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Labour in Scotland during the Second World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Christopher Harvie
Christopher Harvie
Affiliation:
University of Tübingen
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Extract

The 1930s, a decade Labour in Scotland could have done without, ended appropriately. On Sunday, 3 September 1939, hours before war was declared, police closed down a Labour party meeting on Glasgow Green. The Glasgow left-wing weekly Forward, reporting this, concluded gloomily: ‘It is doubtful whether any other meeting will be allowed during the war period.’ Labour’s fortunes in 1939 were mixed, and it did not regard the imminent prospect of an election with enthusiasm. In Scotland it had recovered from the nadir of 1932, when after the secession of the Independent Labour party (I.L.P.) it was left with only three M.P.s out of the seven who had survived the 1931 election. But its gains in 1935 still gave it only 20 out of 74 seats, well short of its 1929 level of 37. It later won two by-elections, and acquired George Buchanan M.P. from the I.L.P. in 1938, but by then its municipal successes of 1932—5, when it took over most of the larger Scottish towns, had been checked. In November 1936 it lost Dundee. There was some recovery in 1937, but a net gain of only one seat in 1938. It had yet to take control in a single Scottish county.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1983 , pp. 921 - 944
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Forward, 9 Sept. 1939.

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3 Labour party: Scottish council (L.P.S.C.) executive: Annual reports,1929, etc.

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6 In a Scottish context, for instance, Roger Eatwell, The 1945–51 Labour governments(1979), states that in 1945 Common Wealth did not contest ‘in seats where Labour was running a candidate’ (p. 36). This was not true of both the seats C.W. contested in Scotland, where they frustrated a Labour gain in North Midlothian.

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38 N.E.C. minutes, 22 Oct. 1940. In May 1941 during the Greenock by-election the communists disclosed that Beaverbrook had offered to finance two I.L.P. ‘peace’ candidates at Scottish by-elections a year earlier, before the formation of the coalition. See the Hugh Dalton diary, in the British library of political and economic science, 25 May 1941.

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125 Glasgow Herald, 27 July 1945.

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128 Scottish Labour yearbook, 1946.

129 Data from Whitaker’s almanack, 1946.

130 Data from L.P.S.C. Annual reports, 1939–46.

131 MacCallum and Readman, 1945 election, p. 252.

132 See Wood, I. S., ‘John Wheatley, the Irish, and the Labour movement in Scotland’, in The Innes Review, xxxi (1980), 81Google Scholar, and Iain, MacLean, ‘Clydeside politics, 1914–1922’, unpublished Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1971, ch. 8.Google Scholar

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139 MacCallum and Readman, 1945 election, p. 81.

140 Labour party, N.E.C. publicity S.C., 10 Nov. 1946.