Generational Learning: from the 1920s to the 1950s

Scottish miners were heterogeneous in their politics and culture. A distinct Scottish mining identity accommodated social conservatives and religious sectarians with class-conscious trade unionists and international socialists. This identity developed through political campaigning from the 1950s to the 1980s and drew upon the claimed values of the Scottish Nation as well as solidarity with working class people across Britain and the world. It emphasised the value of gender equality, and gradually undermined coalfield male chauvinism. Mining leaders related security explicitly to questions of class and nation. Solidarities of class were pursued with trade unionists across Britain, but miners in Scotland tended to see deindustrialisation as an acute and even distinctly Scottish problem. The unreformed constitutional-political structures of the UK were criticised as an obstacle to coalfield security, with policy-makers remote from the communities affected by accelerating job loss. Scotland’s national right to self-determination was asserted, and the miners persuaded the Scottish Trades Union Congress to adopt Home Rule as official policy by the early 1970s.