Top 10 moments in Scottish Labour movement history

1)    Keir Hardie enters parliament

2)    Mary Barbour’s army wins rent controls

3)    Jennie Lee creates the Open University

4)    Scots join up to the International Brigades

5)    Victory in the UCS work-in

6)    John Smith leads the Labour Party

7)    Scotland elects the first Muslim MP

8)    Labour delivers devolution

9)    Devolution delivers

10) A Scot dominates Downing Street

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s been a big week for the future of the United Kingdom. As we approach St Andrew’s Day on Saturday, Labour needs to be much more aggressive in claiming the terrain from which we can win, changing the most important question in Scottish politics from ‘who shouts loudest for Scotland?’, to ‘who delivers most for Scots?’.

Thankfully we’ve a long and rich Scottish Labour history to draw on and at least 10 moments our colleagues across the country should be proud of and ready to defend in making the case for a No vote.

The first, of course, is the formation of the Labour Party as a parliamentary force, an achievement made possible by a Scottish Labour giant whose time as an MP for first West Ham South and then Merthyr Tydfil was the foundation for all that we have achieved together in more than a century since. Keir Hardie was a committed devolutionist and democrat, but his socialism didn’t stop at the Scottish border, nor at the door of the Commons chamber.

For those early socialists, building a real Labour movement meant resisting unaccountable power whether it was found in the state, at work, or closer to home. Given the impact they had in forcing Llloyd George to introduce nationwide rent restrictions, it is amazing how little we celebrate Mrs Barbour’s army. Mary Barbour is in many ways the mother of the modern tenant movement, mobilising 20,000 people to fight off attempts to price them out of their homes. With the men of Glasgow away fighting the First World War, the landlords thought the women would make easy pickings. They thought wrong.

Opponents often initially underestimated Jennie Lee in a similar fashion. Like Hardie, she was a product of the Scottish coalfields and, like him, convinced that excellence in education and access to the arts were not irrelevant to ‘real’ socialism, but the lived manifestation of it. When she entered the House of Commons at just 24 she was too young to vote for herself but she never let her gender, youth or class get in the way of fighting the battles she believed needed fought. Few MPs can claim a legacy as enduring as the creation of the Open University so may you never again speak of ‘Nye Bevan’s wife’.

That desire to give socialism a practical realisation runs deep in the Scottish Labour movement and perhaps explains why Scots joined up to the International Brigades in disproportionate numbers. While the courage of those decisions may seem other-worldly in retrospect, the political motivation remains hard-wired in Scottish Labour today: “They wur internationalists. They wur Europeans. They wur Scots”.

The next moment is one rarely spoken about outside Scotland but which at the time inspired the Labour movement across these islands and the world. The industrial dispute at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders was perhaps the most Calvinist response imaginable to the threat of closure: the men didn’t walk out, they worked-in. Ordinary workers took over the running of the yards to prove they could be profitable, conducting themselves “with dignity and discipline (because) we don’t only build ships on the Clyde, we build men”. Union organiser Jimmy Reid was subsequently elected Rector of Glasgow University and gave a lecture described by the New York Times as the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address.

That Scottish tradition – of high minded oratory combined with formidable machine organisation – gave both the industrial and political wing of the Labour movement some of its greatest stars. Scotland in the 90’s had an extraordinary concentration of Britain’s big political beasts, including Gordon Brown, Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. Chief among them, of course, was John Smith – the “life and soul of the Party”. While attempts are now being made to widen our understanding of who did what during Labour’s modernisation, the role of Smith and his Scottish colleagues continues to be unfairly underplayed.

Our seventh moment took place in 1997, with the election of Britain’s first Muslim MP. When Mohammad Sarwar was elected for Glasgow Govan he became a parliamentary pioneer for a generation of Labour Muslim politicians – including the first Muslim minister in Shahid Malik and the first female Muslim MPs in Rushnara Ali, Yasmin Qureshi and Shabana Mahmood. In turn Sadiq Khan broke the mould: Buckingham Palace asked him to bring his own Koran to be sworn in on as a privy counsellor. He left it for the next Muslim.

1997, of course, also marked the start of the road to devolution. This five minute introduction explains how a Scottish parliament moved, in Donald Dewar’s words “from a hope, to a belief, then a promise, then a reality”. Labour delivered devolution and devolution delivered.

Our final moment really lasted 13 years. We can be proud of the Britain we built together and Scotland knows that with Gordon Brown at first Number 11 and then Number 10 Downing Street our national life had a centre of gravity with a mentality shaped well beyond the Westminster bubble. Wherever you stand on his record, it is hard not to agree that “when the Browns left Downing Street, a certain kind of Britain went too”.

That change is not irreversible, but the replacement of Cameron’s government of and for the few is not going to happen by accident. If we want to keep our country united and build a progressive alternative, Labour members on both sides of the border are going to have to do what Keir Hardie and the people of West Ham did all those years ago: stand together and fight.

Kirsty McNeill is a former Downing Street adviser and a strategy consultant for campaigning organisations. She tweets @kirstyjmcneill.