of Ulster from the rest of our land sought not independence but the need to preserve for Ulster their equal citizenship in the United Kingdom the claim of unionism in Northern Ireland is not the independence but for equal citizenship so Britain is not for nations but three nations together with a contested province which is according to your viewpoint either part of the British nation or part of the Irish nation and that makes the conflict in Northern Ireland particularly intractable it is not a conflict over economics but over nationality and religion or perhaps in Ireland nationality and religion are many different names for the same thing and this means that the conflict unlike an economic conflict is not bargainable an economic conflict can be settled by a fairer division of the spoils that is not possible with a conflict over nationality or religion the unionist seem to be in a permanent majority in Northern Ireland and this means that by contrast with Westminster there's no possibility of an alternative government and alternation of power is not possible in the old Northern Ireland Parliament governed by majority rule often known Stormont which sat from 1921 to 1972 until 1969 unionists never won fewer than 32 of the 52 seats now democracy and the rest of Britain is fueled by alternation of power or the possible alternation of power and governments are to some extent deterred from implementing extreme measures for fear that they will be setting a precedence which their opponents will be able to use there was no such fear in Northern Ireland and when the Northern Ireland Parliament from 1921 to 1972 was based on majority rule the unionists tolerated a policy of discrimination in housing and employment now with the province divided between two seemingly intractable communities there seems no middle ground no floating vote in the center for which the parties can compete there's no incentive for the unionist party to seek nationalist votes they won't win them and similarly in nationalist parties won't win unionist votes the only competition is within a rather than between the two communities and the competition is a word to outflank another party within the community by saying that it's not tough enough in representing the community so this means a competition towards the extremes centrifugal rather than centric so in the unionist camp the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party often called the official unionists have been pushed aside by the more militant Democratic Unionist Party founded by the Reverend Ian Paisley while on the nationalist side the more moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party has been pushed aside by the more militant Shin fain party there is a competitive party system but only within the two communities not between them and because the main issue in northern aound has been the border the British parties cannot compete successfully for votes there since 1974 when the Ulster Unionist broke with the Conservatives the two major parties labour and the Conservatives have not been able to win seats in Northern Ireland for the most part they have not tried now when the alliance between the Ulster Unionists and conservatives broke since then there have been one or two conservative candidates in Northern Ireland but they've been very unsuccessful and the Conservatives have not been able to establish a permanent organisation in the province there was in the past a Northern Ireland Labour Party which remarkably until 1949 had no policy on the constitutional issue of the border but pressed by the voters the Northern Ireland Labour Party declared in 1949 that it was a unionist party and this lost at the chance of securing the votes of the Catholic working-class in 1974 the Northern Ireland Labour Party supported a strike by Protestant workers which brought down the power sharing executive set up by conservative and labour governments and the Labour Party then ceased to give it a financial Svensson the Liberal Democrats do have a sister party in Northern Ireland the alliance party which is a bi confessional party and seeks to win support from both communities though its support comes mainly from middle-class and professional people the British government introduced proportional representation for most elections in Northern Ireland in the 1970s in the hope that this would strengthen the Alliance Party which occupy the center ground but there isn't actually much of a center ground in Northern Ireland and one leader of the Democratic Unionist Party Sami Wilson gave the new leader of the alliance party in 2001 the most damning insult he could think of he called him you Guardian reader you and the Alliance you won't be surprised to hear has never gained more than 12% of the vote in Northern Ireland and currently has no seats in Westminster at all now Scottish nationalism is and always has been quite different from the Irish variety admittedly the union with Scotland in 1707 was secured as that in Ireland in part by corrupt means but the two unions had a very different psychological impact and Gladstone believed that by contrast with Ireland English policy had achieved no triumph so great as the union between England and Scotland there was a difference between Scotland and Ireland in their emotional response to union with England the union with Scotland by contrast to that in Ireland came about with broad consent as a bargain between two autonomous teams of representatives freely negotiating and the union sought to preserve what were then the Scot that the main and central institutions of Scottish civil society the Kirk and the legal system and indeed the Church of Scotland remains the established church in Scotland and the monarch takes an oath to preserve it upon her accession the union with Ireland by contrast was not a treaty or contract freely made between two independent states but was imposed on the Irish who initially resisted it religion which United Scotland divided Ireland and the British party system as we have seen could not secure a foothold in a country dominated by sectarian divisions the union with Scotland secured the rights of Presbyterians whereas the union with Ireland had failed to secure the rights of Catholics so the outcome was that