Back to the future: 1979-1989
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The SNP's occupation of Edinburgh's old Royal High School

The '79 Group and the SNP in the early 1980s.

Essay

On 16 October 1981, six members of the Scottish National Party (SNP), including former MP Jim Sillars and the party's fundraiser Ian Moore, broke into the Old Royal High School building on Calton Hill in Edinburgh.

Their intention was to read aloud a political declaration inside the school's debating chamber. The action was designed to be the first in a wider campaign of civil disobedience to protest unemployment and highlight the need for self-government in Scotland. The High School building, which had sat empty since the 1960s, was selected by the party because it was the proposed location for the Scottish Assembly that was rejected in a controversial 1979 referendum just two years before.

The SNP campaign had been formulated in the wake of twin losses in both the referendum and the general election that followed it, which saw the party lose nine of its 11 seats in Parliament. Reeling from those experiences, the party entered the 1980s in a state of disarray, with the ideological and strategic disagreements that had been kept under control by the shared goals of winning elections and creating the Assembly breaking into the open.

The 79 Group

The conflict within the SNP was most visibly evident in the emergence of factions within the party. Most prominent among these was the '79 Group', whose ranks included future party leader Alex Salmond and Kenny McCaskill, as well as former MP Margo MacDonald and former Independent Labour Party MP Jim Sillars, who joined the SNP in 1980. The group believed that the setbacks at the end of the 1970s had demonstrated the need in the party for a more left-wing orientation in the 1980s and a greater emphasis on protest politics to complement the SNP's long-standing focus on winning elections.

While the 79 Group found little initial support within the rank-and-file party membership, by the time of its annual conference in 1981 its stock had risen significantly. This rise was reflected in both the election of Sillars as the party's Vice Chair and Salmond as a member of its National Executive Committee and the adoption by the party of resolutions backed by the 79 Group calling for a 'real Scottish resistance' that would include 'political strikes and civil disobedience on a mass scale'.

Planned act of occupation

The first acts of the resistance were to take place in Autumn 1981. At the meeting of the party's National Council held in September, Sillars provided detailed plans to the SNP leadership for the Calton Hill action, which he had previously outlined to the SNP National Assembly: 'My proposal in brief was that the Party organises an attempt to prevent the Royal High being used for anything other than a parliament; that we … occupy the building; that we seek to hold a debate on unemployment in the Assembly chamber, and that we declare the building to be 'in waiting' of a sovereign Scottish parliament … Our action would focus attention on the constitutional issue; remind the Scots of Westminster's contempt for our democratic decisions; and link the need for an independent parliament to the provision of solutions for our major crisis of industrial collapse and mass unemployment.' (From minutes of National Council meeting, 5 September 1981).

At the time, some in the SNP expressed reservations about the occupation plan, largely because it appeared to reflect a preference for the devolution of power from the Westminster Government to Scotland rather than Scottish independence from the United Kingdom. Sillars' report detailing the plan, however, was accepted by the Council and the party moved forward with organising a mass rally that was to be held in conjunction with the occupation the following weekend.

On the appointed day in October, Sillars, Moore, and their 79 Group compatriots — Chris McLean, Douglas Robertson, Steven Butler and Graeme Purves — entered the school but were quickly arrested by police and charged with vandalism. Sillars, who injured his arm breaking a window while attempting to gain entry into the school, cancelled the mass demonstration that was to follow the occupation and the abortive occupation received largely negative — if not scathing — coverage in the Scottish press.

Impact on the SNP

The Royal High School episode split the SNP. In its aftermath, several party members publicly stated that they had been opposed to the plan, including Donald Stewart, MP for the Western Isles. For the party's more traditionalist wing, such as MEP Winifred Ewing, the episode confirmed suspicions about the 79 Group's competence and contributed to Ewing's decision to establish the Campaign for Nationalist Scotland the following year as a challenger to the 79 Group within the SNP. Concerned by the growing factionalism in the party and the emergence of even more radical groups such as 'Siol nan Gaidheal' (Seed of the Gael), which advocated a type of cultural nationalism and expressed a questionable commitment to democratic principles, SNP party leader Gordon Wilson took the decision to formally ban all internal groups at the Party's 1982 Conference in Ayr.

The story did not end there for the 79 Group. When its leaders reconstituted the group under a new name as an organisation outside of the SNP later in 1982, the party leadership moved to expel them. Seven party members, including Salmond, McCaskill, and former vice-chair for publicity Stephen Maxwell, were ousted from the SNP, although all were ultimately reinstated following appeals. Margo MacDonald, who for a period had been the public face of the Party following her surprise victory in the Glasgow Govan by-election in 1973, resigned from the SNP in protest over the expulsions and would not join it again until the 1990s.

Election consequences

The Royal High School occupation and the events that followed reflected the turbulence that marked a political landscape in flux in Scotland in the 1980s. Despite its losses in 1979, the SNP should have been well positioned to find political success during the decade given the lingering resentment over the failure of the devolution referendum and hostility towards the Conservative Party and the social and economic policies of the Thatcher Government. Yet the divisions that the Calton Hill episode exposed in the SNP would limit its ability to capitalise on these conditions.

In the 1983 General Election, the party managed to hold its two Westminster seats, but its vote fell by almost a third from 1979 and it lost 53 out of 72 deposits. The party did win three new seats in the 1987 General Election, but lost the two seats it had previously held, including Gordon Wilson's seat in Dundee East. It would take nearly two decades and the ultimate establishment of a devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999 before the SNP would begin to recover fully from its experiences in the 1980s.

Further reading

  • Scottish National Party Papers, 1963-1998 [National Library of Scotland reference: Acc.11987].
  • 'SNP — The History of the Scottish National Party' by Peter Lynch (Welsh Academic Press, 2002) [National Library of Scotland shelfmark: Hist.S.74.N.L].
  • 'The Scottish National Party: Transition to power' by J Mitchell, L Bennie and R Johns, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) [Shelfmark: HB2.212.1.696].
  • 'SNP: The turbulent years, 1960-1990: A history of the Scottish National Party' by Gordon Wilson (Stirling: Scots Independent Newspapers Ltd, 2009) [Shelfmark: PB5.209.1147/6].
  • 'The Journey from the 79 Group to the Modern SNP' by D Torrance in 'The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power' by Gerry Hassan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) [Shelfmark: HB2.210.4.473].

 

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