Long and winding road of isles elections

​For the first 17 years, the seat was held by Liberals under various labels. Since 1935, it has been represented by two Labour MPs for a total of 53 years and two Scottish Nationalists for 36 years between them. Once in the job, MPs have proved quite hard to shift!

Prior to 1918, a very limited franchise within the islands was divided, along local government lines, between two constituencies – Ross and Cromarty and Inverness-shire. Despite the good sense of a ‘Butt to Barra’ constituency being accepted, it took more than 50 years for local government to adapt.

To this day, the constituency has by far the smallest electorate in the UK. A recommendation from the Boundaries Commission in 1980 to extend its boundaries to include Skye and Lochalsh was overturned at a public inquiry. In 2011, an Act of the UK Parliament specifically protected the constituency (along with Orkney and Shetland) from merger with any other.

The first MP for the Western Isles was, without doubt, one of its most distinguished. Dr Donald Murray had been the Medical Officer of Health in Lewis and a dedicated campaigner against insanitary housing and particularly the scourge of tuberculosis. He was truly a man of the crofting people who stood as a Liberal – the dominant political creed in the Highlands and Islands.

At exactly the time of this election campaign, Lewis – still in shock and despair from the losses of war and the unspeakable tragedy of the Iolaire – was hit by the confusing arrival of Lord Leverhulme with his grandiose schemes and hostility to crofting and the promised break-up of farms.

Dr Murray insisted that there need be no incompatibility between Leverhulme’s schemes and the promised land reforms. This stance attracted the hostility of Leverhulme and his supporters, whose ranks included the Stornoway Gazette.

On national politics, Dr Murray also walked a fine line between loyalty to the Liberal Party, led by Herbert Asquith, while professing admiration for his rival Lloyd George, who remained within the war-time coalition with the Conservatives, splitting the Liberals into two competing camps.

To complete the challenges, a Highland Land League candidate emerged, Ex-Provost Hugh McCowan of Oban, taking votes from Murray, particularly in Uist with which he had connections, on a land reform ticket. He would subsequently return as the constituency’s first Labour candidate.

The pro-Leverhulme and Lloyd George candidate was a wealthy shipowner and mining magnate, William Mitchell Cotts, who had made his money in the coalmines of Natal with no prior connection to the islands. With many servicemen still to return, Dr Murray won by just 390 votes and, at Westminster, lived up to his reputation as a champion of Hebridean interests.

Four years later, however, the same issues were still around both locally and nationally. Leverhulme was on his way out, poverty and emigration prevailed while the Liberal split was even more bitter. In a straight fight, Cotts – by now fortified with a baronetcy bestowed by Lloyd George “for services to recruitment” – defeated Dr Murray by 959 votes. Dr Murray died the following year.

Cotts barely spoke in the House of Commons and did not stand again the following year, 1923, when the seat was retained for the Liberals – now nominally re-united but in depleted Opposition – by Sir Alexander Mackenzie Livingstone, an industrialist who had previously stood in Dover and Inverness. When Lloyd George returned as Liberal leader in 1926, Livingstone was the unofficial “whip” of Liberal MPs who continued to oppose and distrust him.

The Hansard record of his contributions confirm that Livingstone was a very active MP with a wide range of international interests. He also appears to have been diligent in raising matters relating to the continued impoverishment of the Western Isles and the need for basic infrastructure such as roads and piers. He did not stand again in 1929 and joined the Labour Party the following year.

A connection to the islands does not seem to have been expected in this era when independent financial means were required to become an MP. Next up as Liberal candidate was Thomas Ramsay, an Ayrshire born lawyer who had gone to the London Bar and previously stood for Parliament in Shettleston.

The election of May 1929 took place against a dire economic backdrop, both nationally and locally. It was the first based on an equal franchise with all women over the age of 21 eligible to vote.

The result produced a minority Labour government, with Ramsay Macdonald as Prime Minister. In the Western Isles, though Thomas Ramsay was elected, Labour took second place for the first time.

Until this point, a notable feature of elections in the constituency was the low level of turn-out. Only once (in 1922 when Cotts defeated Murray) had it risen above 50 per cent and in 1929 it fell to 40 per cent. Two years later when Ramsay retained the seat in a straight fight with a renegade Unionist, Iain Moffat-Pender, it fell even further.

By this time – faced with the grim economic challenges of the Depression – Macdonald had led the bulk of Labour MPs into a National Coalition government. The 1931 election virtually wiped out Labour as an independent force and MacDonald's decision to lead a Conservative-dominated coalition was seen as a betrayal by many of his erstwhile colleagues. The Liberals faced a similar split and Ramsay was re-elected in the Western Isles as a pro-Coalition Liberal.

The 1935 General Election was one of the most significant in the political history of the Western Isles. Nationally, it again resulted in an overwhelming victory for the National Coalition in which the Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, had become Prime Minister the previous year. There was some recovery for Labour as an opposition – and nowhere more so than in the Western Isles.

