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David McCrone, "Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
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David McCrone
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
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Matt Dawson
Hello and welcome to New Books in Sociology, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Matt Dawson, and I'm professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. And today I'm delighted to have as my guest David McCrone. David is emeritus professor of Sociology at University of Edinburgh and the author of the book we're going to be discussing today. That book is titled Change in Society, Politics and Identity, which is published by Edinburgh University Press. So, David, welcome to the show.
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David McCrone
Thank you.
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Matt Dawson
Thanks for coming. So can you tell us a bit about yourself, first of all, and how you came to write this book?
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David McCrone
Yes, Well, I was born in 1945, which makes me 80. Now, that's relevant here because I was born and brought up in Aberdeen and went initially to Aberdeen University, really to do English literature. And because in the Scottish system, you have a choice. You have three subjects in your first year, three in your second year. So I signed up for English and then I thought I'd do history, but my advisor of studies, who was a professor of history, said, oh, no, no, no, history is full up. And I said, in somewhat desperation, because I knew nothing about universities, I said, well, what is like history? And he said, oh, sociology, that's something new that we're starting in Aberdeen. And so I entered, I Just thought, well, okay, and did the first year of sociology at Aberdeen and never looked back. Discovered as you do sometimes, that this is exactly right for me. And because it was so new and experimental, in many respects it was even better. So that's, I always say that the professor of African history at Aberdeen made me a sociologist. So that's what I did. And of course it was all very unbureaucratic in those days that certainly in Scotland all you needed was something called an attestation of fitness, which was a certificate that your hires were good enough to enter higher education. There weren't any akas or yuka forms or anything like that. And so I just, I went to see a person and an administrator and he said, oh. I said, what do I do now? And he said, well, turn up in October. So I did. And the rest, as they say, is history. So but then I got into sociology and discovered it was intriguing. It was about, among other things, family life in Bethnal Green in London and gangs in Chicago. And I thought, well, this is nothing I know about. I don't live in the East End of London, I don't live in Chicago. What about where I come from? What about Scotland? And that began a long period, a 50 year period really, of being interested in this rather curious country of Scotland. And eventually I then fell in love with Edinburgh as a city and I went to university. I transferred from Aberdeen to Edinburgh and found the city and the university very intriguing, which led me just a couple of years ago to write a book called who Runs Edinburgh? But I've been interested in the sociology of Scotland for an awful long time. I wrote a book in 1992 called Understanding Scotland. And when I was a young lecturer in the 1970s, I started to teach a course called the Sociology of Scotland. And one thing led to another and I wrote that as a book in 1992. A decade later I updated all that because of course in the real world everything was changing. We're talking really about the mid to late 70s and into the 80s. I, I published Understanding Scotland in 1992, by which point Thatcher had come, she hadn't quite gone. The whole thing was up in the air. There was a movement towards Scottish independence and a home rule movement for a parliament and so on. And somebody once said to me, quite recently, really just a couple of years ago, you must feel like a kid in a sweetie shop that all the world out there is conspiring to give you something to study. And I did feel that. I felt that as a sociologist, I was very Keen to acquire the skills of being a sociologist, that was what I wanted to do. And so going to university to do English literature, I then turned into a sociologist. And I don't think that's very unusual in terms of what happens to students that go to universities. They come to do X and they turn out doing Y and so on. So it's been a bit of a love affair with sociology. I can get really boring about the virtues of sociology and also some of the vices. But my take on this was to try and connect real world stuff, data on class and industrial change, geography, culture, and connect that up to what was going on out there in what I still believe is the real world. So I'm trying to connect empirical research and empirical data of a whole variety of sorts with an understanding of Scotland, because Scotland is a rather unusual and peculiar place in the sense that sociology grew up as somewhere to study nation states. Well, we then discovered that there aren't any nation states to talk about that. Nation, which is a cultural concept, and state, which is a political concept. Actually, there are very few cultural entities which are states and very few states which are cultural entities, homogenous entities. And Scotland fitted none of these. It was ostensibly a society in the sense that a sociologist would use it, which is that there is a civil society, there are institutions like the education system, and when it mattered, no longer quite matters the same. Religion, indeed, a politics system, a governance system. Because Scotland, in joining the Union in 1707, never lost its social identity. It was, as people have said, historians have said it was the best of both worlds. It was part of a much bigger enterprise. The United Kingdom or the British Empire. Indeed. And yet Scotland retained a lot of its identities through its social institutions. So people remained Scots, but they also became British, and all those sorts of things, kind of duality that we had. So that's how I got into it. And one thing led to another.
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Matt Dawson
Yes, indeed. And you've come to the right place to sing the virtues of sociology. David, there's nothing boring about singing the virtues of sociology. And I was fascinated by your story of becoming a sociologist. I wasn't told this by an art historian, but mine's the same. I went to, actually a higher education college in England and I was told mine was the first year where you had to have four subjects and I had three. And I was like, what should I take for the fourth? And the person sitting opposite me said, oh, you might like sociology. And then here we are all these years later, both of us. So, yeah, many people become Sociologists by accident, as we both deal.
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David McCrone
Yes, we are accidental sociologists, but not prone to accident, I hope, Mike.
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Matt Dawson
Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. We're going to find out in the course of this conversation. I mean, it's really fascinating hearing you talk about your trajectory, David, in your study, because I think anyone who reads the book, I mean, it's a really fascinating book. It's a really enjoyable book. I learned a lot from it. But the thing I'd say is you really get the feel of someone who has spent a long time, as you have, thinking about Scotland and thinking about Scotland in a sociological way. Because I think one of the things that really stands out about this book, and we'll get into this, you mentioned it here, is it is a really sociological take on Scotland. You know, that the changes that we see out there should be understood as driven by social and structural changes in the way that sociologists would do. So I think that really comes through and it really reflects what you had to say there. So to move to my questions, I think perhaps a good place to start is picking up on the discussion you had there. You title your first chapter, what is Scotland? And as you say, it's commonly referred to as a stateless nation. You use the term understated nation at some point, and this has often posed a challenge for sociologists and scholars. As you've already mentioned, we're often tied to methodological nationalism. We think of nation states despite the fact that many of them, as you say, aren't that. And as you mentioned, you foreground civil society to understanding what Scotland is. So can you tell us a bit about why this is so important, why civil society and your understanding is so important to answering that question of.
