Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c.1872-1932

In discussing the nature of Scottish nationality, Gordon Donaldson (who later became Historiographer Royal for Scotland) claimed in 1969 that ‘there was a Scottish political tradition distinct from that of England, but it lay in radicalism and not in nationalism’. This notion of ‘radicalism’—an amorphous and flexible term which can be used to suit many contexts—constituting an essential component of Scottish national identity is a recurrent theme in the national historiography. In the case of Red Scotland! the reader is immediately disarmed by the presence of the exclamation mark, which perhaps indicates the author's enthusiasm for the subject but which also prepares the reader to be taken along a certain narrative path—something which is underlined by the author's own use of the term ‘journey’ in the introduction (p. 1). In fact, although the book does take the reader from the beginnings of modern ‘popular’ industrial action in Scotland, through to the disaffiliation of the Independent Labour Party from the Labour Party (1932), Kenefick also adopts a thematic approach to subjects such as New Unionism, rural/land activism, internal dissension, war and militarism, and the myth (or otherwise) of ‘Red Clydeside’. The division of the book into two sections (1872–1910; 1910–32) is not particularly helpful, and the inclusion of a distinct historiographical chapter on the latter period (ch. 4) somewhat disrupts its internal coherence. The important historiographical debates which are aired in Chapters One and Four would have better been assimilated into a single introductory section

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