Episode 1 Scotland and the Battle for Britain

The early hours of the 24th of June, 2016.

Britain is still asleep, most of it.

But in corners of Westminster, a handful of parties go blearily on.

Some of them livelier than others.

After 43 years of membership,

the country has been voting about whether to leave the European Union.

And while the TV cameras swarm around Westminster,

this is a decision which will affect the whole of the UK,

in particular Scotland.

It's seven o'clock. It's Friday morning, the 24th of June.

This is Good Morning Scotland with Gary Robertson at Westminster and

Hayley Miller in the studio.

Britain votes to leave the EU.

But Scotland backs remain, raising the prospect of Indyref2.

While most of England and Wales voted to leave,

every single local authority in Scotland voted to remain.

This could trigger a second independence referendum.

But Nicola Sturgeon and the ruling Scottish National Party

must be careful.

If they lose again, her cause could be buried for ever.

The Scottish Parliament should have the right to hold another referendum

if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances

that prevailed in 2014,

such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will.

The anger unleashed in Scotland by the EU referendum is only part of a

much longer story of two British political cultures drifting apart.

Scotland and Westminster have been turning their backs on each other

for decades.

So, what has happened?

I am a Scot. I know I don't sound it.

That's because I've spent most of my life working and living

in the clammy grip of central London.

But I'm a Scot by birth, education, upbringing

and, for what it's worth, by sentiment.

And the Scotland that I was born into just felt very different.

It was rather male, it felt slightly dark,

it was fiercely pro-British Unionist and it was mildly conservative,

in every possible cultural way.

A million miles away from today's Scotland, which is leftish,

where women seem to be running almost everything and which is,

of course, now dominated by the Scottish National Party.

So the question is very straightforward

and simple to pose, at least.

Why? What has happened here?

In these two films, I'm going back to Scotland

to tell the story of a quiet political revolution,

which still isn't much understood south of the border.

I'm going to speak to some of the biggest players

about Scotland's past, present and future.

I believe Scotland should be an independent country.

That's what kept me going throughout all of these years when the SNP

didn't have a prayer's chance at most elections.

There's no doubt that Brexit means many things for jobs, the economy,

London's prosperity and for national morale.

But will it also lead to Scotland seizing independence?

Scotland's a country of many faces,

from the hot, fast-talking bustle of Glasgow Central

to the scraped grandeur of the Highlands.

Empty and crammed, rich and poor, there are many different Scotlands.

And Scotland's also gone through

an extraordinary wave of political change.

10-20 years ago,

the majority of Scottish MPs at Westminster were Labour.

And many of Tony Blair's first cabinet were Scots,

which also helped Labour to dominate Scotland.

Today, many of the most important Scottish politicians

are at Holyrood in Edinburgh and, in the last election,

the SNP won all but three of the Scottish seats at Westminster.

But the changes in Scotland have, in truth,

been happening for much longer.

And to understand where we're going,

first we need to understand where we've been.

I was born in Glasgow, but I was brought up in Dundee.

And it's really the east coast of Scotland that I feel closest to.

Perthshire, the River Tay, Edinburgh.

And round here, when I was small,

there was one truly dominant political party.

Now, I am, despite my youthful good looks, a child of the 1950s,

just, born in 1959.

Four years before that, in 1955,

the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, the Tories,

had won 50% of the popular Scottish vote,

an achievement that would stand for half a century to come.

Moderate, one nation, mainstream,

the Tories then could have called themselves the party of Scotland.

And the SNP, back in the day?

Well, they managed 0.5%, exactly the same as the British Communist Party.

Was any constituency ever more flattered

than Kinross and West Perthshire?

Perthshire was largely rural and solidly Conservative.

The constituency next to my parents

was the safest Tory seat in Scotland.

The MP, when I was a boy there, was Sir Alec Douglas-Home,

the aristocrat schooled at Eton, a friend of the Queen,

plucked from the House of Lords

so that he could become the new Prime Minister.

Those were the days.

When I was growing up,

Scottish independence wasn't a live political issue.

It was history, an old song dying out.

Scotland had been mostly independent until 1707 when, nearly bankrupt,

we unified with England under a single parliament at Westminster.

Before that union, which was much disliked in Scotland at the time,

this hall was where the original Scottish Parliament met.

The building now houses Scotland's Supreme Courts,

where advocates glide up and down, trying to avoid being overheard.

These rooms drip with history.

Not a bad place to meet Scotland's leading historian, Sir Tom Devine.

My own feeling is, as a historian, that the 1950s were,

in a sense, closer to the 1850s than the 1950s is today.

The Conservative Party was politically dominant,

the Church of Scotland reached its highest level of membership

in the late 1950s.

It's a sense of nostalgia, almost,

because that Scotland has vanished almost entirely.

'Lord Home accepted Her Majesty's invitation.

'He was now on his way to Number 10 as Prime Minister.'

So how did the Conservatives fall from such a position of dominance?

Michael Forsyth was the Scottish Secretary of State

in John Major's Tory government.

Could I start by asking how Scotland felt politically

when you were growing up, what kind of country you felt it was?

It was strongly Unionist, it was conservative with a small "c".

I went to school in Arbroath.

