AS with his previous book, The Red and the Green – a Portrait of John MacLean, Gerard Cairns manages to pull out more new information and unpublished facts about his subject in John MacLean and Scottish Republicanism, particularly his support for the Scottish Citizens Army and Scottish Defence League.
Cairns also clears up some confusion around Oliver Brown and the Scottish Republican Army. Brown was the founder of the second Scottish Socialist Party, and co-founder of the Scottish Secretariat with Roland E Muirhead. The book also concentrates on John MacLean’s gradual, but inherent, progression towards his Scottish Workers Republican Party from the Great British left. MacLean was at first a member of the Social Democratic Federation that evolved into the British Socialist Party. MacLean wrote in his paper under the pseudonym of “Gael”.
The aristocratic SDL leader Henry Hyndman supported the First World War and a larger Royal Navy. MacLean opposed the war and was appointed Soviet Consul in Glasgow.
Cairns concentrates on his relationship with the Communist Party of Great Britain, now Communist Party of Britain. The full title, CPGB, has currently been reclaimed by a small Maoist group, also very British and Unionist on Scotland. Much of Cairns’s discussion of the Great British left groups and their position on Scotland, is the same as the Unionist right, he shows as standing today.
He discusses the short-lived Scottish Labour Party which was overtaking from the right by the British Labour Party. There is still no SLP in existence or registered as such, merely a branch office of the GB Labour Party, as with the three other English main parties in Scotland.
Familiar names, such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Guy Aldred, Tom Johnston, Jimmy Maxton and other fellow travellers are also well covered. Perhaps more tellingly, is his passion for Ireland as well as Scotland and the Gaeltacht Scotland.
MacLean met Irish nationalists in one of his spells in Peterhead Prison, which shaped his views, as well as that of James Connolly and James Larkin. As one character in Para Handy’s The Vital Spark used to say: “If Dougal was here he would tell you himself.”
If you want more of these historical gems you will just have to read the book yourself.
John MacLean and Scottish Republicanism by Gerard Cairns is published by the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement.
No Language! No Nation! The Life of the Honourable Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr will be published by Rymour Books, based in Perth, and should be out by the end of the month or early May.
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