Dominion

Historical Note

I was born in 1952, the year in which Dominion is set. My parents met through the wartime naval posting of my father, an English Midlander, to Scotland, my mother’s home. So I am, like many British people of my generation, a child of wartime population movements.

Winston Churchill was Prime Minister when I was born, and throughout my childhood he was a revered figure. By the time I came to political awareness at the start of the 1970s, and abandoned, to their amusement and bemusement, my parents’ Conservatism for the left-wing sympathies I have retained ever since, I found a different view of Churchill in the new circles I moved in. He was, many said, a warmonger, a fanatical imperialist who opposed any progress towards Indian independence, a ferocious anti-Socialist, hammer of the workers in the General Strike of 1926 and sender of troops to shoot down miners at Tonypandy in 1910. All of these accusations are true except, oddly, the last, despite its persistence.¹

There were, I think, several Churchills – not surprising for a man whose political career spanned sixty-four years and who spent his life promoting highly original ideas, some crazy, some brilliant. First there was the radical Liberal, on the left of his party, of the years before 1914. Then during and after the Great War appeared the second Churchill, the ferocious anti-Socialist and anti-Communist Conservative, unshakeable opponent of Indian political advancement, on that subject a reactionary even by the standards of his own party at the time. But from 1935 on there emerged a third Churchill, the anti-Nazi who saw that Hitler meant war and that appeasement would end in disaster.

He genuinely loathed the fanatic nationalism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their destruction of democracy. This Churchill appeared on anti-appeasement platforms with Labour and trade union leaders like Ernest Bevin, and in 1940 allied with Labour against large parts of his own party in his determination to rally the nation to fight the war to the last, and his speeches, personality and human skills inspired both politicians and people to do just that. In old age, during his second premiership of 1951–55, a fourth Churchill appeared, his politics turned centrist and consensual, and who in 1949 admitted to Jawaharlal Nehru that he had done him great wrong.²

It is of course undeniable that throughout his days Churchill was an old-fashioned British imperialist, and that ideas of British exceptionalism were at the forefront of his wartime speeches. So it may seem odd that in this book, whose overarching theme is the dangers and evils of politics based on nationalism and race, Churchill appears as a heroic figure. But it should be remembered that Churchill was never a narrow nationalist, and in 1940–5 he always saw Britain in the context of the wider European and world struggle. This is shown in his June 1940 speech which I have chosen as the aphorism for this book; he saw with vivid clarity the darkness that Nazism and the Nazis had brought to Europe and which would continue to spread if they were not stopped.

I have always been fascinated by the notion of alternate history – how the world might have changed had one seminal event turned out differently. And sometimes, as in May 1940, the history of the world does indeed seem to turn on a sixpence. Of course the story told here, of the events that followed Churchill failing to become Prime Minister, is only an alternate history, not the alternate history, for there can be no such thing. Every imagined change to history, every road not taken, opens up probabilities and likelihoods to the historian, but never certainties. I think, however, that Churchill was right in believing that if Britain had accepted German peace overtures in 1940 it would inevitably have become dominated by Nazi Germany. The world I have created is only one of the scenarios that might have followed, though I believe a likely one.

And so, to turn to that crucial moment in the history of the real world, when Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Lord Halifax. Between 1935, when Fascist aggression in Europe began with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and March 1939, when Hitler finally destroyed Czechoslovakia, the policy of appeasement was supported by a majority within the ruling British National Government, a coalition with a large majority which had been in power since 1931. It was overwhelmingly Conservative but included a small number of important Labour and Liberal defectors.

Appeasement was not then a dirty word – it meant, broadly, to seek peace by negotiating peaceful solutions to international problems. People were appeasers from a number of often very different motives. One should never underestimate the importance of the memory of the horrors of the Great War, and the perfectly reasonable dread that with advancing technology, especially in the air, a second European war would be even more cataclysmic and involve the bombing of civilians with high explosives and, it was feared, poison gas. Stanley Baldwin was right when he said, in 1932, that ‘the bomber will always get through.’