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David McCrone
Yes, I often get criticized for using a term like civil society. My first, what I always say to people is, well, you know, who invented the concept of civil society was Adam Ferguson at the time of the Scottish Enlightenment. So it's got a long pedigree. But by civil society, I suppose implicitly, I'm just juxtaposing it to political society. And sociologists are, I suppose the common sense definition is the study of society. Well, what do we mean by that? If we are simply referring to political society, that is states, then that reduces, that misses a whole level, and it certainly doesn't apply to Scotland. Because if you think when I think of the Union of 1707, I'm getting on a bit, but I don't remember 1707 personally, but 1707 was, as many people said at the time, or certainly later, with hindsight, having your cake and eating it, that is. Scotland was a small, relatively poor in economic terms, society, material society, and yet it joined this much bigger entity, what became the United Kingdom, but Great Britain, I suppose. In 1603, the King of Scotland, James VI, inherited the English throne and became James I. So he's the sixth and the first, and he was next in line after Elizabeth I of England. And so that was the beginning, I suppose. And then just over 100 years later, the union of the Treaty of Union, which was a political union now, there was no referendum in 1707. If there had been, I'm pretty sure it would have been turned down. It would have been a no. But there wasn't such a thing as democracy or anything in those days. But nevertheless, a large part of the institutions of Scotland, religion, education, the court system, the rule of law, was distinctively Scottish and remained so within the context of what became the United Kingdom and Great Britain and its empire. And people often made a mistake about understanding Scotland, that it was some kind of colony of England, because England was always the biggest dominant partner. And my answer to that, and of historians who know more about that than I do, is that Scotland was never a colony. It was a junior partner in British imperialism. Actually, as my good friend and late colleague Tom Nairn said, Scotland was a junior partner in British imperialism, which meant it got involved in all sorts of nasty, nefarious things like slavery and so on, but it was never a colony. So therefore, unlike Ireland, for example, which was conquered by England and indeed had many features of being a colony, and was the first part of the United Kingdom to break away in 1921, but Scotland was never a colony. It had this kind of junior partner status, and there was a partner in the union. And that deal, that arrangement of having independent institutions remained. And people thought of themselves as Scottish, although we don't have the empirical data, but they thought of themselves as Scottish as well as British, they became British. And the whole subsequent history of the late 18th, 19th into the 20th century, it is very clear that Scotland had taken advantage of being part of that British Empire. And indeed, it was so successful that many English politicians complained about Scots on the make taking advantage of the lockless English to steal to. Therefore, our claim to be quite mean with money comes out of that eye to the main chance. So we became a part of that. But it was. I always said to my students that it was a marriage of convenience, a marriage de raison, that is, there was nothing. It wasn't a conquest, it wasn't an agreement forever. It was a deal which would last for a time. And of course, as time passed, the British Empire decline disappeared. The UK became far less significant than it was. And by the 1960s and 70s, serious challenges were being presented to the British state. For example, even after the war, the Second World War, Scotland and England didn't differ very much politically. They voted in equal proportions for the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives. And only in the 1960s, 70s, 80s onwards, did that shift hugely between the two countries, the two partners of the Union. Now that mattered because England was always much bigger. And by the time you get to the middle to late 20th century, it's very clear that Westminster governments are elected on English votes. And there emerged what was what we called the democratic deficit, that no matter how Scotland voted, it always got a government it had not elected, certainly from the late 60s and 70s onwards. So that is a very recent history. I suppose sociologists and historians are used to dealing with centuries long or decades long. But here is something that's happened and certainly in my lifetime in 1945, Scotland was also British. It was part of that. It was a kind of partnership of what I call the warfare welfare nexus, which sounds very grand, but remember the Wars, World War I, World War II were wars in which Scottish regiments played an important and significant part, disproportionate part. And so the war, the British war, I suppose. But then of course, post war welfare state, which was the price of the British people generally for fighting a war, was created and that kept that military cultural connection and then the social connection through the welfare state, kept the Scots in the Union. Well, quite happily to a degree even. Although in the middle of the 20th century, there were just the beginnings of the rumblings of something beginning to happen. By the late 1960s. Of course, the discovery of oil in the North Sea removed psychologically the barrier to Scottish independence, which was that, theoretically speaking, Scotland could be an independent state and a rich independent state, just like Norway across the North Sea. And that's a psychological thing, of course. What happened to North Sea oil revenues was that it created, it was used to solve a problem of unemployment and industrial decline. And then in late 1970s, Mrs. Thatcher came on the scene and as they say, the rest is history. And as England went off in a rightward direction, Scotland remained leftist or centrist, largely in the first instance, voting for the Labour Party, which has always been the really British party, and disengaging from the Conservative Party. So there are political effects. Now, my argument, as you rightly say, Matt is that the social differences are what matters. Now, in the post war period, between 1945 until the 1970s, there was in Western societies what became known as the 30 glorious years, the traunt glorious, where major social changes happened whereby the shift which already happened in Britain from the countryside to the cities, the industrialization, the changes in industrialization, the second round of industrialization and all those sorts of things began to break down. And Mrs. Thatcher is not the cause of that. She is a symptom. She was a symptom of those changes and in many ways a lightning conductor that people attribute. Some people wrongly attributed that all to Mrs. Thatcher. But Mrs. Thatcher said quite openly she was an English nationalist, which was a very tricky and difficult thing to say. But there was a great episode which I'm very fond of in 1988, the Scottish cup final at Hamden between Celtic and Dundee United at the height, 1988, a height of poll tax stuff and all the rest of it. And she was invited by the sfa, the Scottish Football association, to attend the cup final. And the stuc hit on a brilliant idea of issuing the spectators with red cards and that a pointed signal. They all waved the red cards to send Mrs. Thatcher off. Now, Mrs. Thatcher, who had no sense of humor, apparently didn't know what was happening. She had not a clue. But all the rest of us knew. And this was a public expression of difference. It wasn't tied. Not all the people who did that were not nationalists with a capital N, because one should think of people in Scotland, wherever you are born and come from, as a nationalist with a small N rather than a big N. And some small N's are big N's and so on. And so there was this expression, this political expression, and people thought, oh, it's just political change. But actually, as you refer to, was social change this period of 30 years. In the book, I use the. The rather splendid cartoon by Vicky in the Daily Mail, which was much earlier, in the 1950s, 60s of Harold Macmillan's, you've never had it so good. Now, Scotland failed to be part of that, never. So you never had it so good because it didn't develop that type of new industries that happened in the south of England, the white goods industries, really, that's what we're talking about. So those material changes, and as a result, and indeed previous to that, Scotland always had a large proportion of people emigrating, some quite significant differences that Somebody calculated that 15%, 1 5% of Glasgow's population in the late 60s and early 70s emigrated. Now they emigrated to Australia or Canada or New Zealand, but also to England. So we had been used to, over nearly two centuries, large numbers of people emigrating. We think of Ireland as the quintessential emigration society. Actually it was Scotland in the post war period that three times as many proportionately Scots left Scotland as the Irish left Ireland. And so that was the happening, that was what people did to get on in the world, as it were. They got out, they went to England, they went to places like Corby in Northamptonshire, which became Little Scotland. And a third of the population had been born in Scotland. A remarkable thing that people. And so Scots kind of took that identity and culture with them all around the world, having taken advantage, as it were, of the wider British Empire. But so what I'm trying to say in the book is that there is a crucial 50 year period, the late 60s, early 70s, a mistake to try and pin it down, but all sorts of things were happening. Industrial change and post industrialism had happened in Scotland in the interwar period, particularly around Clydeside in Glasgow, for example. All those locomotives and heavy engineering and shipbuilding which had been the pride of the Clyde as it were, disappeared, disappeared, were replaced by a global industry of shipbuilding and all those sorts of things. And so the Scottish Office, which was the institution in Scotland belonging to the British government, had tried proactively to change the economy, to attract industry in and all those sorts of things, and indeed to sustain traditional industries. There's a very good example of that by historians at Glasgow University, Jim Phillips and his colleagues, who argued that the closure of pits, the closure of mines in Scotland from the 60s 70s was seen as a moral betrayal. Now that's high language, but a political, moral betrayal of Scotland. And when we got to 1979, of course, Mrs. Thatcher had no truck whatsoever with an attempt to create or hold tight to what she called lame duck industries like the coal mines, or indeed to attract inward investment, it should be left to something called the market, whatever that was meant to be. And so Scotland in economic, material terms became more and more disaffected, disadvantaged. But at the same time there was demographic change. There was a shift away from emigration to immigration, for example, people coming from elsewhere into Scotland. And, and there was also, and all these things that connected demographic change, the expansion of higher education. I mean, lots of people like me, born in 45, who were the first of our generation to go to university, we didn't know about universities much anything, and we were the first to go. And that was because the education system, part of the welfare state, educated us, mind you, only 10% of the age group went to university in those days, not 50% as do so today. So we recognized that. And those fed through the expansion of education, the closing off of migration, demographic change, that people began to have fewer children, 1.2 or 1.5 or whatever it was. And above all, the benefits were there for women. And they were there certainly in two forms. One is more and more women, more and more girls stayed on at school and went to university, so it become equal male and female. And secondly, the move away from industrial jobs, what I call shovel jobs, really, manual jobs which didn't require physical strength or much of it, into white collar jobs, into the service economy, meant there were jobs for women. So women benefited many respects in terms of deindustrialization and expansion of services. Staying on at school and the whole for men and women, for boys and girls, through education gave you access to new skills, whether in the private sector, banks, investment trust or whatever it be, but also in the public sector, in jobs and education, welfare and all the rest of it. Now that's a transformation, that's a revolution, a fundamental revolution in Scotland. Those are what I would call, what a sociologist would call social changes, social structural changes, which had consequences in political terms, because the people who were breaking away in their politics from the two main parties, the two big class parties as it were, Labour and the Conservative, into the Nationalists, SNP and also indeed the Liberals, as they were at the time, there were people who thought, well, I'm moving on, I'm a different kind of person, I'm not the way my parents were or my grandparents were. I'm a different person. And in cultural terms that was the case. So my argument simply is that the social changes were what drove a lot of the political and the cultural changes as well. So that in a nutshell, or rather long nutshell, is what the book's trying to say.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah, and there's lots of things for us to pick up on there, David, that we're going to discuss in a bit more depth. And the first thing I wanted to pick up on was the breakdown of what you call when you mentioned it there, the warfare welfare nexus, which as you discussed there, stitched together Scotland and the rest of the UK for this sort of glorious 30 years. So why did that nexus become untangled? What led to it becoming untangled, do you think?