There was a strong fishing community.

There were lots of small businesses. It was very entrepreneurial.

And there was none of this nationalism

which very much dominates my hometown today.

Why do you think it was where the Scotland,

where most of the population voted for the Conservatives,

became the Scotland where there are almost no Conservative MPs

and only a few MSPs?

Glasgow, when I was born in Scotland,

was the second city of the Empire.

I mean, it had booming factories

producing locomotives for all over the world.

It had a shipbuilding industry.

It had steel and coal.

And all these industries, which had a great past, but sadly no future.

And in large measure, the Tories got the blame for that.

And, of course, you also became...

Scotland became a country where more and more people were either directly

or indirectly dependent for their incomes on public expenditure.

'These are the steel spawning grounds on the banks of the Clyde.'

The story of deindustrialisation is absolutely key if you want to

understand what's driven the great changes in Scotland.

Once upon a time, we Scots mined, engineered and manufactured much of

what made and drove the modern world.

A century ago, a fifth of all ships in the world were built in Glasgow

and towns like Clydebank.

It was a northern European Shanghai.

But deindustrialisation ripped out its innards.

And the party this had the biggest effect on was Scottish Labour.

When people speak about Labour's industrial heartlands,

they mean places like Govan and the Clyde in Glasgow.

Today, these areas may have gone all solidly SNP,

but the men who worked here in the glory days mostly believed

in a United Kingdom.

The days of tens of thousands of men coming into these yards by the call

of a whistle with a sky thick with smoke and the noise of cranes and

chains, that has long gone.

But the politics followed the economics.

Those men were organised in these disciplined trade unions,

which gave them power at the heart of the Labour Party

and therefore at Westminster.

And they were immensely proud of the ships they sent down the Clyde,

many of them Royal Naval ships.

They were British Unionists and they were trade unionists,

Unionists in both senses.

Labour unionism left a big mark on Scotland,

so big that old Labour held on for decades on the hope,

dashed again and again, of regaining power at Westminster.

I've travelled across the country many times and I'm always struck by

how much Scotland was shaped by this period and its politics.

In many ways,

the modern Highlands is the creation of post-war Labour unionism.

Vast acreages taken over by the Forestry Commission,

huge hydroelectric dams,

the Highlands and Islands Development Board,

subsidies for nationalised trains and council houses

in the most remote places.

All of those came from Labour.

These days, the Labour Party seems

a remarkably southern and urban institution,

but the history of Scottish Labour was very, very different.

The major stamp

and probably will never be forgotten,

in terms of the heritage of Scottish Labour

and its historical role in Scotland.

It was the development of what we now call the welfare state,

everything from health, through education, pensions,

unemployment benefit and the rest.

Producing pamphlets...

Helen Liddell was the party's General Secretary for

much of the 1970s and '80s and the first woman to hold that position.

She grew up in a family and neighbourhood

that only ever voted Labour.

I was brought up in Coatbridge,

between Glasgow and Edinburgh,

from an area where people weighed Labour votes.

And if you weren't Labour,

well, you really needed serious medical help.

In the council house I was brought up in,

people really worried if the man next door

was going to be able to keep his job.

They worked in the steel plants.

I got the opportunity to go to university

because of a Labour government.

And, you know, the morning I went to university,

the women in the scheme in Old Monkland,

that I was born and brought up in,

they were at the doors because this was a girl from Coatbridge

going to the uni! That was completely unheard of.

And all of that was put down to a Labour government that was in touch

with the people. To what extent do you think deindustrialisation,

the end of heavy industry on the Clyde and so forth,

had a bad effect on the Labour Party?

Deindustrialisation fragmented societies.

People had to move away.

Most people would live in a street round the corner from the rest of

their family and they would be active in trade unions,

they'd be active in the church.

There was a greater coherence within society.

And that lack of coherence

started to affect the political parties, as well.

People weren't interested in coming out to political meetings.

But the dismantling of Scotland's heavy industries didn't just

fragment Labour's core vote.

It opened people's eyes to other political possibilities.

Once the heavy industry goes, everything changes.

A post-industrial country which is, essentially, what Scotland now is,

produces a post-industrial politics.

What does that mean?

It means an end to the simple binary politics of us versus them,

because I was born in this street, going to this school,

joining this trade union and doing this job,

therefore I vote for that party. That all goes.

The glue vanishes and all sorts of possibilities emerge.

You can live in the same street, go to the same school,

do the same kind of job, but think about doing something very radical

and different like, for instance, voting for the SNP.

In the late 1960s,

the SNP was beginning to breathe unsettlingly down Labour's neck.

But these people were still seen as a bit suspect.

When I was a boy,

nationalism had seemed the preserve of poetic idealists

and nostalgic social Conservatives, kitted out in dusty tartan.

The first SNP leader to really come to my attention was Billy Wolfe.

He'd been a poet and run a business making forestry equipment.

It was Wolfe's idea to fuse the Saint Andrew's cross of Scotland

with a thistle, creating the SNP's famous logo.

Despite his influence, however, Billy Wolfe never won a

parliamentary seat for the Nationalists.

'The glamour in the campaign undoubtedly comes from the

'Nationalist candidate...'

