The 79 Group: From Black Sheep to Leadership of the Scottish National Party

Abstract

This thesis has explored the identity and legacy that the 79 Group left to the Scottish National Party. The 79 Group was an organization created within the SNP in the aftermath of the Devolution Referendum held in Scotland on 1 March 1979. In order to determine what legacy the 79 Group left, it was first necessary to establish the ideological portrait of the Group, what it stood for, what were its ideas, policies and ideologies. Although the 79 Group put forward three main principles: nationalism, socialism and republicanism, it also developed many other ideas and modes of action. The 79 Group took some of the themes introduced in the 1970s by the SNP and amplified them, for instance, unemployment which became one of the main arguments the Group used in order to illustrate its case for independence. After three years of an intense but short life, the Group was banned out of the SNP and seven members were evicted. They all came back in the 1980s and a small portion of these former personae non gratae climbed up the ladder to the top of the SNP’s leadership but also to the top of Scottish politics. This thesis has explored whether the 79 Group left a legacy to the SNP and if the former members carried the Group’s legacy with them. The political manifestos the SNP published for elections from the 1983 to the early 2000s were examined in order to trace the legacy. The research for this thesis has shown that the Group’s ideas were very present in the 1980s and especially in the manifesto published for the General Election of 1983 which occurred only several months after the Group was forced to stop. An analysis of the SNP manifestos then showed that the ideas and policies of the Group declined especially in the 1990s and it became almost impossible to detect once in the new millennium, exactly when the former members arrived in positions of power. As a result, this thesis has concluded that the former Group members rose up to power by giving up on the principles defended by the 79 Group. Nevertheless, the study of the manifestos also proved that the 79 Group managed to hand down to the SNP one of its strongest points: the nationalist party should develop its economic and social programmes in order to convince a larger electorate, that is what the 79 Group asserted in the first “Group Paper” it published in 1979. During the 1980s, the Party started to develop economic and social policies until the 1990s where it was able to present a full political manifesto tackling many issues that Scots encounter in their daily-life.