Whatever the efforts of the Scottish Liberal Democrats to harness Scottish nationalism in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Scottish Labour Party remained its primary ‘carrier’. One need look no further than Donald Dewar's memorable speech at the opening of the Scottish Parliament on 1 July 1999:

And so it continued, invoking Walter Scott (‘only a man with soul so dead could have no sense, no feel of his native land’), Robert Burns (who ‘believed that sense and worth ultimately prevail’) and the ‘symbolic thistles’ on the new Parliament's mace together with the words: ‘Wisdom. Justice. Compassion. Integrity’ (Dewar 1999). Many of these names, symbols, themes and arguments would have been familiar to any nationalist unionist of the previous century.

But Dewar's speech – rich in ethnosymbolism – also appealed to supporters of independence – it would be referenced over the next two decades by Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon – while Robert McLean (a leading light on Scottish Labour's nationalist wing) noted the ‘difference in tone from that struck by the cautious reformer of the late 1960s’, something he suggested reflected ‘the changes in Scottish society, and Donald Dewar's perspective, over the past thirty years’ (McLean 2001: 10).

This chapter examines three distinct phases of Labour's ‘nationalist unionism’: (1) its strong support for Scottish Home Rule in the early twentieth century; (2) the devolution debate of the 1960s and 1970s; and (3) that which re-emerged in response to the twin challenges of the SNP and Thatcherism in the 1980s.