Then there were those who thought the Treaty of Versailles, severing German territories from the Reich in a treaty that otherwise idolized the principle of national self-determination, unfair. And there were many, particularly Conservatives, who while they disliked the Nazi regime, and thought its leaders common and thuggish, felt it was not up to them to interfere in German domestic affairs and saw the Nazis as a bulwark against the threat of communism. Lord Halifax, just before visiting Hitler as Foreign Secretary in 1937, wrote that ‘Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral!’, and added this comment shortly after: ‘I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of communism.’³

We know now, more accurately than people did in the 1930s, how appallingly murderous the regime that Lenin and Stalin had created actually was, but in the 1930s it was no possible military threat to the West. The widespread fears on the British right of communism spreading at home were a chimera.

Then there were others who positively admired Nazism. Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the Great War, called Hitler also ‘unquestionably a great leader’ and ‘the greatest German of the age’.⁴ There were Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, supported for a time by Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, and Hitler also had influential admirers in business and on the wealthy aristocratic right. There were very few Labour politicians who had any good words for the Nazis, but there were one or two, notably Ben Greene, quite an important figure for a while in the 1930s. In Dominion he becomes Labour leader in the pro-Treaty coalition.

Then there were the pacifists, whose opposition to war in any form was total, even after the Second World War began. Pacifism within the Labour Party had been strong in the early 1930s, but declined as Fascist aggression grew, particularly with the Spanish Civil War. Pacifism remained as a force, though, both within and outside the Labour Party. The position taken by people like Vera Brittain and the minority of some twenty Labour MPs who formed the Parliamentary Peace Aims Group was courageous given the atmosphere of the time, but the Peace Aims Group would undoubtedly have voted for a treaty in 1940, and lived – though perhaps not for long – to regret it.

At Munich in 1938, Chamberlain believed that by ceding the predominantly German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, he had met the Führer’s last demand. When, the following spring, Hitler occupied the remaining Czech lands and set up Slovakia as a puppet state, Chamberlain realized he had been deceived. When he went on to invade Poland in September 1939 Chamberlain declared war, but he was a reluctant and ineffective war leader. His long-held hopes for peace gone, he became a tragic figure. When, in spring 1940, Chamberlain said that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ for a spring offensive only for the Germans immediately to invade Denmark and Norway, and British military operations in Norway ended in disaster, his position as Prime Minister came under threat. A large minority of Conservative MPs voted against the government or abstained in the Norway Debate in Parliament in May 1940. Chamberlain turned to the Labour leaders with the offer of a coalition; they agreed to serve, but only under a different Conservative leader. Chamberlain realized he would have to go.

Thus followed the fateful meeting of 9 May 1940 between Chamberlain, the Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson, and the two leading candidates for the succession, Halifax and Churchill. Each of the participants left a record of what happened, which differ considerably in detail but not in essentials.⁵ Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, had the premiership for the asking. He was patrician, experienced, trusted, reliable and respected, though he had been a leading appeaser and there was sometimes an odd element of passivity in his nature. He was supported by the bulk of the Conservative party, Chamberlain, and the King. His junior minister, Rab Butler, had spent the previous evening imploring him to accept the premiership. Labour sat on their hands between the two candidates. Churchill, on the other hand, who had been brought back into the Cabinet when war was declared, was tough, pugnacious, brilliantly creative and popular with the public; but had a reputation among Conservatives as serially disloyal, an ex-Liberal, an unreliable adventurer who had (as he did) some questionable friends.

But Halifax did not press for the position, and agreed to serve under Churchill. He seems to have realized that he did not have the personality to fight the titanic struggle that was coming; the very next day the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France. He also suffered at times of crisis from agonizing, probably psychosomatic, stomach pains. Honourably, he stood aside. Churchill became Prime Minister and entered the House of Commons to loud cheers from the Labour benches, but few from the Conservatives. They took a long time to learn to love him.