while the Scottish Union proved compatible with a sense of nationality in Scotland the Irish Union seemed in conflict with it now of course in the 21st century the Kirke is no longer as important a symbol as it was in the 18th and in the 20th century governments gradually assumed responsibility for economic and social policy and some Scots came to feel that in consequence their country was being neglected by administration's centered in distant London in 1934 the Scottish National Party the SNP was formed at its foundation it was a Home Rule Party but shortly afterwards it became an explicitly separatist party committed to independence it succeeded in winning odd seats in by-elections but it did not win a seat in a general election until 1970 but shortly after that the Scottish political landscape was totally transformed by the coming on line of North Sea oil which had been discovered in the 1960s the slogan it's Scotland's oil was to prove a very powerful one for the SNP and in retrospect the period of the mid 1970s would have been the most propitious time for an independent Scotland based on oil because as a result of the discovery of oil in the North Sea it seemed no longer the case that the union with Scotland sorry that the union with England was a precondition of Scotland's economic health the discovery of oil altered the whole framework within which the economic implications of Independence had been discussed in the weeks following the February 74 election a report prepared by an economic adviser of the Scottish office released under Freedom of Information provisions in 2005 suggested that an independent Scotland would enjoy a large budgetary surplus and in its currency I quote would become the harvest in Europe with the exception perhaps of the Norwegian kroner in consequence and I quote Scottish banks could expect to find themselves in undated with a speculative inflow of foreign funds moreover Scottish incomes per head would increase substantially an independent Scotland could use the oil revenues towards development fund as the Norwegians were to do the British government by contrast used it for current spending partly to pay for increased unemployment benefits in the 1980s North Sea oil provided a cushion for Margaret Thatcher's economic policies but the SNP argued this was a wasteful use of a valuable resource and the governments of Margaret Thatcher served to reinforce nationalist feelings there was a further factor which helped the SNP Britain's entry into the European Economic Community as the EU then was in 1973 because that would guarantee to an independent Scotland access to English and Continental markets since other member states of the EU could not impose tariffs against her in addition as the major producer of oil in Western Europe Scotland could expect to have political influence in Europe out of all proportion to her modest size and she would benefit from having her own European Commissioner rather than having to rely on the indirect representation secured by a British Commissioner but without independence Scotland could appear even more remote and peripheral in Europe today however it would seem that much of the oil has already been exploited so an independent Scotland would have much greater difficulty in securing budgetary equilibrium now it is not surprising that because of the oil in the general election of February 1974 the SNP seven of Scotland seventy seats in the second election of that year in October it won 11 of 71 seats gaining 30 percent of the vote by far the highest vote up to that time of any Nationalist Party in Western Europe in October 1974 it was also second in a further 42 seats including 35 of the Labour Party's 41 seats if the SNP could manage a further swing of 5% it would win another 16 seats so the SNP was threatening Labour's Scottish heartlands and without support in Scotland it would be very difficult for labour to win an overall majority in Britain as a whole so it's hardly surprising that the Labour government in the 1970s produced proposals for devolution to Scotland and I have to say probably as an afterthought for Wales as well but in 1979 in the referendums devolution failed to achieve sufficient support and in the general election of that year the SNP fell back now the success of the SNP in Scotland was a clear indication of the weakening of class politics there in 1967 one or thority on elections are declared that class is the basis of British politics all else is embellishment and detail but since the 1970s that has gradually ceased to be the case and part of the reason for that was disillusioned towards the two main parties who seemed not to be able to resolve Britain's economic problems nor to increase Britain's standing in the world economic failures seem particularly relevant to Scotland which had suffered persistent unemployment and net immigration particularly in the west of Scotland with accompanying poor social and environmental conditions to cure unemployment and migration Scotland needed a higher rate of growth but neither labor nor conservative governments seemed able to achieve this now there was disillusion in Britain as a whole and in England the beneficiaries of disillusion tended to be liberals but in Scotland it was the SNP and that was because the acts of Union as we have seen buttress the sense the Scottish nationality because Scotland retained her separate institutions so reactions to the faders of government would be different in Scotland from those in England and the SNP proved to be a powerful pressure group for Scottish interests in February 1974 labour governed as a minority for seven months in October it secured a majority of three but was soon that was soon whittled away through by-election losses and defections labour therefore was dependent upon the SNP and the SNP was not slow in claiming benefits to Scotland in addition to devolution labour was offered many other goodies labour doubled the regional employment premium it gave Edinburgh and Leith development area status it established a British National Oil Corporation in Scotland and civil service jobs were moved to Scotland in consequence in addition a Scottish development agency was established together with a center for oil drilling technology rail