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David McCrone
It's a good question. Take a preliminary step back. Linda Colley wrote a very good book back In, I think 1992 called Forging the Nation. And Linda Colley was arguing that two things helped to forge the British one was religion, Protestantism in its different guises. So if you were Catholic, you were excluded, which is why Ireland was never really part of that Britishness thing and warfare, because from certainly Napoleonic wars in the early part of the 19th century all the way through, all the way through for 150 years, Britain was at war with somebody, actually or implicitly at war with somebody, usually a continental power such as France or Germany. And the Scottish regiments were an important part of that. So warfare and religion made the British even, although they were English or Welsh or Scots or indeed Northern Irish or whatever. Now in the post war period there was a third leg to that which was welfare. But thank goodness for my generation there was no wars to fight. World War II was to be the war ends all war. That was World War I, but it didn't happen. But we got World War II and that was my parents war and World War I was my grandparents war. So warfare, it was tempt peace, it was 30 years of economic development and peace, relatively speaking Cold War, but it was peace. So warfare just slipped away and with it a strong sense of Britishness. So the warfare welfare and wealthiest changed. Later welfare, the decline of welfare would stitch the British in in 1948 into the National Health Service and so on. By the 1970s, the mid-1970s and the rise of the new right in the Conservative Party and the rise of Mrs. Thatcher in 1979. The writing was on the wall, the nail was in the coffin, depending on which metaphor you want to use. And so welfare as welfare became problematic, at least in the eyes of the right and the English right particularly. Warfare had gone, welfare had gone. The nexus that bound Scotland and Scots into the British state and being British, had wasted away and given right from day one that it was a marriage of convenience. Then it was no longer convenient. North Sea oil had been discovered in the late 1960s into the 1970s. And people said, well, we could be independent. What's happening to our oil money? Norwegians are doing very well in Scotland. It's all been poured into deconstructing the welfare state and rising unemployment, the closing down of industries which were deemed uneconomic, and with it Mrs. Thatcher. This was happening before Thatcher got her hands on it, but she was the lightning rod which brought that about and she was a very successful politician in England. And so you had this growing gap between Scotland and England. I've not mentioned Wales because poor old Wales usually gets lumped in with England, England and Wales. And it's only latterly that that we begin to see the same things happening in Wales. And Wales actually was far more dependent on heavy engineering, coal mining and the rest of it. Over 50% of men in the post war period worked in the coal mines. It was nowhere like that in Scotland. Scotland was much more diverse, much more like the rest of Britain. And the other thing that was happening in the post war period was the demise of the British Empire, out of which the Scots had done very well, was the other nail in the coffin. So lots of changes and these were manifesting through social change from the late 50s, 60s into the 70s. And the disengaging of Scotland, which had its own identity, its own institutions and indeed its own proto government in the form of the Scottish office, even although ministers in the Scottish office belong to the ruling party in Westminster. And the agitation which had always been there throughout the union of oh, let's have home rule, let's have a parliament that's ours that we can vote for directly, even although for much of that time people were happy to stay within the British Union. So these are. But I think of those as political, cultural outcomes of structural change of what was happening elsewhere in the Western world. The metaphor I like to use is the receptors of change. These changes, economic, social, demographic, were happening across the Western world. And as the term suggests, Les Trente Glorieuses is a French conception and it wasn't unique to France, it was unique to all Western societies. The transformation of those societies, and they didn't all become the same, the receptors, the institutional receptors of those changes, this washing over, this tsunami of change that was happening across the Western world, highly identified the institutions that were unique to those societies. So those common changes, demographic, social and so on, expressed differently in Scotland. So lots of things came together, connived at shifting the whole balance. And the driver of those essentially were the social, structural changes.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah, and I think one of the things you said there at the end, David, I think really is true about your book and your argument is, you know, we can understand these, these changes happening across Western societies, but there's a specificity as to how they're received and we can see that in the Scottish case. And I think one of the specificities that you've already mentioned, I want to talk about was migration, because this was something that I was really taken by and I didn't know this, you know, the sheer amount of outward migration, as you said, in the second half the 20th century, Scotland is the part of the UK that people leave. And then as you highlight in the 90s, that begins to shift. There's an increase of people coming from the rest of the uk, of which I'm an example, so I have a personal interest. But also there's international migration. And this is happening alongside the sort of demographic change that we see across the rest of the world. The growth of single person households, less marriages, the kind of births and deaths. And you've already mentioned increased opportunities for women in education and work. So what did these demographic changes mean for Scotland and why are they so important to the discussion you want to make about social change in Scotland over this?
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David McCrone
Okay, okay, that's a good question. The one thing that Scotland always has had going all the way back to its early history was a diversity. Remember, I always remind people that the monarchy, the kings and queens of Scotland, were called the Queen of Scots or the King of Scots, plural, because of the diversity of peoples of languages, Gaels and Lowlanders, East, West, Catholics, Protestants, whatever it would be. The one thing that people had in common was, was that they lived in the territory. So it was, as we would use it today, not a very good term, but it's the best we have. It was a civic identity that developed a recognition of diversity. Because if you had said, oh, if you're a Scot, that must mean that you are a Protestant or a Catholic or a Gael or a Lowlander, or. And as soon as you did that, you opened up difference, which meant there were people who were not that. And a lot of people just say to me, but Scotland is very like England. I said, yes, it is. Of course it is. You speak the same language. Yes, well, more or less, that is true. But it means that the tariff for becoming Scots is low. That is the price you pay. You don't have to learn the language. Now, there is a very interesting debate in Wales and also in Ireland about what is a true Welsh person, What's a true Irish person? Do you have to speak Welsh or do you have to speak what in Ireland is called Gaelic, Ayrsh or not? And people go, oh. Or the debate in Quebec, in Canada about, are you really a Quebecer if you don't speak French? Or the form of French that passes for. For French in Quebec. So the price for the incomer is low. And at the same time, on the other side of the way, people have gone, yeah, you can come here, you're no different from us, you're part of that. You pay your taxes, you do it, you join in, you become part of that. It's. The similarity is an advantage, not a disadvantage to people. So when immigrants from wherever they came, from England or Wales or Ireland, and we had all of those people coming in, and increasingly from the rest of Europe, or indeed the rest of the world, it was relatively easy to be accepted, relatively. Didn't mean to say that we didn't have our racists, of course we do. But the acceptance apparatus, if you like, is there because over a thousand years we've had to accommodate people not like us, whoever us might be speaking language, speaking whatever, on religion or whatever it be. So the kind of territorial sense of being Scottish was built in now. And people say, yes, but that's true of England too. And I say, yes, of course it is. In objective terms, England is also a mongrel society. At the time of the demand for Scottish Parliament, I remember in the 1980s, people said, well, we are a mongrel people. You know, we're not pure bread or poor lean, as the Quebecers would say. Well, no, no, no, we're a bit of everything. Well, that's good. It's something to be celebrated. And it meant that doors were more likely to be open and you didn't have to acquire a particular. And we saw that lots of good quality research was showing that very clearly. When people were asked, you know, what would you think of who is, who is or is not? And we got into work on national identity, about who the claims of national identity. Would you consider this person a Scot? Now people say, oh, well, to be a Scot you have to be born here. And we say, yes, but unless you're an unusual person, you didn't choose to be born here. You just were born here. And what does that mean? It's an inscription. It's not an achievable thing. I was born in Aberdeen. No one asked me. My parents didn't come and say, where would you like to be born? I was just born. Right. But being born, brought up, educated in different ways. So it became a much more, a broader, if you like, with a small L. A liberal way now. And the same is true of England. The same is true of England. Indeed. More people came from abroad into England, as I understand it, because in the post war period there was a labor shortage and so a lot of people with brown and black skins came here to do jobs that quite frankly the Brits and the English in particular wouldn't do, right. In hospitals and care work and so on. And they found, of course, that they encountered an entrenched racism that they couldn't get past. And that was a difficulty. We too had our. In Scotland, we had our racists, and that's true. But the whole thrust of being Scottish and the identity historically provided the backdrop into which people could enter. And there's lots of examples of that, of people burn suppers. We've just had. It's been burns supper period at the moment, the season. And lots and lots of people with black, brown, pink, gray, or whatever color of skin we've got faces are part of that. And a celebration of that. Now that could be celebratory and an excuse for not actually attacking real racism, but it provides the wherewithal to have a go at that. And that racism, it may exist, it hangs on the streets, but it's much more difficult if the societal ideology, if we can call that the political ideology with a small P, is to a degree of openness. Because in territorial terms, we've always had to be that the real question. And people often make the mistake of saying, well, Scotland, what's happened in Scotland has made them all go nationalist or something. Or in Wales. No, no, things are happening in England. I think you made the point before that things were happening in England. The political things were happening in England particularly. Seems as if I'm blaming Mrs. Thatcher, but she's a lightning rod. She's not the cause. But the Conservative Party particularly found even before Thatcher, Enoch Powell found an Expression of Englishness which had never really worked its way through. What are the English? The Liberal left still struggle hugely with what it means to be English and are backed off it. That's partly because Labour, the biggest party, has always thought of itself as British, but they've never broken through into what English means and left it to the Conservative Party or the Conservative Party have stolen it or mobilized it into a kind of racist or neo racist form under people like Enoch Powell and indeed Mrs. Thatcher and lots of other people.
