SCOTTISH NEWSPAPERS AND SCOTTISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

Abstract

Scotland is distinctive within the United Kingdom newspaper industry both because more people read papers and also because Scots overwhelmingly prefer to read home-produced organs. The London national press titles have never managed to penetrate and dominate in Scotland to the preponderant extent that they have achieved in provincial England and Wales. This is true both of the market for daily and for Sunday papers. There is also a flourishing Scottish local weekly sector, with proportionately more titles than in England and a very healthy circulation total. Some of the reasons for this difference may be ascribed to the higher levels of education obtaining in Scotland. But the more influential factor is that Scotland has retained distinctive institutions, despite being part of Great Britain for almost exactly three hundred years. The state church, the education system and the law have not been assimilated to any significant amount with their counterparts south of the border. In the nineteenth century in particular, religious disputes in Scotland generated a huge amount of interest. Sport in Scotland, too, is emphatically not the same as in England, whether in terms of organisation or in relative popularity. Additionally, the menu of major political issues in Scotland often has been and is quite divergent from England - for instance, the land question and self-government. Moreover, since the union of 1707, there has been no elected or representative forum within Scotland to debate these matters. As the government and the press in London both tended to ignore Scottish matters almost completely, the Scottish newspapers were the only available medium through which controversy and discussion on reforms and policy-formulation could be conducted. Scottish papers therefore tended to carry a great deal of material, both news and comment, which was specific to Scotland, and nowhere more so than in the sports pages. The creation of the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh in 1999 has been a boost for the Scottish press, since the deliberations of this body are not much reported in the national papers. But the Scottish parliament administers most of the internal domestic matters which affect Scotland, so there is naturally considerable interest among the citizens to be informed of proceedings there. The quality (i.e., non-tabloid) Scottish press has been diligent and thorough in meeting this obligation from the outset, so that they devote as much space to the parliament in Edinburgh as the equivalent national papers do to the parliament in Westminster. Despite the fact that ownership of the Scottish dailies has for most of the twentieth century been in the hands of non-Scots, there has not been any dilution of the heavy Scottish content these papers contain. Indeed this remote proprietorship may well have been advantageous, as in the case of the rejuvenation of the Scotsman in the mid-1950s under a Canadian owner. The Scottish press has a long history of willingness to innovate with new equipment, and this has persisted to the present, with use of e-mail and web-sites universal among the daily and Sunday papers, and spreading steadily through the local weeklies.