The tradition of heroic defeats began to end in November 1967

when Winnie Ewing won the solidly Labour seat of Hamilton,

sounding uncannily like a Caledonian Margaret Thatcher.

Well, I've been at 15 public meetings round the constituency

and I don't find any difficulty fitting in.

Sometimes, indeed, we've had an almost total response from the hall

that they're going to vote for the SNP this time.

As to being a woman, I think it's an advantage.

REPORTER: But do you think Mrs Ewing will deal as well for you?

Certainly. Certainly.

What do you think she will achieve for you?

For me? Yes, for you, as well.

She'll achieve a lot for me

and she'll achieve even more for Scotland.

You've got to remember almost the banality of Scottish politics

in the '50s and early '60s.

The tussle which had been going on for ages

between Conservative and Labour.

And in this technicolour event, this young woman,

charismatic, appealing, this young lawyer,

I mean the press went crazy over it.

Winnie Ewing had a transformative effect on Scottish politics.

Not only for the independence movement,

but also encouraging a more prominent role for women.

It's particularly wonderful to look out and see...

No offence, guys!

..so many WOMEN here today.

Scottish politics today is heavily feminised.

London is playing catch up.

It was quite a big thing in my life, Winnie Ewing winning in Hamilton.

One, she was an attractive woman.

And it was unusual to see a woman in that position.

For the SNP to win Hamilton in the '60s was a massive difference.

This was a big working class area that was voting for the SNP,

so there was traction there

and maybe lessons that the Labour Party should have learned.

'Wembley, Bobby Moore and John Greig were the captains.

'England versus Scotland.

'Neither Bobby, his team, nor England supporters

'believed Scotland had a chance. How wrong they were destined to be.'

Scottishness was a fervent and powerful feeling back then,

but it was mostly expressed through football, rugby and music.

It was more cultural than political.

'Scotland have beaten the World Cup winners hands down.

'The game will go down in football history as one of the greatest

'that Scotland ever played.'

Even during the heyday of unionism, many Scots felt something close to

despair about the lack of power in Scotland.

The poet, Sydney Goodsir Smith, writing in the 1960s,

portrayed Edinburgh as a spiritless place,

cowed like a beggar in the rain.

Only a capital in name, not in spirit.

He said this about it.

"This empty capital, snorts like a great beast, caged in its sleep.

"Dreaming of freedom but with nae belief.

"Indulging an auld ritual whase meaning has been forgot owre lang,

"a mere habit of words, when the drink's in and signifying naething."

That was a picture of a very different Edinburgh.

A much darker, sadder city bereft of a parliament.

But other external events

would shift the case for Scottish independence up a gear.

And the biggest of these was, of course,

the discovery of North Sea oil.

A number of fields had been cracked in the 1970s and, by 1975,

oil was flowing ashore at Aberdeen.

One of the old arguments of unionism,

which interestingly enough has not really been used again since,

was that Scotland was too poor,

too disadvantaged to stand up for itself as an autonomous state.

So that was kicked into touch by the discovery of oil and some of the

secret documents of the time referred to the potential that,

if Scotland was able to absorb most of the income from North Sea oil,

it would become "the Kuwait of the north"

and would have one of the highest standards of living in Europe.

It was the first serious blow against the old view

that a separate or independent Scotland could not sustain itself.

The discovery of oil and the notion that Westminster might be stealing

it was electoral gold.

The SNP wasted no time in plastering the thought all over their posters.

I was very offended by it.

Because people had to make a moral and intellectual judgment.

The idea that, when there was this bonanza, that we should turn our

backs on working people in Liverpool and Newcastle and Birmingham,

people in communities with the same needs and the same general history.

But oil initially gave a huge boost to the SNP.

Alex Salmond himself once even worked as an oil economist and a

decade later, this would play a big role in his first campaign

to become an MP.

At the present moment, Scotland gets nothing from the oil revenue.

Unless we take control over the resource,

then Scotland is in severe danger of ending up

the only country in history to discover oil and get poorer.

How important to the revival of the SNP was the oil question?

It was very important, but only importance because what it did to

open up people's eyes to the idea

that Scotland could be economically viable, could sustain itself.

Countries which haven't governed themselves, and this is true

virtually universally, always get told that their their-ness

as poor, wee subsidised places and only by the magnificence and

generosity of the central government are they able to sustain themselves.

So oil put a chink in that Westminster armour.

I don't want to wear my bleeding heart on my sleeve,

I just want you to trust me

and I will be as good an MP as I possibly can be. Thank you.

Following Winnie Ewing, the SNP now found a new female champion

to pierce that Westminster armour.

The charismatic blonde bombshell, Margo MacDonald, who, in 1973

stormed the Labour stronghold of Glasgow Govan.

But Margo was very different to Winnie Ewing.

She was much more left-wing and socialist.

Back then in the 1970s,

the SNP could wear almost any ideological clothes they chose.

Left, right or centre, so long as they advocated nationalism.

There were two elections held the following year

and although Margo lost in Govan,

in October 1974, the SNP ended up with 11 MPs at Westminster.

But it wasn't just the 11 MPs.

The SNP had also finished second

to Labour in 30 other seats across Scotland.

