Is it significant that Cameron will speak in a Catholic church in his visit to Glasgow East today? You can bet any Scottish politicians would have avoided any church in a constituency where sectarianism remains a factor – and one not very well understood in Westminster. Church observance may not be high, but the east of Glasgow is still an area where pubs are known as Catholic, Protestant or mixed. It is still shaking off a long and deep legacy. My father grew up in one of Glasgow East’s council schemes, and in those days Protestant kids like him simply didn’t know any Catholics. The self-segregation was complete. It has got better now, but it is still there.
When I started as a reporter in the Scottish Parliament, I was told you can tell the Catholic MPs because their names start with Mc rather than protestant Mac. I grew up in the Highlands (my dad married a Catholic, not that it mattered up there) blissfully unaware of all this nonsense. I have always regarded it with a sense of revulsion. What ministers call “sectarian violence” isn’t rooted in religion – when a Celtic fan catches a Rangers fan they don’t argue about the Real Presence. It’s just Gang A versus Gang B, Hawks v Jets, Montague v Capulet. Poverty brings with it gangs and violence, and in Glasgow it happens to be arranged along lines to do with the influx of Irish immigration.
Here’s my brief history of Scottish sectarianism. The 1849 potato famine and the industrial revolution sent major waves of immigration to western Scotland. (Catholics are to this day called “left footers” due to a myth that they used their left foot to put the spade into the potato field.) Shipyards sucked in more Irish labour in the First World War and by the 1920s the Church of Scotland was so worried about it that it published a—now repudiated—document entitled “Menace of the Irish Race to Our Scottish Nationality” – arguing that drunkenness and idleness were coming over the Irish sea. At the same time the Scottish Labour Party was taking off – and positioned itself as a party that would protect Catholics from discrimination. As Labour succeeded electorally, its consequent grip on local authorities was viewed with suspicion. When my father’s family wanted a bigger council house (he is the second of nine children) it was a common belief that – as my grandmother put it at the time – “if you want a new house you don’t ask the council, you ask the local priest.” As the 1994 Monklandsgate scandal showed, such fears were not entirely groundless. The same forces put bellows under Scottish Toryism.
But, of course, before 1965 there was no Scottish Conservative party. It was the Unionist Party (union as in Ulster, not England) and the repository for protestant votes and the political wing of the Orange movement. In 1955, the Unionists (aligned to the Tories) won the majority of votes in Scotland – the only time any party has done so. The SNP has, over the decades, delved into this when it suited. Nationalist activists campaigned against Helen Liddell in the Monklands East by-election by asking voters if they really wanted to vote for “Helen Reilly” – her Irish maiden name.
People disagree as to how prevalent sectarianism is today. While sectarian chants have now been outlawed, there will be plenty of Orange marches on Saturday. I bumped into a rehearsal in Edinburgh weekend before last – I came straight out of Waverley station to see banners saying “No Popery” and pictures of Ian Paisley. That is why many – like the composer James Macmillain – still argue that Scotland is Northern Ireland without the bullets. I should add that, due to immigration patterns, this is a central belt problem rather than a Scottish problem. Go into Aberdeen and ask where the Catholic areas are and you will be met with a blank stare. But go to Glasgow East and tell them a Catholic by the name of Iain Duncan Smith is launching the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party’s by-election campaign in a Catholic church, and some will think “ah, he’s after the Labour vote, then.”
For the record, I believe IDS and Cameron are acting in an explicitly post-sectarian spirit. Political behaviour in a sectarian age means avoiding churches, leery of alienating one group or another. Through his charity work in Easterhouse, IDS knows this area better than almost anyone else in Westminster. His approach is that, if one wishes to salute the most hardworking institutions fighting against poverty, then the churches would be your first port of call. It’s hard to overstate just what an amazing job churches do there – the Church of Scotland’s welfare division is extraordinary. Politicians may argue (as Jo Moore, Labour’s ex-special adviser, once did) that there are “no votes in the poor” so they give up on Glasgow East or take Gordon Brown’s “let them eat tax credits” approach. But the churches step in where everyone else runs away. Deplorably, church groups and other grass root charities are in Glasgow often confronted by government agencies jealous of their monopoly control over the lives of the poor (see Neal Ascherson for more). The churches, here, are Burke’s little platoons – and IDS and Cameron have come to pay homage. Sectarianism may still be bad in Glasgow East, but the poverty is far, far worse.
PS Cameron was perhaps speaking in St Jude’s Roman Catholic Church in Banlanark for another reason entirely. St Jude is the official patron saint of lost causes.
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