- [45:15]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the things that you do in the book that's really good as well is say that there's. You'll often hear this in the discussion of Britain and Scotland, the idea that somehow Scotland departed from the rest of the UK once Mrs. Thatcher gets elected. But actually we should look at it as more Mrs. Thatcher and England and even then perhaps in particular parts of England departing Scotland in ways that I think are very convincing in terms of that narrative.
- [45:44]
David McCrone
You see, there's, there's also something about the nature of the state that matters hugely. The UK. The UK was formed in 1707, not as a, let's call it a nation state, although it's not a term where either of us care for much, but it was a kind of solution to a dynastic religious problem. But who's going to be the monarch of England? Who was next in line? Oh well, there was this James VI guy, he'll do after Elizabeth. And what about religion? In other words, the so called Glorious Revolution, which wasn't terribly glorious in England, was about religion. It was not having a Catholic on the throne and making sure that didn't happen. And so the uk, the Scotland England nexus was created to solve the dynastic and the religious questions. It never really developed into a proper modern state in terms of what we would recognize. And then of course Wales was really for Wales read England as it were. And then there was the Irish question and Northern Ireland, which was really part of Ireland to all intents and purposes and cultural national terms. But the Scotland England nexus created a state with a fundamental contradiction, which was that it was multinational. It was clearly multinational. Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland multinational, but with a single legislature that it was Greater England. They've never solved that problem. They've never got through that. They down there, Westminster. They have not made the British state modern. There was lots of opportunities for that to happen, but as far as they were concerned, it didn't matter because the uk, Great Britain was really Greater England. That's a real and that led to people's claiming in identity terms that people in England didn't understand the difference between England and Britain. And that's what journalists said. And indeed we got some money, research money, to study scholars in England and particularly England, because people had said this to see if it was true and it wasn't true. People could tell the difference between England and Britain in England quite easily. They were just a little bit reticent about articulating a lot of that. So there's something quite. I wouldn't go so far as to say a failed state, that the UK is a failed state, but it never developed properly. If one can say that it didn't become like France, it didn't become like Germany as a. Well, I suppose the technical term is a Westphalian state after the Treaty of Westphalia. It was never like that. It was an imperial state. And indeed my parents and grandparents generation who emigrated to Canada, New Zealand and Australia continued to think of themselves as British even though they lived abroad, thousands and thousands of miles away. They were British somehow in cultural terms. So the British state never quite evolved in my opinion today it's still not evolved in terms of finding ways through into its multinationality which doesn't require a single legislature which is dominated by people in England.
- [49:32]
Matt Dawson
Indeed. And this is where we get back to, as you said, the sort of marriage of convenience nature of that union, where it is done for that. Let's turn now to something we mentioned a few times, the sort of material changes that you discuss in the book that are driving this. And the key one is class. And you talk about in the book the centrality of, of class to how Scotland often likes to imagine it, or I should say how Scots like to imagine Scotland. Notion of Red Clyde side is often invoked, the world of industrial work and so on. But yeah, I think one of the things that's really interesting, it takes us back to an argument you've already made. If we look objectively and if you remove the south of England, which is always the exception in the British state, if you remove the south of England, then actually the industrialization and changed in the class structure are broadly similar in Scotland to the rest of the uk. So obviously what's significant here is what's distinct about how these changes were understood and experienced. So what was distinct and important in that process of material change?
- [50:31]
David McCrone
Well, it's very interesting because class idea, but there is just a little sidestep. When I was a young student I discovered this wonderful book by E.P. thompson, the Making of the English Working Class which is a must read in those egalitarian days, by the way. I remember doing Sociology 1 and, of course, and sociologists didn't believe. They believed in equal opportunities, whatever, and everyone got a prize. It's a bit like Lewis Carroll prizes for everyone. So, and my prize, I said, we were given whatever amounts of money. And I said, no, I want E.P. thompson's making the English Working Class. And it's a fantastic book, it's well worth rereading. And he makes the point. No, it is about the English working class. He said, Scotland and Wales have their own culture of class. And the other thing that E.P. thompson, Edward Thompson was very, very insistent upon is that class is a cultural thing as well as a material thing. There is a famous essay review which he wrote in the socialist register in 1965, which was a critique of a paper by Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson, where he took them to task for employing a far too materialist notion of what social class was. Because he said, look, there is a culture of class. What is culture to sociologists? It's. It's a system of meaning. It's a way of making sense of material changes and translating them into behavior or political attitudes or cultural identities or whatever. And it is that cultural aspect that we've got a bit caught up in now. So social class has many facets, materially, in terms of the occupations that people do very obviously remember. The great trilogy of. Of David Lockwood and John Goldthorpe in the Affluent Worker was. There are three aspects, structure, consciousness and action. Structure means occupationally, that is, what people do for a living, how they sell their labor. Action is political action. But the key one that everyone ignores is consciousness, by which he meant society, I suppose the one in the middle, the culture, the. The ways in which it is refracted. Changes are refracted through this meaning system into political action or not. It's not enough just to have structure and action. Remember Marx's famous phrase about peasants being a sack of potatoes? And people thought that was very rude to peasants, but actually what he meant was lumping people together because objectively, they are potatoes, they look like potatoes and therefore they are. Potatoes didn't generate action. You need that meaning system, consciousness, culture in those. Now, that's a preamble, but I think it's an important one because how class operated, the same material changes were happening north and south of the border. So in England there was an expansion of the welfare state, expansion of educational opportunity, much as there was in Scotland and in Wales and so on. All of those were happening, but they were fed through a different prism of understanding. In Scotland, there had been. There has still. Is there a cultural, literary concept of the egalitarian myth? Now, egalitarian myth. Myth doesn't mean something that's not true. You know, the earth is flat. That's a myth. No, egalitarian myth is a sense of a belief that in spite of realities, people are the same. So we have phrases like, we're all dropped, Thomson's bairns, or whatever it would be. It's a bit like, although this is not the time to remind Americans of the American dream, is it? You don't hear much of the American dream in the concept of trumpery. However it is to bring about. Yeah, the undream, the nightmare. American nightmare. No American name. That is, if you work hard enough, you can make it. Now, lots and lots of people said, no, no, no, no, look, I mean, this isn't happening if you're black or brown or. And so on. Just. No, you don't get. That's true. But the egalitarian myth in Scotland is quite similar. There's a kind of set of values and understandings that to be Scottish and indeed Welsh, whatever it would be, requires you to think of other people in social terms as your equal. And there's a large literature from the 19th into the 20th century which celebrates that. Now, this can get just too far, but nevertheless, it provides, as I say, a prism of understanding. So what we then found in John Goldthorpe's splendid studies of social class in the 1970s through. In the 80s and now in the 90s, was that how people described their class in objective terms was one thing. Someone works in a factory manual. Working class, whatever, or in an office or something. But the culture of class in England was different, as E.P. thompson had argued, than it was in Scotland, Wales. So you find that many more people, middle class people, people in service jobs in Scotland, will say they're working class and people go, you can't be working class. You don't work with your hands. Well, come on. That is. There is a sort of. There is a kind of attachment of the label to your social origins or how you think of yourself, or indeed your politics. Whereas the same people, almost identically, the same people in the same occupation, occupations in England disguise themselves as middle class there is that wonderful, if you're old enough to remember it. On the BBC did the sketch of the three people for Yorkshire.
- [56:51]
Matt Dawson
Sketch.
- [56:52]
David McCrone
Yes, yes. Of the class system in England.
- [56:57]
Matt Dawson
Oh, the two runners thing with the tall meat. Yes.
- [57:02]
David McCrone
And Ronnie Barker And Ronnie Corbett and, you know, I am working class, I look up to him. I am middle class, I look up to him John Cleese as the upper class person. So that confection of social class is a cultural thing. It's a joke. But the best jokes work because there's reality behind them onto which people can peg things. And that conception of class and status, as we would say as sociologists, operate differently in England. But in Scotland we find people describing themselves as working class. Even people whose parents or grandparents were never working class, manual working class, were quite keen on describing themselves working class. Now it becomes that. That becomes a national identity, not just a class identity. So being Scottish or indeed being Welsh, is a good example of that of people who have perhaps at some stage in their family's history, three or four generations back, been manual workers or peasants or whatever, but articulate that differently. That's what E.P. thompson was trying to do. That's what structural consciousness in action does. And in Scotland, that's why class operates differently in all parts of Scotland, not just in west of Scotland, because people make the mistake of thinking, oh well, only in the west of Scotland and Clydeside was that working class. No, Scotland, across the regions of Scotland and the counties of Scotland was really very similar to the rest of England and so on.
- [58:46]
Matt Dawson
Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned earlier, we've just had burns night, you know, and you think, if the burns by my man's a man for a night, you know this. So is that national myth of what's on going Scotland is. That's tied into that. Let's move from class identity to national identity. So one of the things that was very interesting in your book, and of course it feeds into your argument, is you make the point that up until the 1970s, Scots weren't really asked about their national identity. As you have mentioned, we can make assumptions about how they fought, but they weren't really asked about it. And obviously it is significant for the argument you're making that come the 70s, people begin to be asked in Scotland, what is your identity? Are you Scottish, are you British, et cetera. So two questions I want to ask you, linked here. Firstly, what are the changes in how Scott's come to identify and link to this? You talk quite a bit in the book about what you call the referendum decade, the period between 2011 and 2021, where we get the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and then the Brexit referendum in 2016. So how did. How did the change in patterns of national identity unfold in Scotland. And what role did the referendum decade play in this?
- [59:58]
David McCrone
Okay, two questions there. Let me take the first one. Why since the union? Well, we don't know that sociologists are just as bad as other social scientists for taking things for granted. Only when they become problematic do we begin to think, whoa, wait a minute, I remember that. And I mentioned this one before. The affluent worker studies. The basis of the affluent worker Studies in the 1960s by David Goldthorpe and David Lockwood and John Goldthorpe, and indeed my colleague Eskmont, colleague Frank Baekhofer and Jennifer Platt, was premised on a very taken for granted assumption in the press and in the media that affluent workers, people who earned quite a bit of money as working car plants in Luton and Dagenham, for example, were becoming Tories. And it was all part of, is this a Tory hegemony? Is this the Tory party from the 1950s into the 60s? The way people are going, the more affluent they become, the more Tory they become. On the face of it, it didn't seem a bad hypothesis, but it was a testable hypothesis. So Lockwood and Goldthorpe got car workers, affluent car workers who earned a lot of money way above the average manual wage and discovered they weren't Tories. And that's a nice example. The assumption they'd taken for granted, conventional wisdom was, well, come on, the more people earn, the more Tory they become. No, it didn't work. It didn't work that way. The same is true. It only became a researchable question when sociologists began to say, wait a minute, that just doesn't work. And the same was true in Scotland that people didn't just assumed, because the conventional wisdom was that Scots were British as well as Scots, they never ceased to be Scottish. But Scottishness was dovetailed into Britishness. There was a broader concept of Britishness and there was the English and the Scots and the Welsh and the Northern Irish, but that's another argument. But they were co. Equally. So that was it. And then in the rise of political nationalism in the late 60s and early 1970s, people went, Wait a minute, is this true? Are people not ceasing to be British and becoming Scottish? So it became a hypothesis. And only when it became a hypothesis did social scientists get in on the act. And the earliest evidence we have is early 1970s. Now, what was the trigger was a very interesting measure that was developed in Spain after 1975 in the death of Franco. In Catalonia, political and social scientists got interested in, well, if in Catalonia, a bit like Scotland being Catalan, more important than being Spanish. Have people in Catalonia ceased to be Spanish because Spanishness was so strongly associated with Franco in the far right? What is happening here? And so various people got involved and they began to evolve measures and ask people in surveys and elsewhere, you know, are you Catalan and Spanish? And people, somebody said, well, I am both, I'm equally. Or I'm more Catalan than Spanish, or I'm more Spanish Catalan. And one of my former students, Luis Moreno, who came to do his PhD from Barcelona to Edinburgh, brought the technique with him. And we persuaded the Herald, which was then called the Glasgow Herald, to try the question in Scotland. Do you think of yourself as Scottish, not British, more Scottish than British, equally Scottish and British, British more than Scottish or British, not Scottish. A five point scale, what technically is called a likard scale, but that's neither here nor there. So what was behind that was maybe how are people juggling their state identity being Spanish or British and their national identity being Catalan or Scottish or whatever. And that was an expression of, of the problematic that was emerging in political terms. And that led to a lot of research of people like us trying to refine the measures of national identity. Because the other piece of conventional wisdom that turned out not to be true, we didn't think it was. People said, oh, well, the rise of nationalism in Scotland, the SNP and whatever, means that people have ceased to be British and they are now Scottish. And so we ask people, and it's not true, they still mix. Overwhelmingly, people prioritize being Scottish over being British, but they don't deny being British. And so you have these dual labels that were operating and for a long time, and this is me getting to your second point about the referendum experiences, for a long time people had thought that political change was driven by those, for example, who said they were Scottish were voting for the snp and those who said they were equally or more British were voting laboratory it wasn't. So we discovered that a lot of people, and the 5 to 1 ratio, more people were. People were saying they were Scottish more than British, that was clear. But they were not denying that they were British to a degree. And indeed people who said they were Scottish, not British, or indeed more Scottish than British, were not voting for independence necessarily. A minority were, a minority were. And there was no proper correspondence between national identity and your political actions anymore than people who emphasized the British end. And it was always about 10%. Oh, and there weren't a huge number of people in Scotland who prioritized being British. The lowest point in the scale that affected was Scottish equals British, equally Scottish and British. That's where, you know. So most Tories would be equally Scottish and British. But it meant that people were articulating some very deep complexes of understanding of national identity, and they were not translating cultural national identity straightforwardly into politics until the referendums. Now, referendums are crude instruments. They require a very simple response, yes or no, for or against, remain or leave or whatever it be. Now, we knew that people's opinions were more nuanced. They were subtle. They were not crude, like, oh, if I'm an A, I'm not a B. And so the first referendum, 2014, which, of course, the British government. Why did the British government do the referendum in 2014? Because they thought Scots would only vote. About a third of them would vote for independence, and that would be the end of it. Then they were shocked, scared out of their wits that it was very, very close, and it was 45, 55. It's not as close as all that. But nevertheless, it meant that a lot of people were converted by a simple question, because the scale of people said, yeah, well, I'm in favor of independence, but not complete independence, just a bit of independence, a bit of devolution without worrying about defense or whatever it would be. That was a common response. So referendums distilled people's opinions. If you force people to choose A or B, you may be shocked at the outcome. And that's what happened. So one of the effects of the 2014 referendum was that people who said they were Scottish and not British voted, well, we're voting yes to independence, and it's never gone back. Two years later, we get Brexit, the Brexit referendum. Now, Brexit referendum, the outcome was not predicted, people. The UK Government had a referendum on Brexit because they thought it would win it. And look what happened there. But In Scotland, over 60% of people voted remain. But in England, where most people lived, a majority, just a majority, voted to leave. And so what did we get? We got to leave because England is so big, it's 80% of the UK population. Government's decisions are determined on the English because there's an awful lot of them out there. Now, one of the effects, if you then had. And people in Scotland have been told in 2014, oh, well, if you vote for independence, you won't automatically be in the European Union. And then two years later, Brexit happens, and lo and behold, we're not in the European Union anyway. So there's a kind of very curious effect. And mobilizing around Brexit. Yes or no, Remain or Leave was infused because it was only two years after the independence referendum that people who supported independence thought of themselves as European and people who were opposed were Leavers. And so a very simple question, again, too simple, overly simplistic. Leave or Remain? Because public opinion was not divided into two, it was divided into four or five or six or whatever it would be. But forcing people to choose forced another a reinforcing of Scottish political identities in favor of independence and being a European. And nobody predicted that. But the referendum had a catalytic effect on creating those. And what had been a social political movement of the Liberal left, I suppose we would call it in 2014 on the referendum was transposed into Brexit. And Brexit, of course, the key variable in England which explains Brexit is saying you're English. That was just a fact. Of all the surveys that we did, the one that jumps out is the more English people thought of themselves, the more likely they were to remain. So you had the Ukip effect, you had the so called Reform effect, you had the Farage effect and all those sorts of things of a right wing capture, which was alien not only to bits of England, but above all to Scotland and Wales on top of all the other things that had been happening in the 50 years that we've just been through. So that's been a very important decade. And the evidence seems to be that people in Scotland remain, but they are pro European and they're in favor of independence.
- [71:54]
Matt Dawson
Yeah. And obviously these political events are also happening in a society that since 1999 has had the Scottish Parliament, which was the Scottish assembly when it was formed, and the Scottish government, which was then the Scottish Executive, and the voting patterns and the makeup of the Parliament, and to some extent the government have also changed and been exacerbated by this referendum decade. And you talk in the book about how these helped form two dominant groups, what you call the Scottish Sovereignists and the British Unionists. So I was wondering if you'd tell us a bit about those two groups and how their emergence have impacted the three main parties in Scotland, which would be, we've already mentioned, of Labor, Tory and Sempex.
- [72:38]
David McCrone
Yes. Well, this is work that the political scientist Michael Keating and I did. And we were responsible for a couple of surveys on Scottish social attitudes, which is an amazingly good vehicle, just as British social attitudes is. It's absolutely kosher, it's absolutely to be trusted with a proper methodology. And we were interested, we were told first of all that, oh, Sovereignty, people say, oh, that's a very complicated legal. People don't understand it. But we devised a couple of questions which turned out to work, which effectively, to be a sovereigntist is to believe, whether you vote for independence or not, that you're in favor of people in Scotland making their own decisions. Self determination, if you want to be grandiose about it. Where do you think, where does one think sovereignty lies? Who is sovereign? And we devised a couple of questions and we had other ones that we tried a couple of years later and they seemed to work and we wrote various papers on that, so won't bore you with, but sovereignty were people who believed that, that people in Scotland were the source of sovereignty. But there were also people, and they were the largest number, about 40% of people in Scotland, one might say, believe in sovereignty. It doesn't mean to say, by the way, that they're in favor of independence because you could be a sovereigntist in theoretical terms or a theoretical concept and thinking, oh well, maybe now is not the time to be independent. Right. So that's a tactical decision. Whereas the theory of sovereignty is a theory is a kind of basis of a fundamental value. If you like Unionists were people who disputed that and perfectly reasonable thing to do. Now they were about 15% of people in Scotland. Now you think, well, you're just describing nationalists on the one hand and Tories on the other, aren't you? No, because although there are these two blocks, if you then ask them about policy, well, who makes decisions about welfare, who should make decisions about farming, who should make decisions about this or that, and the next thing, social welfare, you get a much more complex understanding. A lot of sovereignties believe that certain things should be the responsibility of UK government, and a lot of Unionists believe that Scottish government should be responsible for other things. So although you can distill out these two blocks, they're not separate blocks. There is a considerable amount of washing over between those two positions. Now, it'll come as no surprise to learn that SNP voters are overwhelmingly sovereigntists. Well, you'd be surprised if they weren't. And that Tories are overwhelmingly Unionists. Labor is the interesting division. They split almost evenly between sovereigntists and Unionists. And so within voting for the same political party, you find some very complex and nuanced differences. Now you may think, well, that's labor in some difficulties because they can't make up their minds. Actually, the other argument is, well, they understand nuances of one thing and another, which is reflected in who has policy priority over particular areas. So it doesn't map neatly onto party politics. Being a sovereigntist and a unionist neither, as I said, the beginning is being a sovereigntist overwhelming in favor of independence, because there'll be people who argue this is not the time for independence, even although you may believe theoretically in the principle of sovereignty. But the principle of sovereignty is very important because it means that all things benico in terms of the higher political social value, that's where you think. And therefore it goes back to what I said at the beginning of our discussion. If Scotland entered the union in 1707 as a marriage of convenience, a tactical convenience with England, then sovereignty remains. There are episodes in history which are very important. In the post war period there was a debate about, and we think it'd just be esoteric or uninteresting. But before I think either of us were born, the question of the title or the number, the number question of the monarch. Was the queen, I nearly said elected. She wasn't elected. But who became the Queen in 1953? Was she Elizabeth I or Elizabeth II? Because in Scotland we hadn't had an Elizabeth I, but in England there had been Elizabeth I. She was the woman that had Mary Queen of Scots head chopped off. But that's another matter. So there was the numeral question. And you think, well, that's just kind of trivial and silly. No, because fundamentally people are saying, no, no, no, this is a union of partners. This is a partnership union with a small country and a big country. And therefore, if you're saying that we don't matter as a small country, then you're making a very fundamental mistake as well as a very fundamental decision. So throughout the relationship of Scotland to England as the two founding partners of the Union, it's not to leave Wales out, but for Wales. Read England, as the Encyclopedia Britannica used to say, Wales had just become part of England and didn't have proper devolution until much later than Scotland didn't even have a Welsh office until 1965. But the partnership between Scotland and England, which founded the British state in 1707, was based on a notional equality of two nations. And throughout there has been that tension of, well, wait a minute, we got into this union in 1707 as a marriage of convenience and retaining our sovereignty. And here we are and we reserve the right to leave. Most people in Scotland just say, well, we're happy at the moment, but we have the right to leave if things turn nasty. And that's, I think, what sovereignty and unionism is about. And the interesting parties are not the ones who overwhelmingly either Nationalists or the Tories are separate, but labor, particularly in the middle, because Labour historically in the post war period was the largest party in Scotland and remained the Unionist party. Indeed, in 1945, Labour was the biggest party in England and Scotland and Wales. And that is where the tensions are and remain in terms of the British state.
- [80:27]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, it's never left its British nature, has it? It's a fundamentally British party in that sense. So one of the themes that we've spoken about a lot and one of the key themes of the book is culture. And you have a whole chapter on this. You follow Tom Nairne, who we spoke earlier, who of course discussed the idea that Scottish culture was prior to 1970s seen as deformed. We get the famous cultural cringe or cultural pessimism which is seen to define Scotland for a long period. But you note that what the period you're discussing, this period of the 70s and onwards does is we see this replacement of this cultural pessimism with a sort of cultural optimism, this idea of this sort of now newly resurgent, vocal progressive Scotland. And I want to quote what you say about this, David. This is a bit of a long quote, but I think it's useful to put it so quote. Put simply, it seems that the old wisdom that Scottish culture was erratically deformed, thus preventing proper political change, shifted to the assertion it was cultural change which was responsible for bringing about these political constitutional changes. The old argument otherwise was turned its head. If culture had prevented political change, then in post 70s Scotland it was deemed responsible for making political change happen. You go on to say that both assertions seem to you too stark for the attribute. The key relationship is that directly between culture and political, without much in between. Above all, they are asociological. So what did you mean by that?
- [81:57]
David McCrone
Well, to say above all it's sociological is to invite the repost world. You would say that, wouldn't you? Yes, but it is an interesting question because there's a long tradition in looking at Scottish culture in a sociological terms. I don't just mean capital C culture, you know, books and theater or whatever it be. We're talking culture generally. And this is associated with my old friend and former colleague Tom Nairn, a last deceased. But Tom and I founded a degree in nationalism studies and we worked very closely together and we knew each other over a long period of time. And he was a fantastic intellectual, Tom. But however, some of his theories, if you like, I thought and I said to him were flawed. And one of these, because Tom wrote eloquently on deformed Scottish culture, that Scotland had not had political independence, because that its culture was a kind of deformed, a cringe culture, tartanry, kailyardism, as it was called, parochialism, and all those nasty things that we learned to object to in the 1960s and 70s. And see, he said explicitly that culture was so hegemonic that it prevented political change emerging, that it affected people's psyche, their psychology, in terms of making them feel inferior. So there was kind of inferiorism, to use Frantz Fanon's term, inferiorism was generated by the failure of the class who in many parts of the world, especially in Europe, were the class who carried nationalism forward. Why was that? Because the bourgeoisie, as Tom would say, took advantage of the empire and there was no need for there to be an independent Scotland. This created a kind of psychological deformity in the minds of Scottish people that they weren't good enough to be independent, they weren't strong enough, they were too weak, they were too poor to be independent. And that was Tom's very powerful thesis. Now, many of us on the sociological side said, but Tom, the evidence for that. What's the evidence for that? And when we. That's a question Tom was never very keen on answering because he didn't think in terms of evidence and the way a social scientist would think in terms of evidence. But he thought, and he was very convincing, convinced a lot of people. And so when Home Rule happened and the Scottish Parliament was created in 1999, people said, oh, that wasn't meant to happen. I thought we were so deformed and cringing that we didn't have the psychological wherewithal to do that. And then they turned the table and said, ah. Now, the reason is that in spite of the cultural cringe, people have been working away on the culture. So it's culture what did it. That is the emergence of other kinds of reproductions, of novels, of poems, of song and so on. The cultural revival of the 1960s and 1970s created the demand for a Scottish Parliament. Now, my argument is logically that cannot be, that you can't have the same explanation for completely different things, and there must be something wrong. And now my answer is that the connection between culture and politics is complicated, that it fails to take on board the fact that there is a prism of understanding that Scottish culture was never as deformed as Tom made out, to be honest, and it was much more complex. And no one denies that the cultural revival from the 1960s and 70s onwards was very important and had political ramifications. But it was not the only lever to create the demand for Scottish independence, let alone Home rule. And what was missing was the sociological component, that is the set of understandings of cultural and social institutions through which many of these structural changes passed to be made sense of in terms of political action. And therefore the sociology was missing. Well, I'm parti pre here. I mean, I would say that, but I think it makes sense. One of my great heroes in the study nationalism studies is Ernest Gellner, the late Ernest Gellner, who had this wonderful turn of phrase, and he said that civil society is the bit in between what he called the tyranny of kings, the state and the tyranny of kin, family. So creating a structure, a social structure which consisted of elites on the one hand and people on the other, kings and kin, is wrong. It's just more complicated than that. There's an intermediate level of voluntary organizations, of understandings of people going around the business under everyday, what I call sociality. The sociology of that is missing. And that's where I think neither of the arguments is correct, that on the one hand, Scottish culture was so woebegone that it couldn't go anywhere. That wasn't true. And neither is it the case that it was Scottish culture what won the parliament in 1999. That is too simple. But you had to understand, because the creation of the Scottish Parliament happened after, in 1992, the failure of a Labour government to get elected, and a lot of the expectation, not unreasonable, was that only the election of a Labour government would bring about a Scottish Parliament, a devolved Scottish Parliament. Labour failed to get elected in 1992 under Neil Kenneth. And therefore people literally took to the streets, they set up organizations, they went about meeting in church halls and on the street. And there was a famous. There was a famous common cause organization. They set up a pitch outside the St Andrews house in Edinburgh and Scottish office and said, we're staying here until we get a parliament. Which, given the weather that we have here, seemed very brave and that it was a recipe for catching pneumonia. However, as far as I know, nobody caught pneumonia. And it became very popular. It was popular, it was populist. Think United States today. Think of the expressions of opposition to the Trump presidency in places like Minneapolis St. Paul and Chicago and in New York. That's civil society. It's not political society per se, it's civil society. People so outraged that they talk to their neighbors and they get mobilized. That's what people in Scotland had to do in 1992. Thankfully, no one was killed. But there was a sense in which civil society operated into bringing this about. And so in 1997, when the Blair government was elected, it was presented with a statement said, you signed up to this, now do it. Civil society in Scotland expects you to do this. And they did it. They had no alternative option. So that's a very good, I think, example of how civil society works in many societies. That's how it works. Think of the fall of communism before 1989 in East Germany, in Czechoslovakia and so on. The mobilization of people in different groups, whether they are religious groups or social groups or cultural groups or whatever, the mobilization of those people, just as is happening today, 2026 in America, is civil society in action. And it then asks questions of the political class, do this or do that or do what? It is that is what happened in Scotland.
- [91:05]
Matt Dawson
Yeah. And certainly the Blair government wasn't going to create a Scottish Parliament or even give a vote for a Scottish Parliament without that false tany. Blair later said he regretted it, didn't he? But, yeah, that's a separate story. So we're coming to the end of our discussion and particularly the end of your book. You talk about what is to come, but you make the point. I thoroughly agree with that. It's not the role of your book or of sociology to predict. We can't predict, we're not that level. So what I'm going to ask you is not to predict, but to ask if you've had any reflections on changes since you felt finished the book, which you say there was in 2024. And since then there's been a few events. We've had a Labour government elected, a Westminster who had become very unpopular. It's doomed their chances of regaining power in Holyrood. In the Scottish Parliament, the elections come for that in may fight the rise of reform as a populist riot side, which traditionally has been very tied to English nationalism, but might indeed gain some sort of foothold in Scotland. And without the stabilization of the snp, it looks like they're probably going to win the next Holyrood election without much enthusiasm. We've seen the Saltire, the Scottish national flag thrown in lampposts across the country for political ends. That's quite different to how it was used before. So I guess, had all these different things happening. Do you see these events as a continuation of what you discussed in the book, or are we seeing some new changes coming in with what's happening?
- [92:33]
David McCrone
Things change all the time, don't they? And we can kind of go, well, that's it explained and we'll move on to something else. Yeah, you're right. Sociologists and social scientists generally are very bad at prediction. But prediction is not what we do. I mean, I don't know, predictions for someone else, you know, crystal ball gazers or something, because the unintended consequences of human action, which is a very sociological concept, the unintended consequences of human action are so important. We talked earlier about the United States and Trumpism and all those sorts of things. Think of the unintended consequences of a lot of things. Who would have predicted the twin cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul and all of those movements which are fermenting away as being, as being very, very important. So no prediction. But the task of sociologists is to explain society, to have a critical engagement, as my former professor Tom Bourne said, with society, with social institutions. Where are we going? What sense are we making of that? Well, there is a tendency, particularly in the media, but also in academia only to study what you want, what you're interested in, and to work backwards. The problem of teleology, that is, if you know how things end, you then work back in a very simple or simplistic way. The causes that work have way through. We all do that because reality is very complex. But neither of those we look through a glass darkly, as the Bible said, we look for glass. Danglia and we don't know now what has changed. Well, a couple of years ago, I think, as you said, the SNP's in some difficulty, but a lot of what happens in politics is not what you do, but what the other guy does or doesn't do. And so the whole framing of politics with a small P as well as a big P is quite different. And we've seen the rise of the populist right of so called reform is so called. There really should be called reaction about so reform. Right. And that's where they choose to call themselves under eyes of that. And in the next Scottish Parliament elections they will have a presence because of the order. I don't know, I'm not a predictor, but let's call it 15% now you think that's terrible. Yeah, but look, it's the old joke about better having somebody inside the tent pissing out than pissing in. I'm sorry about my language, but that is it, that is the virtue of proportional representation in the Scottish Parliament or on the Welsh assembly or whatever is that you have a reflection of what people want now you may not like you, not you personally, but one may not like what people want, but you can't say we're not having them because they're nasty people. My argument has always been always much better to have people that you personally detest represented than being outside. Because if when they're there, they have to answer questions because they have to argue the case and so on. Now, you mentioned earlier the issue of flags. People think running a flag up a flagpole or a light socket or something will make a difference. Now, to be quite sociological here. The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim once said, and I quote him about flags, we forget that the flag is only a sign, that it has no intrinsic value, but serves only to recall the reality it represents. We treat it as if it were that reality to change it slightly. It's a floating or an empty signifier, a flag. It only has meaning insofar as people attribute meaning to it. It's an empty signifier. That's Levi Strauss, who first sent that. So people try to run, literally and metaphorically, run the flag up the flagpole as claiming it. The problem is that the average person in the street is too smart for that. That The Saltire, the St Andrew's Cross, has been, it's not inevitable, has been the symbol of nationalism in Scotland. Big N, small N and the liberal left movement have supported that. It's become, if anything, a symbol of the left and not the right. So running a flag, running the saltire up a flagpole makes no odds because historically the right, the far right in particular, their emblem, their flag was the union jacked. The union flag. So simply changing your mind. Oh no, because yeah, no, there is embedded meaning in symbols. The one thing social science tells us, and anthropology in particular, there's embedded meaning in symbols. And you can't just, oh, we're going to call it something different and it doesn't work because there are a host of expressions dragged behind it and it's imbued with quite different meanings. And although of clearly reform, once someone said to me the other day, well, reform represents in Scotland the scunner factor. People who are so fed up and scunnered with politics that they want a simple solution. And the answer to that is there aren't any simple solutions. You know, life is complicated, that's not how it operates. But there is a kind of snake oil effect. I mean, I'm talking trumpery again, a snake oil salesman who says, if only this would happen, your life will be so much better. Never trust a snake oil Salesperson, because they're trying to sell you something that's not true and you don't need. So there is that representation. And already, I think, on the far right in parts of England, we see that they're coming up hard against reality and they would find it very difficult. So they'd probably give up and go away and be replaced by some other feature. But it's an interesting question, and that has changed. And populism has to be taken seriously in Scotland as well. See, the other thing I say to people is there is a consistent body, substantial minority of opinion in Scotland, which is, to use the technical term, authoritarian, as opposed to liberal authoritarian. But it doesn't have a voice. And, well, you think probably that's just as well. But liberal opinion, leftist opinion in Scotland is the dominant one. But there is a core of authoritarian beliefs, more discipline, more of this, more of that sort of thing. They are just as in all these societies, and the skillful politician is then trading. But making that a Scottish question for the populist right is very, very difficult because populism in these islands is overwhelmingly associated with the right, from Enoch Powell all the way through to Thatcher all the way through to Farage and all those people. This is English nationalism, which doesn't play well, not unreasonably, in Scotland or indeed in Wales.
- [100:38]
Matt Dawson
No, indeed, indeed. And it'll be very interesting to see where that ends up. So can you tell us a bit of what you're working on now? Now the book's done, what are you turning your attention to now?
- [100:48]
David McCrone
Well, two things, really. One is I recently read a fantastic book by two Irish journalists. Fintan o', Toole, who's one of my favorite Irish journalists, had a great piece in today's Irish Times, by the way, and who got together with Sam McBride from Northern Ireland, Edwards of the Belfast Telegraph. Now, Sam wrote a fantastic book about a few years ago and Cash for Ash, which was a scandal of which was a great story, and he told it incredibly well. Anyway, they wrote this book, rather than going, well, Finton as a Southern Irish person is going to write about pro Irish unification, and Sam, as a Northern Irish unionist, is going to write again. No, each of them wrote the other bit. So Finton wrote pro and pro pro. And they had two chapters each, one for Irish unification and one against. And what they were doing was something very, very clever, which is trying to put a rational argument, the best argument forward. It's like having a class of students and saying to them, now you are taking this position and you're taking that position. And if they said to you, but I don't believe that, all the better to argue the case, take the position. So I'd like to write or think about writing a pamphlet or a long paper on Scottish independence, pro and anti, because it's not straightforward. And I'd like to set out not from my personal beliefs, but in a sociologically informed way, what are the arguments in favor of Scottish independence and indeed against Scottish independence. So I got that from those two splendid Irish journalists. But I'm interested in populism. I mean, I mean, Tom near and I started a course in nationalism studies and the last Tom died but a few years ago. But nationalism studies are still going. But one form of nationalism is populism. There is confusion about all of this and I'll be roaring about it. Populism is a form of nationalism, but nationalism does not equate with populism. There's more to nationalism than populism. But populism is a highly important and at the moment anyway, a dominant variant of that wherever we look in France or Hungary or America or indeed in these islands. And in many respects nationalism and its expressions and in Scotland and England are quite different. One is leftist liberal or liberal leftist in Scotland, and the other one is as far as right wing in England. That's why Thatcher did so well, because she described herself as an English nationalist. And that's something I think I'd like to. Sociologists are too inclined to work on things that they, they like. I think I remember a few years ago, with two colleagues now dead, alas, Brian Hillert and Frank Beckhofer, we got interested in the rise of the new right in 1970s. We were obviously ahead of the game and people came up to us at British Sociological association conferences, BSA conferences and said, you see, you're studying when you write, you must be sympathetic. And we said, no, no, no, no, we're not sympathetic. But here's a phenomenon. It's duty bound for sociologists and social scientists especially to study things that we do not approve of in as rational a fashion as we can.
- [104:37]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, very much agree and I do think you're right. We do have a tendency sometimes to overlook that. So sounds like very important, very timely work to look for. Forward to seeing that. So as a reminder for listeners, I've been talking with David McCrone about his book entitled Change in Scotland, Society, Politics and Identity. And as our discussion has hopefully demonstrated, the period you're covering, David, in this book is a hugely significant, hugely eventful period for Scotland and what you get from the book and what hopefully people got from this discussion is this really good sociologically rich understanding of where this came from and how this happened and what were the key drivers in this change. And I've only lived in Scotland for 15 years, so I've lived for a very small part of these changes. But I certainly learned a lot from your book reading about those changes. So I'd really recommend it to listeners. Whether you live in Scotland and you understand what's been happening over the last 50 years or if you're, as we say, in Scotland, out with the country and you want a really sociologically rich account of social change, you'll get it from books. I recommend it. So, David, thank you for joining us today.
- [105:45]
David McCrone
Okay, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I've enjoyed that.
- [105:48]
Matt Dawson
Oh, no, I enjoyed it, too. Thanks for having us.
- [106:04]
David McCrone
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David McCrone
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