The mutual loathing between the two sides was very much on display

when the Labour politician Brian Wilson debated independence

at the Oxford Union.

..Mr Brian Wilson to speak second for Scotland and against the motion.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen,

I stand before you, if Mrs Margo MacDonald is to be believed,

as a parasite lacking in self-respect,

and I think in her speech we heard the language of intolerance

that we in Scotland have come to associate with nationalism.

They were viewed as opportunistic, as chameleons.

One place, they're socialist. Another other place,

they're right-wing Tories. The basis of the SNP vote was built

in the strongest Tory areas in Scotland, and the grafting on

of sort of radical credentials came much, much later.

But still, there were two tribes that really disliked

each other, weren't there? I mean, Nats and Labour Party people

had no time for each other whatever.

In general, I think that was true.

But I think the reason for that is that the SNP

have always, certainly in the past 30 years,

that if they were going to prevail,

which they've come quite close to doing, that the prerequisite for

that was the destruction of the Labour Party in Scotland.

In 1976,

Labour's Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson

as Prime Minister, but the gains made by the SNP in Scotland

had shaken Jim to his socks.

To fight back, he proposed to create a Scottish Assembly with

very limited devolutionary powers.

There's room for much diversity within that sovereignty.

And if you wish it,

an elected assembly is yours for the taking.

If you do so, and I would encourage you,

in the belief that a yes vote is good for Scotland and certainly not

harmful to the rest of us,

you will take the first and most essential step to putting an end

to a controversy that has distracted politics in Scotland,

intermittently, for a century.

This was a huge political gamble, vaguely reminiscent of

David Cameron's proposal for the EU referendum.

But then, a group of anti-devolution Labour MPs

moved an unprecedented amendment,

that unless 40% of those on the electoral register in Scotland

voted yes, the Assembly wouldn't happen.

But as the 1970s meandered on, Britain and Scotland limped.

The economy was shot,

the winters were long and everybody seemed to be on strike.

For many, the mood was cautious and nervous.

The Winter of Discontent was, in retrospect, about the worst

possible time to be holding a referendum for radical, new change.

On March 1st, 1979,

Scotland went to the polls to record a very timid yes.

Number of yes votes...

..1,230,937.

But, it wasn't enough.

That's 40% hurdle hadn't been reached and the result was

a kind of massive anti-climax.

Once again, however, British politics was on the move.

Well ahead in the polls, the Conservatives proposed a vote

of no-confidence in the Labour government.

I always look forward to a good fight.

The Tories needed a majority and the SNP,

in revenge for Labour's failure to deliver devolution,

sided with the Conservatives and the Liberals,

and the government was defeated by a single vote.

It was a move Jim Callaghan famously described as turkeys voting

for an early Christmas.

By voting to bring down Labour, the SNP had certainly helped bring

Margaret Thatcher to Scotland.

'..and Mrs Thatcher waves as Prime Minister.'

And so, while the Tories dominated in England,

the SNP were punished in Scotland,

helping Labour do better and turning Scotland red -

or at least an angry pink.

When I first started as a young reporter in Scotland

in the early 1980s, staggering my way rather unsteadily up and down

these stairs to the back door of The Scotsman,

Scotland seemed an unassailably Labour country.

Even in the 1979 general election, Margaret Thatcher's great triumph,

Labour in Scotland had a clear majority,

44 out of 71 of the available seats.

And by 1987, that had risen to 50.

Labour seemed impregnable.

Now, if, by some kind of beery alchemy, I was able to travel back

in time and tap my younger self on the shoulder

and tell him that, by 2015,

Labour in Scotland would have been reduced to one, just one MP,

younger Marr would've said to me, "You something-something lunatic!"

I would not have believed it.

This mismatch between Labour Scotland and Tory-dominated

Westminster gave rise to a popular idea - that Scotland was being ruled

from London against the will of the Scottish people.

30 years on and exactly the same rhetoric is still being used.

As things stand, Scotland faces the prospect of being taken out

of the EU against our will.

But this sense of us against London reached its zenith

during the Thatcher years,

and what's really raised the hackles was when the Tories introduced

the poll tax to Scotland in 1989,

a year before the rest of the UK.

MAN CHANTS: We're not paying the poll tax!

We're not paying the poll tax!

Thatcher's got no mandate in Scotland, not a vestige left

after last Thursday. This is a Tory-free zone

and it's got to be a poll tax-free zone, as well.

The "no mandate" argument was the notion that a party which failed

to get a majority in Scotland had no moral right to rule there.

In that period, how important was the poll tax in sharpening the idea

the Tories didn't have a mandate and making it all a bit more intense

and a bit more aggressive?

It was very significant, because it crystallised the difference between

what was being legislated for at Westminster and

what the majority of people in Scotland,

just as the majority of people in very large,

other parts of the UK wanted.

But this wasn't just coming from the SNP.

Many people within Labour were also speaking out about

a democratic deficit.

The idea that Scotland was being ruled by a Westminster government

without a mandate.

The Scottish Tories,

they must know that 25% of the vote gives no mandate to pursue policies

that Scotland rejected.

If they push on with the unacceptable proposals of recent years,

they will try the patience of Scotland beyond breaking point.