Crucially, there were three candidates for the seat. Thomas Ramsay was defending it as a National Liberal.

The Scottish National Party was contesting a General Election for the first time and its candidate Sir Alexander MacEwen was both its leader and a well-known figure in the islands. An Inverness solicitor, he had been county councillor for Benbecula.

Late in the day, the Labour Party selected as its candidate Malcolm Kenneth Macmillan, whose family roots were in Point and who was at that time a 22 year-old student at Edinburgh University. It was a remarkably bold choice of candidate and probably the first time since Dr Murray when local credentials featured in an election.

Just as important were the issues of the day. Unemployment was rife and men worked for pitifully low wages to qualify for minimal National Insurance. The clouds of war were gathering and the fact that Ramsay was still in Coalition with the Tories did not help his cause in an island setting.

It was significant that although the Western Isles was the most rural constituency in the country, islanders had experienced more contact with industry and the power of organised labour than other parts of the Highlands and Islands, through Harris Tweed, the herring fisheries and the Merchant Navy. That basis helped create the conditions for a move to Labour.

A Labour rally, the Gazette reported, “again filled the Town Hall to capacity” with “representatives of all the local trade union branches” on the platform. The chairman, Councillor Kennedy, said that radicals in the islands were in a dilemma. “It had been usual for a Liberal candidate of the old Radical flavour to come before electors but now there was no such candidate in the field”. Macmillan himself was a commanding orator and spoke of international as well as domestic and local affairs.

Macmillan won with a majority of 1345 while MacEwen signalled a future Nationalist challenge by taking more than a quarter of the votes cast. The Gazette noted without enthusiasm: “The Western Isles is the first Highland constituency to desert the traditional Liberal faith for Socialism” and that “the result would almost certainly have been different if Sir Alexander MacEwen had not intervened”.

There was no General Election in the wartime years and when Labour swept to power in 1945, Macmillan held the seat against a strong Liberal challenge while the Tory candidate was Iain Macleod, the future Chancellor of the Exchequer whose family owned Scaliscro Estate in Lewis. In all, Macmillan stood and won at eight General Elections.

The ”anti-Labour” vote would coalesce each time around the best placed (or sometimes only) opponent. One of these was Donny B. Macleod who stood twice – first in 1959 for the National Liberals (who had by then merged with the Tories) and then in 1964 when he stood as a Liberal.

Donny B’s family owned a confectionery shop and Macmillan, never short of a good turn of phrase, brought the house down by describing him as the “liquorice allsorts candidate”. Having taken a drubbing in 1964, Donny B pursued a more successful career as a much-loved national broadcaster.

For the great majority of his 35 years as MP, there is nothing in the Parliamentary record to suggest that Macmillan was anything other than a diligent MP, constantly raising island issues in the House of Commons and pursuing Ministers. Famously, for many years he held the record for the longest speech in the Commons chamber, on an amendment to a Crofting Bill.

However, he lived in an entirely different Parliamentary era when MPs were poorly paid and could claim minimal expenses even for travel to a far-flung constituency. This made him vulnerable to a home-based opponent who was both personally well-liked and constantly in the public eye. The Provost of Stornoway, Donald Stewart, fitted that description perfectly and gained the Western Isles in 1970 for the Scottish National Party, the first time they had won a seat in a General Election.

Macmillan had not been helped with divisions within the local Labour Party. Some felt he had simply been there too long and, as expectations of MPs changed, charges of absenteeism were starting to stick.

There was also an ideological split over crofting with some leading lights supportive of the Crofters Commission’s desire (under James Shaw Grant) to turn all crofters into owner-occupiers, a policy to which Macmillan was deeply opposed.

Whatever the reasons for his defeat, Macmillan had enjoyed a good run and could have retired at that point with dignity. Unfortunately, he eschewed that option and when the local Labour Party did not re-select him as candidate, he created a split which it took years to recover from, leaving the field clear for Donald Stewart to consolidate his base.

Donald managed to combine his national role as a respected standard-bearer for independence with adherence to a personal agenda more suited to his island constituency including support for capital punishment and opposition to the Common Market in all its subsequent works.

As I wrote in an obituary for the Guardian when Donald died in 1992, just five years after his retirement: “In the Western Isles, his outlook, demeanour and identification with local causes fitted a large proportion of his constituents like a glove and he saw off various challenges - including my own - with ease”.

The 1983 General Election was the last one which Donald contested and his retirement opened the door to a Labour revival with Calum Macdonald gaining the seat in 1987 and retaining it for 18 years.

Despite being in opposition, Calum piloted through a Crofter Forestry Act and also helped the Harris Tweed Act on its Parliamentary passage. He became the only MP for the Western Isles so far to hold Ministerial office, in the pre-devolution Scottish Office.

By 2005, the political tide turned again and Angus Brendan MacNeil secured the seat for the SNP, the first representative hailing from the southern end of the island chain to be returned. Having fallen out with the SNP, he is now defending it as an independent, creating another unique circumstance in the long and winding road of General Elections in the Western Isles.

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