MARCH 28 marks the 40th anniversary of the vote of no-confidence that brought down the unpopular Callaghan Labour government in 1979, and we have already seen Labour supporters repeating claims that the 11 SNP MPs ushered in Margaret Thatcher.
The Tories got in because they obtained two million more votes in England than Labour. Following the “winter of discontent” and widespread strikes English voters abandoned the Labour party, which had not a hope of being re-elected in 1979.
Following the rigged referendum in March 1979 when the Yes vote for a Scottish Assembly got the same majority as Leave had in 2016, the Labour government refused to implement the democratic wish of the Scottish people. Callaghan and Michael Foot wanted to leave the devolution act on the statute books with a view to reviving it, but English Labour MPs vowed to block the plan.
Labour’s anti-devolution zealots, such as Tam Dalyell and Neil Kinnock, well aware that a Thatcher victory was on the cards, implicitly preferred this scenario to the establishment of a Scottish Assembly, and the survival of their own government for the remaining six months it had left.
The extent to which some Labour anti-devolutionists in 1979, which included Brian Wilson and Johann Lamont, were prepared to go can be summed up in the words of Patrick Cosgrave in his book The Lives of Enoch Powell, when he wrote: “Confidential exchanges took place between Thatcher’s aides and a number of Labour backbenchers hostile to devolution.”
If you read Jim Callaghan’s memoirs, Time and Chance, you will learn that the Prime Minister noted: “In his view [that of Michael Cox, Labour’s Chief Whip], the difficulty within the [Labour] party was much greater than any from the Scottish National Party, and the whip’s judgment was that the government could not rely on the votes of Labour members from the north.”
The vital no-confidence vote was lost through the absence of Sir Alfred Broughton, Labour MP for Batley, who was too ill to attend, and the unexpected non-voting of two Irish republican MPs who normally supported Labour but felt that Labour had double-crossed them on redrawing the political boundaries in Northern Ireland. In fact, Gerry Fitt and Frank Maguire flew from Belfast to London expressly not to vote.
Towards the end of the 1979 referendum campaign, the highly respected former Prime Minister Lord Douglas Home promised (like Gordon Brown’s Vow in 2014), that an incoming Tory government, which at the time had the support of 31% of Scottish voters, would produce a better devolution package if Scots voted No. This pledge was not honoured by Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives voted to repeal the Scotland Act on 20 June 1979.
Mary Thomas
Edinburgh
I WAS very interested to read the piece “Museum marks the centenary of an epic journey” (March 26). It told the story of R34, an airship built at the William Beardmore factory in Inchinnan, near Glasgow in 1919.
This airship flew from East Fortune in East Lothian to New York, and was the first transatlantic crossing by air. The tale was told in a book Flight of the Titan, written by George Rosie and published by Birlinn in 2010. I spoke to George on Tuesday to inform him of the article and he had not remembered it was the 100th Anniversary. The builders called it Pride of the Clyde, but the workers and the crew called it Tiny – it was 634 feet long, the length of two football fields.
The flight to New York took 108 hours and 12 minutes; all the drinking water and most of the food was gone, and there was only 140 gallons of fuel left in the tank – sufficient for roughly an hour’s flying, a very close-run thing. New York went mad!
The return trip to Britain took 75 hours and three minutes, indicating the influence the weather pattern had on the outward flight. When they neared the British Isles they were directed to go to Pulham in Norfolk; the crew was expecting to return to East Fortune where their wives and families were waiting. The captain queried why was this happening, but was directed by the Air Ministry to divert to Norfolk; the anti-airship force in the Air Ministry, led by Winston Churchill, did not want big publicity going to East Fortune, which was only 20 miles from Edinburgh.
And this was in the days before the SNP was even invented.
Jim Lynch
Edinburgh
WHILE the National is one of the best of its journalistic kind, I think it worth pointing out that if they might appear to have sold out in the local shop or supermarket, first look beneath a pile of other dailies to see if some smart arse (or Alec!) hasn’t deliberately hidden them from view.
I’m wise to this ruse now and it’s remarkable how low some people stoop when running scared of the movement!
Janet Cunningham
Stirling
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