But for a unionist party to reject the idea of a Westminster government

was kamikaze politics.

The Labour Party started to talk about the Tories

not having a Scottish mandate.

Was that a serious mistake for your party?

That was a serious mistake, to subscribe to that rhetoric.

I grew up in Argyllshire.

All my life, there've been Tory MPs there.

The idea that Scotland didn't have Tories was nonsensical.

All you were really saying was that a substantial minority

within Scotland should have no representation,

and to me that wasn't a very clever argument.

But more fundamentally,

I think the problem was that a generation of Scottish Labour

politicians arose who thought that was the only solution,

that was all you needed to do,

and stopped thinking about anything else,

and particularly, stopped understanding the dangers for

the Labour Party and for progressive politics

that was inherent in that approach.

What may come, however, as a bit of a surprise is that there was

actually a Scottish element to many

of Margaret Thatcher's era-defining policies.

Now, it's often claimed, particularly by left-leaning Scots,

that Margaret Thatcher was somehow an alien influence in Scotland.

This is not entirely true.

In the early 1970s, when the big state was at its biggest,

a group of free-market libertarian students met together at St Andrews

University in Fife and began to talk about ways of dismantling

the big state through a new word - privatisation.

In 1977, they formed the Adam Smith Institute, which became one of the

key influences on Margaret Thatcher's government.

The voice, to Scottish ears, might have been unpleasingly English,

but the ideas it was expressing had been welded together in Fife.

One of those intellectual welders was Michael Forsyth,

who'd become Margaret Thatcher's most trusted lieutenant

north of the border.

'She promoted right-winger Michael Forsyth,

'putting him in charge of health and education.'

I mean, I went up to St Andrews thinking I was a socialist,

and I encountered extraordinary people like Madsen Pirie and

Eamonn Butler, who set up the Adam Smith Institute subsequently.

And they were bubbling with ideas, and so the things I cared about,

you know, how you could create a meritocratic society,

how we could extend choice, how we could reduce the power of the state,

how we could increase personal freedoms,

there was a ferment of ideas.

This is very, very interesting, because it's often said,

particularly on the left, obviously,

that Scotland was a place that was alien for Thatcher ideas,

and Margaret Thatcher found Scotland a completely alien country.

I mean, I knew Margaret was involved as a youngster in a leadership

campaign and I can remember her being greeted with cheering crowds,

shouting, "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!"

Hello!

The period of Margaret Thatcher's governments, especially in terms of

Scottish perception, and, even more important,

Scottish historical memory, encrusted with myth.

Still people believe,

despite the recent successes or partial successes

of the Conservative Party in Scottish elections,

they still regard that period as a terrible time for Scotland.

Of course, it's not without a core of truth,

but if you look at the fundamental problem,

which was the Scottish economic problem,

industries had been decaying for at least a generation.

And so, in that sense, it was a tragedy.

But the myths grew gnarled and almost overwhelming,

and Mrs Thatcher did little to allay them.

In 1988, just two years before she was forced from power,

Margaret Thatcher came here to The Mound in Edinburgh to address

the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland,

the church's annual governing conference.

And her message caused what people in Scotland

would call "a bit of a stooshie" - a heck of a row.

Perhaps it would be best, Moderator,

if I began by speaking personally as a Christian,

as well as a politician, about the way I see things.

Yes, she said, Christians should look after the poor and the weak,

but first they had to believe in wealth creation,

otherwise where did the money come from?

And they had to believe in original sin.

And that they should look after their own families first

and they should not depend on high taxation or over-mighty government.

But, intervention by the state must never become so great

that it effectively removes personal responsibility.

50 or 100 years earlier,

that message would have caused no ripple of dissent in the Church of

Scotland or most other Christian churches in Britain.

So why did it upset so many people in 1988?

I think it was the time and the tone.

After the miseries of deindustrialisation,

the miners' strike, Scots had had enough of what they regarded

as Margaret Thatcher's grating, patronising voice,

that perfectly manicured fingernail jabbing at them.

The churchmen made it clear they were distinctly unamused,

and, in that, they spoke for many Scots.

As many commentators said at the time,

as far as the Scots were concerned, Margaret Thatcher was

the very incarnation of an unacceptable type of Englishness.

Everything from her clearly bourgeois demeanour,

her cut-glass English accent,

her apparently patronising behaviour.

You could argue, I think, that if it had been a different personality

leading the Tory Party,

although their policies would have ensured a degree of alienation,

they might not have ensured the degree of alienation

which came the way of Margaret Thatcher's governance.

Two years later and Margaret Thatcher did this

disastrous interview with a young Kirsty Wark.

I was very perturbed at the last election that we in Scotland

hadn't quite had the full benefit

of the increasing number of jobs that there were.

Her way of showing Scotland wasn't being ruled from London

was simply to replace "you" with "we".

..and it's going to, it looks from the latest figures,

as if we in Scotland are going to have higher growth

than the people further south.

Just a tad cheeky, Mrs T.

Prime Minister, thank you very much. Thank you.

Less than a year later, Margaret Thatcher resigned.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we're leaving Downing Street for the last time.

But the fall of Margaret Thatcher's only part of the

political story of Scotland.