closures were halted and the modernization of the Glasgow underground was agreed but following the defeat of devolution in 1979 there would be 18 years of Conservative government 11 of them under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher these years of Conservative government were to prove highly unpopular in Scotland where the Conservatives were distinctly in the minority in particular the Thatcherite philosophy of competitive market individualism proved an affirmative the Scots who claimed that their philosophy gave much more emphasis to ideas of community Margaret Thatcher could on occasion be insensitive to Scotland which she saws an outpost of a dependency culture reliant on public subsidies handouts and benefits what Scotland needed in her view at least even more than the rest of the country was a bracing dose of free-market policies and she tended to brush Scottish objections as aside in her memoirs she declares that the union with Scotland and I quote was inevitably dominated by England by reason of its greater population the Scots being an historic nation with a proud past will inevitably resent some expressions of this fact from time to time that was perhaps an understatement the Scots particularly resented the reform in local government finance in the late 1980s the community charged popularly known as the poll tax which was tried out in Scotland before the rest of Britain rates of refusal to pay were much higher in Scotland than in England and the SNP gained support by urging non-payment other Thatcherite policies such as privatization deregulation and opting out of local authority control crude far less popular in Scotland than in England and Margaret Thatcher had to conclude sadly in her memoirs that there was no tartan Thatcherite revolution during the years of conservative government conservative majorities in Britain in four successive general elections 1979 1983 1987 and 1992 were matched by labour majorities in Scotland and the Labour Party argued that the Conservative government had no legitimacy in Scotland since the Conservatives were in a minority there and the majority of Scots were against it but this argument was to rebound against labour because it was a double-edged argument because the SNP response was that an independent Scotland would not have to put up with Thatcher ism or Conservative government's at all labour the SNP said could not combat Thatcherism since even though it was the majority party in Scotland the Conservatives will majority party in Britain and labor was tied to the Westminster system but if the Westminster government had no legitimacy in Scotland was that not a strong case for independent an independent Scotland and the SNP could combat Thatcherism much more effectively than labour since an independent Scotland would hardly ever be conservative the Labour Party's response was devolution that Labour argued would protect Scotland from Thatcherism since domestic policy would then be in Scottish hands for that reason so one Labour leader insisted devolution and I quote would kill Scottish nationalism stone-dead and the policy of devolution was also fuelled by memories of Ireland where the failure to grant Home Rule had been said to have caused more extreme nationalism but of course the evolution did not kill Scottish nationalism stone-dead from the time the Scottish Parliament was established the SNP proved the main opposition to labour they would almost certainly be returned as the government in Scotland when Scottish labor became unpopular and that happened in 2007 when an SNP minority government took office labour had hoped that proportional representation used for elections to the Scottish Parliament would at least prevent the SNP from being able to form a majority government but that hope too was disappointed when in 2011 the SNP won an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament and claimed a mandate for an independence referendum David Cameron wisely in my view conceded that referendum and what happens if you don't have been recently shown in Catalonia now a referendum held in 2014 saw independence defeated by fifty-five percent of the vote to 45 percent nevertheless it led to a surge in SNP support and in the 2015 general election the unionist parties were wiped out in Scotland the SNP 156 of the 59 seats albeit on just 50 percent of the vote the distortions of the first-past-the-post system working in the party's favour in the 2017 election however the SNP fell back winning just 35 seats on 37 percent of the vote even so it remains over-represented because it won over 50 percent of the seats on under two fifths of the Scottish vote now the SNP like UK in England seems to appeal most of all to the constituency of the Left Behind by social and economic change in the areas of the first Industrial Revolution marked by the decline of heavy industry in particular west central belt of Glasgow an area that has never really recovered from industrial decline and the consequential loss of jobs for the semi skilled and unskilled there's a sharp cleavage in Scotland as in the rest of Britain between those who have the skills to benefit from globalization and those who have not that was apparent and the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 voters in the normally Labour supporting west central belt of Scotland around Glasgow and in Dundee voted for independence while SNP voters in middle-class errors such as Aberdeenshire Angus and Perth sure voted against it voters in West Dunbartonshire which has one of the lowest life expectancies in Scotland voted yes to independence voters in East Dunbartonshire which has one of the highest life expectancies in Scotland voted no the SNP is stronger amongst the young than amongst the elderly and is a fervently yura file party though that is a comparatively recent development because in the first year peon referendum in 1975 the SNP oddly in view of the advantages Scotland had to gain from Europe the SNP was the only party in Scotland to advocate leaving the European community and the worry then was that a constitutional crisis would be caused if England and the United Kingdom as a whole voted to stay while Scotland voted to leave now today of course the war is the opposite but