TODAY is the 75th anniversary of the Motherwell by-election in which Dr Robert McIntyre became the first Scottish National Party Member of Parliament.

I have written before about this momentous event for the SNP and you can see the article I wrote on May 30, 2017, on The National website. The point of today’s article is to relate the outrageous events after that momentous victory in this week of 1945.

After a hard-fought campaign the Motherwell-born Dr McIntyre clinched the first-ever seat for the party of which he was the national secretary. The result, declared on April 13, 1945, was: Dr Robert McIntyre (Scottish National Party) 11,417; Alex Anderson (Labour) 10,800. The majority was 617.

McIntyre had fought on major Scottish issues but his overall message was that Scots should have control of their own country. The low turnout of 54% helped McIntyre, no doubt.

It is important to put McIntyre’s win in context. There was a wind of change blowing through British politics and the Common Wealth socialist party had actually won a wartime by-election – Skipton in January, 1944 – while the day after McIntyre’s victory, Sir John Boyd Orr, standing as an independent, comfortably won the Combined Scottish Universities by-election standing on a Home Rule ticket.

That “wind of change” was shown in Labour’s colossal victory in the general election in July, 1945, with Anderson regaining the Motherwell seat in which the turnout had soared to 72.8%, polling 15,831 votes to McIntyre’s 8022.

It was what happened to McIntyre in his all-too-brief time as MP which carried a portent for the future of the SNP in the Commons.

Let’s deal with the myth that McIntyre at first refused to take his seat. This completely untrue nonsense was still being peddled in obituaries when the man known to the SNP as Doc Mac and the ‘father of the party’ died on February 2, 1998, at the age of 84.

The problem for McIntyre was that no other MP would “sponsor” him – the Commons rule dating from the time of the English Parliament is that two sitting members must introduce the new person. What happened when McIntyre went to take his seat in the Commons on April 17 is told eloquently in Dick Douglas’s memoir of McIntyre, At The Helm:

“Hansard records: ‘Mr R D McIntyre, Member for the County of Lanark (Motherwell Division) came to the Table to be sworn without being introduced according to custom.’

“The Speaker (Douglas Clifton Brown) informed the SNP’s new Member, ‘That it is the uniform practice of this House that, when any Member comes into the House for the first time, he should be introduced by two Members of the House’, and he put the question to Robert McIntyre as to ‘whether two Members of this House are prepared to introduce him, in accordance with the usual practice ...’.

“Well, in the words of the Punch cartoon which appeared in the Times, ‘McIntyre was INTIRELY ALONE’ and could only state, ‘I was elected as a representative of a Scottish constituency and ....’, before Speaker Clifton Brown shut him up. He had been asked a question and, in Mr Speaker’s view, his answer, was ‘No’.

“‘I have to call the attention of the House to a Resolution of the House on 23rd February 1688 ...’ stated the Speaker. The terms of this mysterious Resolution are worth noting in full: ‘The House, being informed that it was an ancient Order and Custom of the House, that, upon new Members coming into the House, they be introduced to the Table, making the Obeisances as they go up, that they may be better known to the House; Resolved, that the said Order and Custom be for the future observed.’”

McIntyre said: “It should be noted that 1688 was before the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England in 1707. If resolutions of the old English Parliament are binding to the Parliament now at Westminster, then it would appear that the present Parliament is merely a continuation of the old English Parliament and is not a united Parliament based on the Treaty of Union.”

Sound familiar? To their credit, some Labour MPs tried to set the 1688 resolution aside, as had happened before in 1875. The House voted their motion down by 273 votes to 74 with both Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Labour leader Clement Attlee voting against – so much for waging the war for democracy…

Eventually two Scottish MPs, the Rev James Barr of the Independent Labour Party and Labour’s Sandy Sloan, bravely agreed to sponsor McIntyre to the chagrin of the Unionists, red and blue.

Having made it into the Commons, McIntyre made his maiden speech in which he said that he and future SNP MP would “come with the intention of returning as soon as possible to our own country where we may, under democratic government, achieve the long-needed reconstruction of Scotland.”

McIntyre went on the attack immediately and you may recognise the SNP targets to this day. He asked information minister Gwyllim Lloyd-George, son of the former PM, “what arrangements are being made by the BBC for election broadcasts in Scotland.”

The minister replied: “The broadcasts by the party leaders given on the BBC’s Home Service can be heard in all parts of the United Kingdom. No separate broadcasts have been arranged for Scotland.”

Later McIntyre asked Churchill “if he will arrange for a referendum in Scotland on the question of the establishing of a democratic legislature in that country, through which the Scottish people would be able to control effectively the affairs of their own country.”

The one-time Home Rule proponent replied simply: “No, Sir.”

Discussing aviation Sir Geoffrey Mander said: “I personally have heard enough about Scotland for the time being, and I turn to Wolverhampton and the facilities that are to be offered to the citizens of that important town.”

McIntyre replied: “I will never tire of pointing out to Members of this House that if they do not want to hear more about Scotland they have the solution in their own hands.” As Ian Blackford still states...

On the bill to make a British-wide policy on education he was barbed: “In Scotland, you can have either a Scottish education, or an education which is a poor imitation and copy of the English product. Scottish education has a different fundamental social basis from any English education.

“The fundamental basis of Scottish education has always been a democratic one. On the other hand, the basis of English education, it appears to me as an outsider, is of the nature of a caste basis.”

The first SNP MP made his mark 75 years ago, but as we know only too well from the experiences of SNP MPs in recent times, nothing much changes about Unionism.

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