How did the SNP now rise from marginal to mainstream?

The Nationalists picked up on the anger caused by Margaret Thatcher

and started to appeal to people on the left.

This is a powerful and a very carefully-phrased resolution.

This period also saw the first appearances by a young Alex Salmond.

It is a government of occupation we face in Scotland,

just as surely as if they had an army at their backs,

and when you think about it, perhaps they have.

Salmond had always been a committed left-winger,

supporting a socialist faction called the 79 Group.

He worked to shed the SNP's right-wing image

and turn it into a party of the centre-left.

Salmond rose to become the SNP's leader just three years

after reaching Westminster.

I think it's very important for the party to set ambitious targets.

I mean, there are 37% of people

already believing in Scottish independence.

We've never had that situation before in Scottish politics.

One of the earliest moves Alex Salmond made as leader was

to confront the sectarian divisions which stopped so many people

from even thinking of voting SNP.

One of the things that I remember very clearly from the Scotland I was

brought up in was that it was still religiously divided, even in Dundee,

the big Orange parades and all the rest of it.

All football teams were completely religiously affiliated one way or

another and the SNP, particularly in the West of Scotland,

was seen as essentially a Protestant party against

the pro-Catholic Labour Party.

Yes, and I deliberately went out to change that.

I mean, you know, listen, the SNP never wanted to be identified with

a religion, but because of Labour's domination of the Catholic vote

in Scotland, which, in many senses, was a largely immigrant vote

from Ireland, because Labour held that and held it fast,

then basically what was left tended to be non-Catholic.

Now, that had to be changed,

and therefore I quite deliberately, in the 1990s,

went out to say to people,

"Look, we have to do more than just say

"we are not on one side or another,

"we have to make it absolutely clear in a variety of ways

"that the SNP is a party which embraces

"all of the trends and tendencies in Scotland."

But Alex Salmond's brand of leadership didn't always appeal.

# Oh, rowan tree

# Thou'll aye be dear tae me... #

And it would still be a while before the SNP could completely shake off

their image as a protest party and slightly odd outsiders in politics.

And if we can run into the election in a challenging position,

over 20% in the opinion polls,

then sky could be the limit for the SNP in that election campaign.

# There wasnae sic a bonnie tree... #

I think it's good to say, you know, independence for Scotland,

free by '93 - very important to set high targets.

# Oh, rowan tree. #

But Scotland was never free by '93.

In fact, in the general election of 1992,

the Nationalists won only three seats in Scotland.

The Tories were the surprise winners at Westminster,

but Labour kept control of Scotland.

This brought back the idea the Tories had no mandate,

which was an extremely dangerous idea for Labour

because they were a profoundly unionist party.

It was a danger masked, at least for a while,

because now British Labour chose a Scottish leader.

I, therefore, declare

that John Smith is elected the leader of the Labour Party.

But who was John Smith

and what did he bring to the Labour Party and Scotland?

All this gorgeous countryside is really John Smith country.

He was a studious, serious Highland boy, who grew up to be a studious,

serious Edinburgh lawyer and then a studious and serious and

highly successful government minister and then Shadow Chancellor,

leader of the Labour Party.

The most important thing, though,

was his utter, shiny-shoed, imperturbable self-confidence.

We talk a lot in Scotland sometimes about the Scottish cultural cringe,

that sense of inferiority complex when Scots confronted by the more

loquacious, swaggering, wealthier and much more numerous English,

in particular the English establishment,

and John had not a shred of that.

All the way through, he thought he was better than they were.

He didn't take them at all seriously.

I promised some vigorous changes for the Labour Party

which will be carried through.

But they're predictable Conservative attacks.

They also attack the individuals

and I'll no doubt be subject to a great deal of that,

not just from the Tories, but from some of their friends in the tabloids,

but that just goes with the job and I'll deal with it with as much

forbearance as I can muster.

Now that he was leader,

Smith chose to bring back a policy he had worked on for Jim Callaghan

back in the 1970s.

It is the Labour Party which has campaigned to get

a Scottish Assembly established.

No other political party has pioneered the way

in which this Labour Party has.

Smith said he felt that Scottish devolution was unfinished business.

But surely, that devolution would help Labour reign supreme?

He thought that a devolved Scottish Parliament would satisfy Scottish

aspirations and, in particular, would see off, would scupper

the real enemy, the SNP,

leaving Scotland as a secure Labour bastion.

Which only goes to show that John Smith might have been a fine man,

but he wasn't right about everything.

Politics is full of the unexpected,

and on May 11th, 1994,

a sad event took everybody by surprise.

The death of Labour leader John Smith has stunned not just the world

of politics but the whole country.

He died this morning in a London hospital after suffering his second

heart attack in six years.

John Smith's funeral was attended by people from across

the political establishment.

His close friend Donald Dewar delivered a moving address

to the packed church in Edinburgh.

No-one would deny the sincerity,

the tenacity, the true spirit of the man.

John Smith was buried on the tiny island of Iona

in the Inner Hebrides.

The Church of Scotland minister George MacLeod once called Iona

"a thin place, where only a tissue paper separates heaven and earth".

