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Clydeside: When the Workshop of the World Shut Up Shop |
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shipyard workers |
Many of country’s most powerful institutions looked for scapegoats for the industrial crisis, and in Glasgow the Catholic Irish were targeted. In 1923, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, then an extremely powerful force in political and social life, issued a report accusing not only Irish but Catholic immigrants in general for having a negative effect on the Scottish cultural identity.
The proclivity for hard liquor and bookmakers that accompanied urban industrial life was blamed on Catholic Irish immigrants; and the general dilution of traditional, hardworking, Presbyterian, Scottish culture by loose-living immigrants was seen as being at the heart of the problem.
However, despite Labour’s new alliance with the Catholic Church, working class Protestant communities in and around Glasgow didn’t necessarily swing towards the Tories as a result, and in fact the Orange Order formally broke from the Conservatives in 1922.
The Scottish Protestant League, despite its anti-Catholic sentiments, and despite encouraging sectarianism in the labour market, laid the blame for mass unemployment firmly at the feet of the middle class Moderates within Glasgow’s council who failed to deliver welfare for the struggling, Protestant working class masses.
Despite heavily influencing local elections in the early 1930s, and being fuelled by the Church of Scotland, sectarianism failed to have any major impact on the main political parties, who were reluctant to get involved in a brand of politics that was viewed as extremist and quite often parochial. However, the long traditions of sectarianism that have plagued modern Scotland were at their worst in the 1920s and 30s.
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