while England and the United Kingdom have voted to leave Scotland has voted to stay but an independent Scotland seeking to join the EU would no longer enjoy frictionless trade with the rest of the United Kingdom's the position would be different from the 1970s and it would presumably lose the benefit of the rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and probably be required to join the eurozone that would mean reducing its budget deficit to 3% and is currently around 9% of GDP the public spending cuts needed to achieve that reduction would be so severe as to make George Osborne appear like Santa Claus so in my view brexit makes Scottish independence less rather than more likely now Welsh nationalism is different both from Scottish and from Irish nationalism in Wales there was no act of Union but the country was incorporated into England by acts of Henry the eighth in 1536 and 1543 there was a strong Welsh national consciousness which developed in the late 19th century but it's ought not independence but recognition of wellness and in particular religious equality for the Welsh where the majority community was nonconformist not Anglican Wales sought equality within the United Kingdom not separation the constitutional issue a Welsh Home Rule divided liberals who were the majority party in Wales before the first world war North Wales was sympathetic but industrializing South Wales was not fearing that Wales would be cut off from its markets in England when in the 1890s Lloyd George tried to mount a campaign for a wealth Parliament he met with a stinging rebuff from South Wales and was defeated but although divided on Home Rule Wales seemed United in seeking recognition for wealth cultural aspirations and religious distinctiveness they sought recognition of their status rather than as with the Irish separate development there was no equivalent in Wales of Irish conditions there were no memories of famine no forced emigration and no absentee landlords so Welsh nurse was to be achieved not through separation or exclusion as with the Irish but through recognition by the English of Welsh claims so the focus was less on a wealth Parliament than on national educational institutions and the disestablishment of the Welsh Church the former proved easier to attain than the latter in 1889 and Intermediate Education Act made Welsh count as the first local educational authorities in Britain under a system that was later to be adopted in England in 1902 and then in 1893 a charter was granted the University of Wales and so the Welsh educational system was in the process of becoming a national system the first and most striking expression in institutional terms of the reawakened consciousness of Welsh nationhood but disestablishment of the wealth church was much more contentious and was not enacted until 1914 and came into effect in 1920 now the Welsh Nationalist Party applied kumari was founded in 1925 and in its earliest years it was primarily a pressure group seeking the revival of the Welsh language and this land the language issue gave rise to an acute dilemma for wealth nationalists because wealth was foken only by about around 20% always today spoken only by around 20% of the wealth population very much of a minority so whereas in Scotland the symbols of nationhood United the country in Wales the prime symbol of nationhood language was divisive and if language was a test of wellness around 80% of the population was not Welsh at all so applied Comrie had to decide whether its main aim was to seek restoration of the Welsh language a policy which inevitably had only a minority appeal or of a Welsh parliament in which Welsh speakers would be in the minority and opponents of the language argued that it was a product of a dying culture which should be left to die and plaid company as I said began as a movement to preserve the language it was almost a cultural conservation society and as late as 1962 the party's first president Saunders Lewis said that the language was the only political question deserving of a Welshman's attention at the present time and then it was more important than self-government but in 1968 applied camry adopted a policy of bilingualism but even this policy was divisive in Wales and the party has not been able to secure extensive support in every part of Wales its support is mainly derived from what might be called Welsh Wales the Welsh speaking counters of the north and west primarily Carnarvon and Marianas plight Cumbria is also a distinctively left-wing party more so than the SNP and while the SNP emphasizes nationhood plied Cumbria emphasizes culture community and decentralization now in the devolution referendum in Wales in 1979 it was defeated by a massive four to one vote but in 1997 it secured just over percent of the vote because in addition to welsh-speaking Northwest Wales the welsh-speaking heartland it also secured and supported the industrial Wales of the valleys the former coal field areas so there was a very small majority for the assembly but the majority in 1997 narrow though it was did show a marked increase in the sense of Welsh identity since 1979 and there is evidence that this sense of identity has grown further since 1997 and support for the assembly is almost certainly greater than it was then and of course in Wales unlike Scotland there seems little danger of devolution leading to independence now I have so far dealt in this lecture with Ireland Scotland and Wales but what about England by far the largest component of the UK with 85 percent of its population does it do have a nationalist party now until recently the answer would have been a categorical no the English of course have always seen themselves as a non philosophical nation and highly resistant to defining Englishness so it's always been a puzzle in 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote an essay of national character in which he said the English of any people in the universe have the least of a national character and unless this very singularity may pass for such in one of the Henry James novels the tragic news a Henry James of course is an American he makes his hero feel and I quote the sense of England a sort of apprehended revelation of his country which laid on him a hand