John Smith's widow Elizabeth said it

was here that he felt most happy and relaxed.

It's often said that we personalise politics too much these days.

Well, maybe we do, but still,

the randomness of human life is very, very important.

Had John Smith lived, he would almost certainly have become

Labour Prime Minister in 1997.

We would not have lived through New Labour, as it subsequently developed.

Now, I don't know,

but I don't believe that John Smith would have taken us

into the Iraq War with George W Bush, and I think that, even now,

more than 22 years on, the Labour Party today would be a different

party had he lived and, therefore, the Tories would have been

different, Scottish politics would have been different

in unknowable ways, and all because of one overstressed heart

and one very bad night.

So, one of the things that happened as a result of John Smith's death

was that leadership of the British Labour Party passed

not to Smith's natural and obvious Scottish successor,

the youthful Gordon Brown,

but to Tony Blair, a politician of a very different kidney.

Blair had had a Scottish father and he'd been educated partly

in Edinburgh, but to most Scots he simply didn't sound

or look Scottish at all,

and his politics were much more focused on winning over

the floating middle-English voters to Labour,

demolishing that long Thatcher majority he'd lived under.

And that simply produced a different atmosphere,

a different form of words, a different tone, if you like,

in Labour politics.

Tone had a different tone entirely.

Since the Chilcot Inquiry,

Tony Blair's become an even more controversial figure,

but his role is still key to the story of modern Scottish politics,

because when he took over from John Smith,

devolution became one of New Labour's flagship policies.

And many within the party believed it would fend off the SNP for good.

A Scottish Parliament inside and strengthening the United Kingdom

would kill the SNP, because the majority of people in Scotland

want control over their own lives, over domestic affairs,

but they don't want to wrench Scotland out of the United Kingdom.

It's been said that it was Elizabeth Smith who said to you

after John Smith's death,

"You know, you must press ahead with devolution, because

"that's my husband's inheritance and you owe it to him, as it were."

Was that true? Was that part of your motivation

for pushing ahead so strongly with Scottish devolution?

Elizabeth Smith was obviously very keen

that John's legacy on devolution should be protected,

but in any event it was part of the Labour Party's programme

and I believed in it. You know, we've got to understand

that the cause of devolution, at least,

had been going on for 100 years or more before the Scottish Parliament,

and, of course, in the 1970s had been a dominant issue

in the politics of the Labour government at that time.

So I think this has always been an argument that's been there

and been latent at times, coming to the surface at other times.

John Smith, who I was very close to, obviously,

was a passionate supporter of devolution,

and devolution was the Labour Party's programme.

I mean, this was a programme I inherited as leader.

CHEERING

He arrived at Buckingham Palace,

the first Labour premier for 18 years and the youngest this century.

New Labour moved swiftly to push forward Scottish devolution.

Four months after the May 1997 general election,

there was a referendum in Scotland,

asking people if they supported the creation of a Scottish Parliament.

And the result was a resounding yes vote of almost 75%.

And so, almost three centuries after the 1707 Act of Union,

the Scottish Parliament rose again.

Scotland does not need to choose, and should not be forced to choose

between separation and no change,

that there is a better, modern way forward,

there is a third way -

that way is devolution within the United Kingdom.

Waiting for a new building, the parliament was housed

in the same place where Margaret Thatcher had once delivered

her sermon on The Mound.

On July 1st, 1999 it was officially opened by the Queen,

and received its full legislative powers.

And Donald Dewar, Scotland's first First Minister,

made this memorable maiden speech.

This is, indeed, a moment anchored in our history.

And in the quiet moments of today, if there are any,

we might hear some echoes from the past.

The shout of the welder in the din of the great Clyde shipyards.

The speak of the Mearns, rooted in the land.

The discourse of the Enlightenment, when Edinburgh and Glasgow

were indeed a light held to the intellectual life of Europe.

The wild cry of the great pipes and back to the distant noise

of battles in the days of Bruce and Wallace.

The past is part of us, part of every one of us,

and we respect it, but today there is a new voice in the land,

the voice of a democratic parliament.

A voice to shape Scotland.

A voice, above all, for the future.

APPLAUSE

The first Scottish elections had been held earlier that year in May.

Labour were the winners, gaining 21 seats more than the SNP,

and they formed a coalition with the Lib Dems.

But Labour's dominant position was making the party

arrogant and overconfident.

When I was growing up in Ayrshire, the saying used to be,

you could put a red rosette on a monkey

and people would still vote for it.

And, you know, it was meant as a joke,

but I suspect Labour started to believe that...

There were some monkeys in Westminster.

..they were untouchable. That is not what I would say, but, you know,

there was a sense that Labour could do anything they wanted

and people would still, in Scotland, would still blindly vote for them.

And this emerging hubris among the Labour Party in Scotland

as they continued to win election after election,

but especially in the local areas, it used to be said that

their votes were weighed rather than counted,

is a serious historical lesson for the current SNP government.

The danger of hubris.

The danger of self-satisfaction and taking things for granted,

which can easily occur

if a political party is continuously dominant.

New Labour also introduced policies

that alienated the party's core vote.

Privatisation,

welfare reform,

trade union legislation,

tuition fees, which were reversed by the Scottish Parliament but then,

of course, the war in Iraq.

