SCOTTISH CATHOLICS AND THE BRITISH LEFT, 1918-1939

Abstract

At least up to 1918, the Liberal party was the chief repository of the Catholic working-class vote. Liberals advocated both Irish Home Rule and moderate social reform and so were an obvious pole of attraction to enfranchised and politically aware Catholic voters of Irish descent. Perhaps just as important, the only alternative in the two-party British political framework was the Conservative party (known after 1911 as the Unionist party in Scotland), which was antagonistic to both Irish national and Catholic interests. From 1885 down to 1914, only a minority of enfranchised Catholics were likely to vote regularly at elections. A community, the bulk of whose members were to be found at the lower end of the social scale, was hardly likely to be a deep depository of political consciousness. The everyday struggle for survival or else the flight from the harsh realities of life induced by alcohol or more benevolent opiates like sport sapped the energies of most working-class men in Scotland no less than elsewhere. Paradoxically it was the Irish issue which, in the first instance, drew working-class activists into Scottish and British politics. In the 1880s, their real loyalty was often reserved for the United Irish League (UIL), the British section of the Irish Home Rule Party, even though some campaigned for the Liberals in their home area during elections. Launched during the heyday of Charles Stewart Parnell in the 1880s, the UIL (initially known as the Irish National League) usually delivered the Catholic Irish vote to the Liberals, principally because they were thought most likely to grant Ireland home rule.1 In practice, little love was lost between Irish activists and their Liberal allies, who, in Scotland, tended to be less radical and more prounionist in sentiment than elsewhere, to the extent that a Liberal Unionist Party emerged in Glasgow during 1885-86.2 For three decades up to 1918, the UIL was a formidable force in several Scottish constituencies. Valuable political training was given to working-class activists who, in many cases, could put their skills to good use elsewhere. Without the intrusion of the Irish question into domestic British politics, it is unlikely that so many unskilled workers would have become involved in politics.3 Bodies like the UIL, along with social and recreational offshoots like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and football clubs, gave newly arrived immigrants an opportunity to display political and organisational talents which otherwise would have lain fallow. Another view might see the Irish question as a diversion and an irritant which replaced a working-class consciousness with a nationalist one and, as well as obstructing the rise of a socialist party, triggered off sectarian quarrels within the working-class. There must be some truth in this argument but, going by the lacklustre growth of socialism in areas where emigration or the Irish issue did not count as factors, one might just as easily conclude that, minus Ireland and its troubles, the end result would not have been a faster socialist breakthrough but instead a more stable and hegemonic Liberal party.