A long, hard struggle: Yes veterans mark rise of the SNP

Alan Johnston is reflecting on his near-40 years of independence activism. The 70-year-old was politicised by reading underground newspapers in the 1960s and learning about Martin Luther King.

He’s one of the election-hardened campaigners who endured years of slammed doors and heartache to grow the Yes movement from a fringe group to the dominant force in Scottish politics, commanding almost 60% in the opinion polls after 13 years of SNP government.

As the party holds its annual conference, and with St Andrew’s Day tomorrow, he’s clear on the progress that’s been made. “We used to go out and celebrate if we got anywhere near 10%,” he says. “It was pretty heartbreaking. Lots of times the door just got shut in your face. Not many would engage with us – hardly anybody. It was because you felt if you didn’t do it and people like you didn’t, the country wouldn’t move, it wouldn’t go anywhere. So you did it.”

Johnston’s entry to politics came in the Paisley of his youth, when Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly played the town’s folk clubs and he began reading the International Times, the radical counter-culture magazine backed by Paul McCartney and Allan Ginsberg. “There was so much happening for young people in Scotland,” he says. “Up until then, when you hit about 16 or 17 you’d to turn into your grandfather in one of his hand-me-down cardigans. All of a sudden there was all this colour.

“People were starting to find out about other countries and other ways of doing things, other political movements.”

That learning saw Johnston, from Lochwinnoch, first align with socialism before an advert in the local paper caught his eye. It was about an SNP meeting in Renfrew, where he now lived with wife Margaret. “We went along to see what it was all about and never managed to escape,” he says. “We became very involved.”

Since then, Johnston, who also counts US civil rights leader King as an early influence, has stood as a candidate, spoken at conference and chapped more doors than he can count. He says he felt a change in the public’s thinking in the mid-90s – even if the polls of the time didn’t reflect it. “People were coming round to the idea that Scotland was different, that Scotland was ignored. Political change can take a long time to set into action.”

Margaret McGregor first felt the change in her local supermarket. Now 82, she was the SNP’s longest-serving councillor until her retirement from West Dunbartonshire Council around a decade ago.

She’d bumped into a local Labour grandee, someone with whom she shared mutual respect. “He said, ‘I tell everybody that belongs to the local party to look at what Margaret McGregor has done for her area,’” she recalls. “By then, we’d really built up a lot of credibility.”

The unexpected praise came after what McGregor calls “a hard, hard struggle”.

The Haldane woman was one of just six members of her branch in the Vale of Leven around 60 years ago. Back then, there was no need to hire a hall to meet – a living room would do, so they conducted party business in each other’s homes. “I had no idea at that time that my grandparents on my mum’s side were nationalists,” she says “Because we didn’t talk about it. My dad was a Labour man who worked on the Clyde, but I made up my own point of view.”

IT was around the time of Winnie Ewing’s historic Hamilton by-election win, and, with the party’s small but dedicated membership now on a high, Ewing visited the Vale of Leven to help secure the election of Ruth Dick.

McGregor herself stood after first campaigning against the scrappage of school bus passes under Strathclyde Regional Council, a move which would have hit families like hers, sending four teenagers to school by bus each day, hard. The formation of community group Haldane and Jamestown Tenants and Residents followed before she was finally “pestered” into putting her name on the ballot paper.

That was in 1977, when she was one of four SNP members returned in a council contest. “The other three lost their seats the following elections and I was left on my own,” she recalls. “The Labour Party just didn’t want to know the SNP, we were considered Tories.

“It’s been a long, hard struggle. I remember one Labour councillor saying to two of my colleagues that we were lower than a snake’s belly. That’s how we were thought of. It was a hard, hard time. Even the officers weren’t all that sympathetic but I just got on, did my work in the interests of my community. They learned to respect us.”

But that wasn’t universal – McGregor faced prejudice and dismissal on account of her sex. “I remember the Provost telling me to go away and have a Tupperware party – in broad daylight, in front of the press and everybody else,” she recalls. “But I did it for 30 years and I loved it, I really loved it.

“I’ve been around for so long and seen the developments. I don’t know if I’ll live to see it, but I would love to see Scotland regain its nationhood. I think we’re getting nearer. The polls are climbing and Nicola Sturgeon is doing a fabulous job.

“There are people who want independence yesterday, but we can’t go for it until we know we’re going to win it.

“A lot of the new people in branches want things different and they haven’t come through the struggle of people like me, who have been struggling for 60-odd years.

“Calm it down. Let Nicola decide what’s happening, along with the rest of the party.”

Dave McEwan Hill has also spent more than 60 years building the case for independence. Now living in Dunoon, he came upon the SNP by accident while heading to enrol at Glasgow School of Art. “I came upon a little office – ‘Scottish National Party’ was the signboard and the small window had some cuttings on display,” he says. “ I went in and joined up.

“Five shillings was it? I can’t remember. An Ayrshire farmer, Ian McDonald, had sold his farm and set up the first SNP HQ.

“It wasn’t a sudden conversion for me, however. I had never believed other than that a country called Scotland should be ruled by a Scottish government. It was, and still is, the only sensible position.”

McEwan Hill thinks that “might have had something to do” with his grandfather, who was a friend of Thirty-Nine Steps author John Buchan and a backer of the Scottish Party.

The country is now, he says, “on the brink” of constitutional change. “We have a generation of Scots who are about to carry us there.

“This generation is not British,” he goes on. “The generation I grew up in was British. British and Scottish, maybe – it’s possible to be happily both.

“They or their parents and grandparents had suffered and come through two world wars behind the Union Jack. There was a worldwide empire and the opportunities it offered the Scots, who were never slow to take them up.

“When I joined the SNP it was registering less than 1%. It took real selfless dedication to pick up the fight on those terms. It wasn’t big marches and rallies, online debate, town halls full. It was ... round the doors, round the doors and round the doors – every year.”

Those “selfless” campaigners are, McEwan Hill says, “real heroes”. “That generation is now mostly passed,” he says. “I am luckier than most.

“But it has to be recognised that it was the dedication of those who carried the torch in very difficult political waters from the forming of the SNP 86 years ago that got us here – I can remember us partying when we saved a deposit in a by-election.

“It was all built on the backs of the generation that, very often at huge personal expense, contested elections which they had no chance of winning. And who all understood very clearly that we could disagree on just about everything except the major aim and still march together – a lesson some folk could do well to learn today.”