that was - ghostly to press and yet somehow - urgent to be light more recently and English interviewee told a researcher I just wished that Scotland would bloody well hurry up and become independent so that everyone would shut up and people would stop doing all this stupid research about bloody national identity it's very English view now part of the reason for the English unwillingness to define their nationhood is that for many in the past England Britons seem to be one and the same in 1924 the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin speaking at the annual dinner of the Royal Society of st. George confessed to a feeling of satisfaction and profound thankfulness that I may use the word England without some fellow at the back of the room shouting out Britain Bolden's liberal predecessors Prime Minister askwith is buried near Oxford and his grave records the fact that he was and I quote Prime Minister of England though he always sat for a Scottish constituency in 1965 the historian AJP Taylor in the preface to a volume of the Oxford history of England which I suppose should really been called the Oxford history of britain wrote that when the Oxford history of England was launched a generation ago England was still an all-embracing word it's meant indiscriminately England and Wales Great Britain the United Kingdom and even the British Empire foreigners used it as the name of a great power and indeed continue to do so so until recently there seemed no need for a special English nationalism it could be subsumed under British nationalism indeed for many it was the same thing and because England was so dominant in the United Kingdom there was no need to beat the drum or blow the bugle if you're securely in charge there's no need to remind others of the fact and indeed it could be counterproductive because a strong assertion of English identity threaten the union with Scotland by reminding the Scots of their subordinate position but English identity has been strengthened both by devolution to the non-english parts of the United Kingdom and by brexit in 1997 John Major warned of this he said Labour's policies of devolution would assure as night follows day raise a spectra of nationalism in England market Thatcher wrote of the danger of Scotland awakening a resentful English nationalism which questions other aspects of present arrangements which Scots themselves take for granted and William Hague her successor as Conservative leader warned in 1999 that Scottish nationalism was dangerous enough but there was an even more dangerous specter around the corner' extreme English nationalism and devolution has led to the English becoming more aware of the differences between Englishness and Britishness the English are beginning now to ask themselves what does it mean to be English they are beginning to ask the English question why should Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland have their own Parliament's but not England is not a symmetrical devolution unfair to the English England seemed full of karma Muir become a mere residual had kind of void it is what of left what is left of the United Kingdom once the rest of the United Kingdom has been given devolution so English nationalism can appear a kind of nationalism by default were to become stronger it could threaten the United Kingdom for unlike Scottish or Welsh nationalism it is not the nationalism of a minority seeking secession but the nationalism of a majority now the second factor that has fuelled English nationalism is brexit England has in recent years been more skeptical of European integration in Scotland in Scotland Europe was seen as an enabler of independence in England it was more often seen as a threat to independence whereas Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain in 2016 England voted for brexit with London being the only region to vote for remain the satirist David Frost and Anthony Jay wrote perhaps unfairly but perhaps presently in the 1970s millions of words have been spoken and written about impediments to our joining the Common Market none at all about an obstacle more overwhelming than any of them the blunt fact is that the English don't like foreigners now how his English nationalism to be expressed despite what I've said support for an English Parliament remains very much a minority concern the English seem not terribly interested Disraeli once said that England and perhaps he meant Britain is in England was governed not by logic but by Parliament and for the moment it seems that while the English seemed prepared to accept devolution in Scotland and Wales they do not seek it for themselves there does not seem as yet majority support for an English Parliament though that could change but do the English have to answer the English question one party that says they do is you Kipp perhaps the nearest we have to an English Nationalist Party and you keep does favor an English Parliament despite its current travails you keep is without question the most successful minor party in British history indeed it is arguable that without you Kipp Britain would not brexit would not be occurring without you Kipp arguably brexit would not be occurring so it deserves to be considered as part of my next lecture on minor parties but perhaps the last word should rest with a short poem by Kipling and you will have to decide that whether when he says England he means Britain Kipling said this if England was what England seems and not the England of our dreams but only patty brass and paint how quick we drop her but she [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 18,148

Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, nationalism, nationalist parties, political parties, politics, political history, uk politics, uk political parties, vernon bogdanor, Irish Question, IRA, Irish nationalist party, 1974, SNP, scottish nationalist party, Scottish Question, 1998, Devolution, Legislation

Id: 2JjuKkqDN0g

Length: 60min 4sec (3604 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/reph]

Following his prior lectures on the Conservatives, Labour, and Liberals, this lecture concisely covers the goals and evolution of the main nationalist parties in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England.