Churchill immediately appointed a new War Cabinet, the central core of ministers to direct the war. Besides himself, Halifax and Chamberlain remained for the Conservatives – other prominent appeasers were cast out (Sir Samuel Hoare suddenly found himself ambassador to Franco’s Spain) – and Churchill appointed two Labour members, the party leader Clement Attlee and his deputy Arthur Greenwood. This was more than Labour were strictly entitled to, given their level of parliamentary representation, but it was a shrewd move – Churchill had not been a politician for forty years for nothing – because both were anti-appeasers who could be relied on to support him in prosecuting the war vigorously. It gave him a majority in the War Cabinet, and Chamberlain too, though now terminally ill, showed a new resolution. This was needed. By the end of May 1940 British and French forces were in full retreat, the British to Dunkirk. At this point Germany made peace overtures, as they did again later in 1940, the thrust of which was that Hitler, who had never wanted war against his fellow Aryan nation, would leave the British Empire alone in return for a free hand in Europe. Halifax wanted these overtures to be followed up; it seemed the war in the West was lost and perhaps now was the time to try to settle and avoid further bloodshed. Churchill argued, though, that a peace treaty would inevitably lead to German domination of Britain and that with her navy and air force, supported (though in some cases not wholeheartedly) by the Empire and with the protection of the Channel, she should fight on and face invasion if need be. Churchill won the day and obtained support of the full Cabinet. The rest is history.

Had Halifax become Prime Minister, the outcome would likely have been very different. He would have appointed a different War Cabinet, with a different balance. It might well have negotiated peace when France surrendered. If that had happened I think both the Labour and Conservative parties would have split, a Labour minority following most Conservatives into a pro-Treaty coalition. I believe King George VI would have stayed – constitutionally he would have had to support the decision of his government – and carried on as King, however reluctantly as the regime hardened. I have never bought the idea that the Germans, had Britain surrendered or been defeated, would have restored King Edward VIII, though certainly the Nazis played with that idea. True, Edward was pro-Nazi, but many in Britain loathed him for abdicating and he was such an irresponsible and foolish man that, as King, he would have been a headache to any government.

Deciding who Britain’s political leaders might have been in the years that followed is difficult. Even if people are long dead one is reluctant to label them unfairly. Faced with the realities of what the Treaty brought about in the circumstances of this book, I think Halifax would have resigned in guilt and despair. Chamberlain died late in 1940 and as for the other leading candidate to succeed Halifax, Sir Samuel Hoare, I am conscious that his first-hand experience of fascism in Spain turned him into an anti-Fascist. I have portrayed Herbert Morrison, who was anti-Fascist but saw himself as a realist and was always consumed by the lust for power, as leading the Labour pro-Treaty minority but, like Halifax, later resigning in despair. Lloyd George, however, I am sure would have loved a late return to power and there is no question of his sympathies with Hitler.

As for the man who succeeds Lloyd George in Dominion, if one is looking for an appeaser in love with power, fanatical about a united British Empire setting up tariffs against the rest of the world, and a man who was irredeemably corrupt and unscrupulous (he left his native Canada under a cloud over the circumstances in which he had made a business fortune), the obvious candidate has to be Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. Clement Attlee, who did not say such things lightly, described him as the only evil person he had ever met, a judgement shared by others,⁶ although Churchill was, from time to time, friendly with him. To be fair, Beaverbrook was never an active anti-Semite, but nor did he like Jews and nor was the issue particularly important to him. From the Great War until the early 1930s he was the epitome of the newspaper magnate who successfully interfered in politics, until Stanley Baldwin courageously squashed him when he described newspaper proprietors as having ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. No single newspaper proprietor had such power again until the years following Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 when she, followed by Tony Blair (and Alex Salmond of the SNP), handed ever-increasing amounts of influence to Rupert Murdoch.

Enoch Powell was always the most fanatic of British nationalists, and though in the 1960s he became the ultimate British isolationist, while at the Conservative Research Department in the late 1940s he was a passionate imperialist. He sent a paper to Churchill, then the Leader of the Opposition, in 1946 advising the military reconquest of India, which made Churchill worry about his sanity, though Rab Butler managed to reassure him.⁷ Powell seems to me an obvious candidate for India Secretary. Rab Butler later became a leading Conservative moderate, but he was the most passionate of appeasers before 1939, a fact which earned him the lasting enmity of Harold Macmillan, who hated fascism.

