Why Scots Tories should model themselves on writer who thought we should all be nationalists

Buchan is most famous as a writer, with an extensive output of history, biography and novels, most famously The Thirty-Nine Steps. He is less well-known as a politician and statesman, being elected Member of Parliament for the combined Scottish Universities in 1927 as a Unionist, and later being appointed as Governor-General of Canada with the title of Baron Tweedsmuir.

Buchan was part of a generation of Scottish Unionist politicians who, according to the writer and researcher Dr David Torrance, were “bursting with progressive ideas and able exponents”. Among this group were Walter Elliot who would be Scottish Secretary from 1936-38, and Noel Skelton, who is credited with inventing the notion of the “property-owning democracy”.

The Scottish Unionist party was created in 1912, with a merger of the Scottish Conservatives and the Liberal Unionists, being those Liberals who had opposed William Gladstone’s ambitions for home rule in Ireland. This union brought together what had been two competing political traditions in Scotland, those of Tory and Whig, dating back to the religious and political conflicts of the 17th century.

Walter Scott’s ‘patriotic unionism’

The Tories were the supporters of the Stuarts, mostly Episcopalians, defenders of privilege, and the interests of the landed classes. The Whigs, in contrast, were Presbyterians who represented the middle class, and stood up for the rights of Parliament against the Crown.

One of the best-known representatives of the Tory tradition in Scotland was Sir Walter Scott, who, through his writing, rekindled interest in Scottish history, and actively promoted Scottish traditions. His energetic defence of the right of Scottish banks to issue their own notes, in defiance of the Bank of England, showed his willingness to stand up for threatened Scottish interests.

The union of the Conservatives with the Liberal Unionists was a fusion of these two quite different political traditions, giving the Scottish Unionists a much broader appeal than they had ever had as Conservatives. And the Scott tradition of standing up for Scottish interests, what we might call “patriotic unionism” was at the heart of the Scottish Unionist approach to policy. 

Speaking in the House of Commons in 1932, John Buchan declared: “Every Scotsman should be a Scottish nationalist.” By that he did not, of course, mean that he supported Scottish independence, but he was a champion of the notion of a Scottish Parliament within the United Kingdom, a position which many of his colleagues shared.

When majority of Scots voted Tory

This newspaper in 1947 reported that these Unionist MPs were seen as “standing up for Scotland” and “busy in the assertion of Scottish rights and viewpoints”. There was no contradiction in them being unionists, and being seen to support the Scottish interest. Professor James Mitchell, in his 1990 study “Conservatives and the Union”, concluded that: “Unionists have succeeded in playing the Scottish card effectively while the Labour party appeared as an unimaginative and centralist alternative.”

There was a second element in the Unionists’ success – which famously led to the party in 1955 being the only one in Scottish history to win an overall majority of votes in a general election, something that even the SNP failed to achieve at the height of their recent success. This was an avowedly moderate policy platform, explicitly advocating “a middle road between two extremes – the extremes of laissez-faire and socialism”, as the party’s 1955 East of Scotland Yearbook put it. This was the Liberal Unionist tradition, rather than the Tory one, to the fore. 

As the Scottish Conservatives now again debate our future, there is much that we can learn from our past, although the political environment today is very different from what it was in the last century. There are many more people with centre-right opinions in Scotland than currently vote for the Scottish Conservatives, which provides a great opportunity for us to expand our political base, with the right positioning and messaging.

Taking a stand

A Scottish Conservative party that is seen, as the Unionists were in a previous generation, to explicitly champion Scottish interests will be one which places ourselves in the mainstream of Scottish public opinion, and attracts a new generation of supporters.

Where we have a UK Conservative party that takes stances which we believe to be against Scotland’s interests, we should not be afraid to challenge them. To give just one example, it was good to see Douglas Ross speaking out when Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced in the Spring Budget that he would extend the windfall tax on oil and gas for a further year, a policy which undoubtedly would have damaged the economy of North-East Scotland. That said, whether Scottish Conservative MPs would in the end have resigned their ministerial jobs in order to follow Ross’s lead is unclear, but it was an important issue on which to take a stand.

So this is, in my view, exactly where the Scottish Conservatives need to go, irrespective of the issue of party structures. Drawing on the tradition of John Buchan and his colleagues, adopting a policy of “patriotic unionism”, and championing Scottish solutions for Scottish problems rather than aping every line from Westminster, will be the platform on which we can rebuild our party fortunes.

Murdo Fraser is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife