Category: Scots Independent column

Political song at the heart of debate

by Andrew Murray Scott (Scots Independent, November 2025)

During SNP Conference in Aberdeen I attended the ‘open floor’ music session, organised and kept alive by Rob Gibson, Cllr Greg McCarra, Clare Adamson MSP, Richard Thompson and many others. An entertaining evening that raised £500 for local good causes: well done all! Traditional songs of love, death and work have been around for centuries, but the folk upsurge in the early days of the SNP was associated with iconic ‘rebels’ such as Rabbie Burns, John Maclean, the anti-Polaris campaign and the songs of Irish republicanism. Samizdat song pamphlets, poorly zeroxed, cheap but heart-felt, were available if you knew where to look, and reprints of the famous Rebels’ Ceilidh Songbook. The rebel tag seemed to fit us then, but are we rebels still? Can you be a rebel if you’re in government, albeit only devolved? We still are underdogs, battling the might of the British establishment and anyway, the rebel tag has always been culturally cool

Hamish Henderson’s ‘The Men of Knoydart’ about the 1948 land raiders was often performed by the first ‘folkie’ I ever met, Hamish Imlach who also used to sing the republican song, ‘Scottish Breakaway’, lyrics by ‘Thurso Berwick’ (Morris Blythman). In late 1972, Hamish turned up at the SNP rooms in Dundee’s Cowgate during the Dundee East By Election. As teenage veterans, Scott Mands and I were given a few quid and instructed to take him to a pub to keep him out of harm’s way. The campaign committee did not want a gregarious, cowboy hat-wearing, leather-jacketted badge-bedecked folkie upsetting voters! So much for rebels!

Jim McLean songs were performed by the Corries, the Dubliners and of course Alistair McDonald and he was rightly famed for writing with empathy and insight about the Clearances as well as humorous political songs. There is a story of McLean at a folk club in London in 1962 being ‘pestered’ by a young Bob Dylan with endless questions about Scottish folk music. Jim took him down to the toilets to share a few nips from a half-bottle of whisky but was wanting to get back to more important business: chatting up the girl (his future wife, Alison) who was taking the tickets at the door, so he fobbed Dylan off by telling him it was all about rebellion. The rebellion Jim had in mind of course was of a good-humoured, often satirical, empathetic nature, never racist or discriminatory. Cherished by activists, Jim’s songs remained almost unknown to the wider public until 2023 when he was finally honoured by the re-release of sixty of his best songs in a CD box-set, The Songs of Jim McLean performed on stage at the Celtic Connections festival. The organiser, Fraser Bruce, a key figure himself since the early 1960s is the author of Folk River, a book bringing alive the stories and tales of our folk ‘rebels’, and I heartily recommend seeking out both the Jim McLean box-set and Fraser’s book, both of which can be purchased at www.fraserbruce.co.uk  As for that pesky young Dylan… he’s still out there, still ‘rebelling’ but then aren’t we all?

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

Scots Independent, October 2025

Putting Scotland First:The Rise of the Scottish National Party 1966-1974 by Ewen Cameron, is the third of an ‘unofficial trilogy’ following Professor Richard Finlay’s Independent and Free, which covered the years 1918 to 1945 and Paula Somerville’s Through The Maelstrom, which continued the narrative from 1945 to 1967. Filling an identified gap in the party’s bibliography it carries a foreword by John Swinney, who observes that a detailed book on the period is ‘long overdue’. The book began as post-graduate research in 2014 at Strathclyde University with Professor Finlay as Cameron’s tutor.

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Cameron’s book starts with a major advantage. Before even a word of it had been written, the author had performed valuable service by seeking out previously untapped material. Aided by Billy Wolfe’s son David, he uncovered a huge collection of papers by the former party leader which in 2017 became the William Wolfe Collection in the National Library of Scotland. Then in 2018 he learned of sixteen tin boxes in a factory in Larbert belonging to former party Executive Vice-Chairman Douglas Drysdale, now also in the care of the NLS. His conversations with key National Organiser Ian Macdonald prompted the rediscovery of four boxes in McDonald’s attic which were similarly donated. Then five folders of Tom McAlpine’s were donated by Isobel Lindsay to the NLS, and Cameron also had a hand in the vast archive of Hamish McQueen being acquired by the Scottish Political Archive. He is to be commended for assisting with this preservation work and of course has used it well to provide new insights into the period, along with extensive interviews conducted with key figures. He also acknowledges lesser-known election agents and local activists.

It is, as he puts it, ‘a story of a self-assembling mass movement’ in the ten-year period of its greatest growth which saw ‘the largest shift of voters in Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century’. He links personae and events in five immensely readable yet detailed chapters and has been able to correct misconceptions. For example, in relation to dramatic increases in membership, where it had previously been claimed documentation either did not exist or had been destroyed, Cameron discovered useful data in the Wolfe papers proving a decline in membership by 1971.   

In the final chapter, ‘Themes From The Past in The Present’ Cameron steps beyond the 1966-74 period to examine what impact the events have had in the context of the present day, exploring how perceptions of the route to Independence have altered. He concludes that ‘the prioritising of Scottish interests over British… of a significant portion of the electorate’ is the legacy of 1974. Scotland started to matter then and the change was permanent. This book will come to be seen as the most definitive account yet produced not just of the rise of the SNP but of how the nation began to change in the light of it – and why. Ewen Cameron will be at the Scots Independent stall at SNP Conference in Aberdeen at lunchtime on Saturday 11^th October to sign copies of the book.