The Scottish Nationalist Party was formed in 1934 through the merger of two small parties, the right-wing Scottish Party and the leftish National Party of Scotland. The new party, which remained very small, included elements sympathetic to fascism, but had no common policies on the serious issues of the day – mass unemployment, the continuing Depression and the darkening international scene – beyond the dream, common to all nationalist and Fascist parties throughout Europe, that the expression of nationhood would release some sort of a mystical ‘national spirit’ that would somehow resolve all problems. The struggle against fascism was no priority for them; in 1939 the Party Conference voted to oppose conscription. Their leader, Douglas Young, was imprisoned for his refusal to be conscripted on the grounds that there existed no Scottish government to decide on it. The SNP’s 1939 resolution and subsequent behaviour show the unimportance fighting fascism had for them, while the rest of the British people, like my Scottish mother and English father, were either working their fingers to the bone on the home front or serving in the forces to fight the greatest threat civilization has ever faced.

In my alternative universe I see the SNP splitting, with right-wing elements supporting the Beaverbrook government in return for national symbols like the return of the Stone of Scone and vague promises of autonomy or independence. As Gunther says in the book, the co-option of local nationalists from Brittany to Croatia was an important element in Nazi policy throughout Europe.

During the 1980s, a new school of thought appeared, criticizing Churchill’s decision to fight the war at all costs. This time it came from the political right. In 1993 the academic John Charmley wrote a book, Churchill: the End of Glory,⁸ which stimulated Alan Clark, the ever-controversial Conservative MP, to write a Times article questioning whether Britain might have been better to make peace with Hitler in 1940. This exaggerated Charmley’s position, but nonetheless his book questions Churchill’s policy of fighting the war at all costs: ‘In international affairs it was the Soviets and the Americans who divided the world between them; in domestic politics it was the Socialists who reaped the benefits of the efforts of the Great (1940–5) Coalition.’⁹

To take the last point first, the Attlee government of 1945–51 was put in office not by Churchill, but the electorate. Whether the creation of the welfare state, full employment and the nationalization of part of the economy was a good or a bad thing is a matter of judgement. (I have portrayed in my book what I think conditions for ordinary people under a government that opposed these things would have looked like.) But peace with Hitler – which would certainly have involved Britain aligning itself with German foreign policy in Europe – was likely, I think, to lead to the end of democracy, let alone glory, in Britain. What, for example, would have happened (as in my book appears likely in a 1950 election) if a party or group opposed to the Treaty looked like being elected?

Charmley accepts that the Empire by 1939, particularly India, was going to be difficult to hold on to for long, and blames Churchill for his failure to see the facts. This is fair enough. However, a government which accepted the peace terms available in 1940 would inevitably have had to rely more, economically, on the Empire; unrest in India could only have got worse with Britain tied to the Nazis; the breakup of the ‘old’ Commonwealth would have been a distinct possibility. The New Zealanders, in particular, would have loathed links with the Nazis.

It is true (and the strongest argument used by those who disagree that the Second World War was ‘the good war’), that Stalin’s victory made the Soviet Union the second power in the world, and gave it control over Eastern Europe, which suffered murderous oppression and economic exploitation from his regime in the post-war years. Even so, had Hitler been allowed a free hand in Eastern Europe and Russia, the fate of those countries would have been even worse. It took the efforts of Britain, Russia and the USA to end the war in Europe in 1945. By then, the Holocaust had taken place and twenty million Soviet citizens, many of them civilians, as well as two million Poles and many other people from Eastern Europe, were dead. If the struggle in the East had continued with Russia fighting Hitler alone, the war would have gone on for years and the slaughter would have been infinitely greater yet. Hitler planned to kill the populations of Leningrad and Moscow, perhaps seven million people, and either enslave or murder all Russians and Poles who could not show Aryan ancestry.

The war in Russia was, I think, always militarily unwinnable; the country was just too vast, and the population totally hostile. This was not because the Russians loved Stalin but because Hitler planned to kill or enslave all of them, so they fought, quite simply, for their lives, as did the Poles, who fought back vigorously against attempts to settle part of their country with Germans. I think the result would have been as I have portrayed it in my book: Europe east of Germany as a vast slaughterhouse, conventional warfare combined with an endless guerilla conflict; Vietnam on an almost unimaginable scale. If people think that the preservation of some hypothetical British glory would have been worth that, it is not a notion I can share.

There is also the question of the effect of a British surrender on America. America would then have had no potential military toehold in Europe and might well have turned its back on the continent and done a deal with the Japanese. This in turn would have made the Japanese war against China, which reproduced many of the features of the German–Soviet war in its scale and murderousness, all the more protracted.

Therefore, despite the horrors of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which followed Russian victory, I think a British surrender would have made world conditions even worse, to say nothing of the consequent continuation of Fascist rule in Western Europe.

Hitler believed that his Reich would last a thousand years. This was never likely. He deliberately built up the regime as a series of conflicting factions with himself at its head. And physically he is unlikely to have lasted long – most historians agree that by the last year of his life he was showing symptoms of early, rapidly developing Parkinson’s disease. In my book, by 1952 the disease has taken its most rapid and serious path. If Hitler had died or become disabled there would have been a struggle for the succession between the regime’s competing factions, not least the army and the SS. In the real world sections of the army tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, by which time it was clear the war was lost. The 1944 Bomb Plot failed: had it succeeded a civil war between army and SS was a likely outcome.¹⁰ This would, I think, have been even more likely had Hitler died in 1952; I have postulated a larger group of opponents in the army that existed in 1944, based on their having fought an unwinnable war in Russia for a further eight years.

The Nazi regime was, contrary to myth, always unstable at its heart. So, too, was Stalin’s dictatorship; following his death the regime changed greatly and became far less murderous, though it remained, economically, monolithically Communist, and brutal to any people or satellite countries that stepped out of line.

And so, at the end, I think the Second World War was, still, the good war. Western Europe did indeed, for many years, enter the ‘broad sunlit uplands’ which Churchill foresaw. But nothing lasts for ever, and at the time of writing, August 2012, Europe faces both economic and political crisis. And across the continent, in response, forces of nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise again. European history in the first half of the twentieth century was, apart from Russia, a story of nationalism triumphant. The rivalries between big-nation nationalisms culminated in the war of 1914 and nationalist spirit kept that war going for four years despite its unprecedented slaughter. Courageous figures like Lord Lansdowne in Britain, who talked of a settlement, were thrust aside, or worse. After the Great War came the Treaty of Versailles, which glorified small-nation nationalism. New states sprang up from the wreckage of the old Empires, most of which promptly began discriminating against the new minorities within their borders, not least the Jews, and ended up as nationalist dictatorships. And in both large and small European countries nationalism gave birth to its monster children; fascism, based on the organized worship of the nation and Nazism, which worshipped not just nationality but race.

After the Second World War nationalism did not die. One only needs to look for example at de Gaulle’s France, or the anti-Communist movements in Eastern Europe, but for the most part it was far less fierce, less xenophobic. But now it is back in its rawest form; all across Europe, in France, Hungary, Greece, Finland, even Holland, and most worryingly perhaps in Russia, fiercely nationalist, anti-immigrant, and sometimes openly Fascist nationalist parties are significant forces in politics again. And the terrible story of Yugoslavia in the 1990s reminds us just how murderous European nationalisms can still become.

I find it heartbreaking – literally heartbreaking – that my own country, Britain, which was less prone to domestic nationalist extremism between the wars than most, is increasingly falling victim to the ideologies of nationalist parties. The larger ones are not racialist, but they share the belief that national identity is the issue of fundamental, overriding importance in politics; it is the atavistic notion that nationhood can, somehow, allow people to bound free from oppression – nationalism always defines itself against some enemy ‘other’ – and solve all their problems. UKIP promises a future that will somehow be miraculously golden if Britain simply walks away from the European Union. (To what? To trade with whom?) At least they have the honesty to be clear that they envisage a particular type of political economy, based on that other modern dogma which has failed so often and disastrously, not least in Russia, that ‘pure’ free markets can end economic problems.

Far larger, and more dangerous, is the threat to all of Britain posed by the Scottish National Party, which now sits in power in the devolved government in Edinburgh. As they always have been, the SNP are a party without politics in the conventional sense, willing to tack to the political right (as the 1970s) or the left (as in the 1980s and 1990s) or the centre (as today) if they think it will help them win in dependence. They will promise anything to anyone in their pursuit of power. They are very shrewd political manipulators. In power, they present themselves as competent, progressive democrats (which many are) but behind that, as always, lies the appeal to the mystic glories of in dependence, which is what the party has always been for. Once ruling an independent state, they will not easily be dislodged. How people who regard themselves as progressive can support a party whose biggest backers include the right-wing Souter family who own Stagecoach, and Rupert Murdoch, escapes me completely. Like all who think they will be able to ride a nationalist tiger, they will find themselves sadly mistaken.