In February, 2003, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Glasgow,

and one of the main speakers at the rally was John Swinney,

who was then the leader of the SNP.

Prime Minister, one last time, are you listening

to the overwhelming majority of the people of Scotland?

Not in our name! No way!

Seizing this and many other opportunities given to them

by the Blair government, the SNP were on the rise again

and this time attacking the very notion of Tony Blair's New Labour.

Now, New Labour was never a Scottish construct.

Now, of course, that didn't mean it wasn't successful in Scotland,

and Blair had at least two successful elections in Scotland,

but he was never loved in Scotland.

He was never approved of in Scotland.

And, of course, the Iraq War poisoned the well

to an extraordinary degree.

So you had the SNP emerging

as a viable alternative, while you had much, much disillusionment

with the Labour Party in Scotland,

and I think that is...a combination of that,

is why we won the 2007 Scottish election.

CHEERING

In May 2007,

the SNP beat Labour by one seat to win the Scottish

parliamentary elections and form a minority government.

The first time the Nationalists had ever been in power.

Four years later, they won a commanding majority at Holyrood.

Blue Scotland and red Scotland had now gone.

The entire country seemed to be Nationalist to bumblebee - black and yellow.

The SNP can finally claim that we have lived up to that accolade

as the National Party of Scotland.

And this meant one big thing,

plans for an independence referendum were now well and truly afoot.

We shall bring forward a referendum and trust the people

with Scotland's own constitutional future.

Thank you very much.

So how do we best explain the recent rise of the SNP?

Was it somehow inevitable or was it also down to Labour

and the creation of this parliament at Holyrood?

So if you think that the momentum which has taken us to the lip of

independence now starts with the creation of the Scottish Parliament,

the obvious question then is if the Scottish Parliament had been denied

to Scotland, could all of this have been avoided?

No, because people in Scotland wanted a parliament,

so if it had been denied to the people of Scotland, who knows,

we might be independent already, because people wanted...

I think the lesson for Labour is that they thought...

The Scottish Parliament for them was a calculation about

how they could contain the aspirations of the Scottish people.

And I think the lesson for them should be you can't contain

the aspirations of a country.

Scotland wanted a Scottish Parliament and therefore,

if had been denied it by Labour, it would have...

that sentiment would have found another direction.

And, likewise, if Scotland wants to be independent,

nothing ultimately is going to stop that happening.

The New Labour response to the rise of the SNP

is, unsurprisingly, a bit different.

They declined to blame themselves and instead put it down

to identity politics.

I think the Scottish National Party has arisen for all sorts of reasons,

and so I think what would be a mistake is to think

that this issue hadn't been there, or this gathering sense Scotland

certainly wanted more power over its own destiny hadn't been there,

so the question really is what is the thing that has driven it

with such vigour in these last couple of decades?

And what's your answer to that?

Because it's been an extraordinary change, very, very fast indeed.

My instinct is that it's part of actually what is a bigger

global movement, where people want a greater sense of identity,

look for identity, where identity politics is much more important,

and where people also...

they like to be part of a kind of insurgent movement

against the other thing that is dominating people's lives,

whether it's UK and Brussels, or whether it's...

Scotland and Westminster,

but you can see very similar things happening right round the world.

For much of 2011, after that initial announcement of a referendum,

not a lot actually happened.

There were meetings, negotiations and cheery pronouncements,

and then in January 2012,

David Cameron, speaking to some haggard-looking bloke on the BBC,

upped the ante.

And I think we owe the Scottish people something that is

fair, legal and decisive.

And so, in the coming days, we'll be setting out clearly

what the legal situation is,

and I think then we need to move forward and say,

"Right, let's settle this issue in a fair and decisive way."

So you are saying, vote earlier.

I think this is a matter for the Scottish people. It is, it is.

If there are problems of uncertainty and lack of clarity,

and I don't think we should just let this go on year after year.

I think that's damaging for everyone concerned.

So let's clear up the legal situation and then let's have

a debate about how we bring this issue to a...

Sooner not later? My view is that sooner rather than later would be better.

Right.

Two days later came the announcement from Alex Salmond and the Scottish government,

the independence referendum would be held

in the autumn of 2014.

Your Scotland, your referendum.

The date for the referendum has to be the autumn of 2014.

That's because this is the biggest decision that Scotland has made for 300 years.

The date had been set.

The race was under way.

What could possibly go wrong?

In the next film,

what really happened when Scotland voted on the issue of independence?

I always believed that it was winnable. What we were

putting forward was something which many, many Scots found attractive.

The Nationalists could never make an economic case.

An economic case will, in most circumstances,

trump the emotion, if you like.

And coming right up to date,

what does Brexit mean for the future of Scotland and the United Kingdom?

Are we, at last, about to witness the break-up of Britain?

There's probably somewhere around a 50% chance that Scotland is

going to vote to leave the United Kingdom in the next two years.

If you want to find out more about historical

and contemporary Scotland, just go to the website below

and follow the links to the Open University.

STELLA: You're under arrest.

You're going to prison.

In what sense are you free?

PAUL: I live with a level of intensity

unknown to you and others of your type.