Nicola Sturgeon’s Frankly

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

[Scots Independent, September 2025]

Political memoirs exist to maximise successes and put forward plausible excuses to mitigate the failures. Frankly is no exception and most readers will bring pre-existing ideas about Sturgeon and her legacy to the task. It supplies mandatory behind-the-scenes drama, some insider gossip and ‘controversies’ as well as the narrative of her career. From early political involvement in Ayrshire to election as an MSP and 25 years in the Scottish Parliament; sixteen in Ministerial posts and eight as First Minister. A political career made entirely in Scotland without the taint of Westminster, so it is a pity the book was not offered to a Scottish publisher as a gesture of faith in Scottish publishing. Hyped as ‘revelatory’ it does reveal, with considerable frankness, her increasing sense of imposter syndrome as shy activist mutates into the public persona of Nicola and becomes the face of SNP campaigns. Trapped inside the carapace, she learns to function brilliantly as a national leader but often feels trapped. Details of her miscarriage, previous relationships and later, going through the menopause whilst intensely involved in high-level politics, are accompanied by insightful comments into the attitudes of men towards female leaders.

The long and successful partnership with Alex Salmond – the ‘dream team’ that almost won Independence – is scrutinised. Inevitably, for while Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell is referenced 48 times in the book, there are 270 references to Salmond. After his death, Sturgeon agonised about ‘whether I should even write about the events which shattered our relationship.’ Clearly it was difficult for her. While some claim it is posthumous assassination, I cannot believe that anyone who reads it could come to that conclusion. There are few who do not think Alex was a genius, fewer still who think he was a saint. Like most SI readers, I had engagement with both, and it seems to me that Frankly is a meticulously fair account and has the feel of truth, and the truth often hurts.

 Sturgeon cannot be accused either of skipping over mistakes she made and admits these were many. She did not provide us with Independence of course. Some will never forgive her for that. Poor handling of various scandals, and at the outbreak of the gender ‘wars’ in 2022 she ‘lost the dressing room’ as she puts it, a ‘rabbit in the headlights’ over the Isla Bryson affair when her ‘communication skills deserted me utterly,’ and regrets not pausing GRA legislation to allow mature consideration by all parties. But it would be churlish not to recognise her hard work and her record. Victory in each of the eight elections she faced as leader: three UK General Elections, two Holyrood elections, two nationwide council elections and one European election. Yet her sense of self throughout is insecure. ‘There is no doubt that I was a massive electoral asset’ she proclaims, ahead of the 2016 Holyrood elections, immediately undercutting such immodesty with: ‘I had started to believe… that I really did walk on water.’

There are a lot of tears in the book and a prevailing sense of her own inadequacy, as well as an admission that she underwent counselling following her grilling at the Covid Inquiry. It has not been an easy road for her, or us. This book, like the memoirs of previous SNP leaders contains important insights, essential reading for our future leaders.

Andrew Murray Scott (Scots Independent, June 2025)

If the first casualty of war is truth it is right that we consider the glorious myths of the 80^th anniversary of VE Day. That everyone pulled together ‘for Blighty’ is broadly true but ignores soaring rates of rape, murder, racketeering and disaffection in the black out that were not publicised for reasons of morale. More insidiously, the class-ridden nature of the British war effort and the racism of Churchill and other leaders such that the efforts of commonwealth troops was recognised belatedly, if at all. Films and novels embedded these myths and made dashing heroes of upper and middle class officers who often got the medals their soldiers died for.

Few novels feature the ordinary ‘tommy’ but one of the best is Alexander Baron’s  There’s No Home (1950) prefaced with a quotation from Hamish Henderson’s poem The Highland Division’s Farewell To Sicily. Henderson of course was heavily involved in these campaigns and it is a line from the poem, ‘there’s nae hame’, translated into English, that provides the title.

Set in a two month lull after the fighting in Sicily in summer 1943 as the Allies regroup to launch an invasion on the Italian mainland, the remnants of a British Battalion is quartered in the bombed-out and poverty-stricken backstreets of the town of Catania and gradually begin to form attachments with the local, mainly female, population.

Observed through the eyes of Sergeant Craddock, who forges a relationship with young mother Graziella Drucci, whose soldier husband is missing in Africa, the novel focuses on these attempts, on both sides, to forge a new domesticity and some sort of rapprochement.

Baron’s war trilogy (of which this is the second) were bestsellers, yet his work has faded while the works of contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Olivia Manning remain to the fore.

Perhaps this is because his primary concerns were with the ordinary soldier and civilians rather than with the officer class of such as Guy Crouchback and his clubbable chums. Baron had been in the thick of the fighting as a member of Montgomery’s 8^th Army and in the D-Day landings and started writing as therapy after the war. Being Jewish and a former communist whose parents had been party intellectuals certainly accounts for his inability to gain promotion above the rank of Corporal.

The book homes in on the desperation of the individual circumstances of soldiers missing their families and the plight of their starving hosts whose menfolk are missing or dead. A kind of symbiotic domesticity is created. Some soldiers become surrogate fathers to the fatherless families, others assume the role of the missing men as lovers, while officers such as Captain Rumbold treat the local women in a purely exploitative manner.

A very different war novel that personalises the great myth of ‘The few’ is That Summer by our own Andrew Greig, a novel of extraordinary power, a breathless, unputdownable read.

We should applaud the sacrifice of servicemen and women without succumbing to misty-eyed myths and untruths perpetrated by those who did not want the war experience to change anything after it was over.