The SNP have no real position on the crucial questions of political economy that affect people’s lives, and never have; their whole basis has always been the old myth that released national consciousness, will somehow make all well. They promise a low-regulation, low-corporate-tax regime to please the right, and a strong welfare state to please the left. The wasting asset of oil will not resolve the problem that, as any calculation shows, an independent Scotland will start its life in deficit.

It does not take more than a casual glance at its history to show that the SNP have never had any interest in the practical consequences of in dependence. They care about the ideal of a nation, not the people who live in it. They ignore or fudge vital questions about the economy and EU membership. In recent times, before the Euro crisis, they cheerfully talked of an independent Scotland joining the euro (they evade the huge issue of whether an independent Scotland, as well possibly as the remainder of the UK, would have to reapply for EU membership, a legal minefield). Before 2008 they spoke of the banking sector, of all things, as the core of an independent Scottish economy, forecasting a Scottish future comparable to that of Ireland and Iceland, shortly before both countries went so catastrophically bust. Now they talk of keeping the pound but following an independent economic policy. (How would that work? Why should the rest of the UK agree effectively to write a blank cheque? How would that be independence exactly?) But the practical problems of the real world have never been of interest to parties based on nationalism; on the contrary populist politicians like Alex Salmond ask people to turn their backs on real social and economic questions and seek comfort in a romanticized past and shared – often imagined – grievances. National problems are always someone else’s fault. The unscrambling of the British economy and British debt after three hundred years of intimate unity is impossible to calculate using any accounting formula. Arguments are already leading to bitterness and growing national hostility on both sides of the border. That is what nationalism does, and what it feeds off. And all the arguments, all the ill feeling, are tragically unnecessary.

Meanwhile the SNP are trying to manipulate the independence referendum to secure a maximum vote for themselves, by holding it in the anniversary year of the Battle of Bannockburn and lowering the voting age to include sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, because polls have shown that age group is most likely to vote for them. This smacks dangerously of electoral manipulation by a ruling party to stay in power and increase its power. God knows we have seen enough of that in modern European history. John Gray has recently written that while the dictatorships of the 1930s are unlikely to return, ‘toxic democracies based on nationalism and xenophobia’ could emerge in a number of countries and be in power for long periods.¹¹ Scots are proud, rightly of seeing their country in a European context. This, today, is the context.

Scotland and England have been politically and economically united for over three centuries. They have not been at war as states since the sixteenth century. The civil wars of the seventeenth and the Jacobite wars of the eighteenth centuries, though they had strong nationalist elements too, were both essentially about the nature of kingship and its relation to Parliament, society and religion within all the nations of the British Isles. This is not a historical narrative the SNP would approve, of course. They want a people drugged on historical legend, replete with holy national sites (such as Bannockburn) and myths. These things are the dead, empty heart of nationalism, always said to be unique in every country, always drearily similar. The British people have intimately shared everything, good and bad, involved in the experiences of the first Industrial Revolution, the rise and fall of the British Empire, and two world wars. Economic division in Britain has been, since the 1930s, not between Scotland and England but between south-east England and the rest. There are probably millions like me who are British Anglo-Scots and wish to be allowed to remain so.

Prejudices between the Scots and English have on the whole been mild in recent history. In my view, at least, the Scots and English are very good at knocking the rough corners off each other’s national cultures. But, beneath the empty populist bonhomie of Alex Salmond, the prospective breakup of Britain is already creating a new culture of hostility and bitterness on both sides of the border. I hope with all my heart that Scotland votes to remain in Britain, because then at least one nationalist spectre that has grown during my lifetime will vanish from Europe. If this book can persuade even one person of the dangers of nationalist politics in Scotland as in the rest of Europe, and to vote ‘no’ in the referendum on Scottish independence, it will have made the whole labour worthwhile. The recent record of other parties in Scotland has not been good; that is never a reason to vote for something worse, and to do so irrevocably; and a party which is often referred to by its members, as the SNP is, as the ‘National Movement’¹² should send a chill down the spine of anyone who remembers what those words have so often meant in Europe.