Editorial

I am delighted to be given the opportunity to guest edit this special issue, which follows on from a conference ‘Scotland: An Enlightened Nation’, held in the wake of the Independence Referendum in 2014. I first began to consider that Scottish approaches to social welfare might differ from those in England when introduced during my social work training to Seed’s (1973) article on the Scottish ‘ragged’ or industrial feeding schools. These schools eschewed dominant English institutional or ‘hospital’ responses to problems of street urchins in the Victorian period. Rather, they were based around a concern to preserve family ties, indeed, to go beyond this and to identify children attending the industrial feeding schools as agents of change within the families they were to return to each evening. The identification of education as a route both to individual change, in contradistinction to much English thinking which saw the education of the working classes as encouraging of sedition, and to community cohesion (Smout 1969) seemed to be another point of departure.

Attempting to set out a Scottish tradition of social welfare might prompt some caveats: it could lead, especially in the current political climate in which constitutional questions are to the fore, to a tendency to overstate national differences and to underplay shared concerns and interests. It might also collude with particular national myths regarding Scottish social welfare (although, as some of the articles in this issue suggest, myths are important in the imaginings of what an emergent Scottish social welfare might look like).

These caveats notwithstanding, it should not come as a great surprise that social welfare in Scotland does have features that distinguish it from dominant English models, reflecting the country’s particular historical conditions. In any country, religious institutions, the law and education are going to be the pillars of its social welfare system. The Union of Scotland and England in 1707 kept each of these intact within the new political settlement and they bring their own flavour to understandings of society and of social welfare.

Scotland’s religious tradition has, directly and indirectly, exerted a profound influence on ways of thinking about social issues. The impact of religion on Scottish life can be traced back to the Reformation of 1560. The Scottish Reformation, unlike that in England, was strongly doctrinal, based upon Calvinist principles. Scotland inherited from the Reformation a distinct set of political and moral preferences, a social ethos that has been described as ‘secular Presbyterianism’ or communitarianism. Structures within the Reformed Church were, on the one hand, socially authoritarian but, on the other hand, expressed a ‘militant democracy’ and were strikingly egalitarian (Smith 2012).

This tension between the socially authoritarian and the politically egalitarian is but one of a series of conflicts captured in Scottish literature through Smith’s (1919) coining of the term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, expressing the co-existence of polar opposites within the Scottish psyche. It is a tension that can still reprise in present-day debates around, for instance, the ‘named person’ policy, which brings arguments over the respective roles of the state and parents in their children’s upbringing into sharp relief.

Education forms another foundational strand of Scottish social welfare and is bound up with the country’s ecclesiastical history. To ensure the Calvinist imperative, that people should have unmediated access to the Bible, the kirk assumed a responsibility to establish schools in every parish across the country and an educational ideal took root in Scottish life. The Reformation also placed the onus of providing social welfare on to parish communities, which assumed responsibility for the care of the sick, orphans, and those who had fallen on hard times. Thus, education and social welfare can trace common roots to the parish system. The potency of this educational ideal in Scottish life, whether or not it was always rooted in reality, is emphasised in James MacAllister and Gale MacLeod’s article, which makes the case that when it comes to identifying a Scottish philosophy, it is an educational one. Their article also begins to pick up on the myth-making of the Scottish educational tradition. Like Sharpe, MacAllister and Macleod highlight the growing recognition of John Macmurray’s philosophy in his native Scotland and more widely.

Following the Act of Union, Scotland’s political centre of gravity moved to London. This allowed the development of a vibrant civil culture in Edinburgh manifest in the particular flavour of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment has attracted scholarly attention in recent decades, much of which takes on a revisionist feel, rebalancing for instance, Adam Smith’s work from its erstwhile economic reductionism to stress his writings on moral sentiment. Indeed, it is this relational core that is evident in much Scottish Enlightenment thinking. Jonathan Hearn offers a scholarly and engaging account of this period of intellectual history, going on to consider what such ideas might offer to thinking about present-day social welfare.

Charles Sharpe, in his article for this issue, considers that the legacy of the Reformation, with some of its associated contradictions, might reach through the centuries to percolate the biographies and belief systems of key philosophical and psychological thinkers in the early twentieth century. The nature and extent of this influence has perhaps merits further exploration.

While recognising what contributions to this volume do offer to the history of Scottish welfare, it is also perhaps important to mention what is not here. The Disruption of the Kirk in 1843 saw a group of evangelical ministers break away from the established church, viewing it as complacent and comfortable and unable to respond to the needs of the growing industrialised and urban populations. A key figure in this movement was Dr Thomas Chalmers, who has been described as the father of Scottish social work. His story is still to be told. The story of the Kilbrandon Report (1964) on the other hand has been told in other places, mostly favourably. This set the scene for the professionalisation of social work in Scotland and the establishment of the children’s hearings system. It also constitutes an early example of the use of social welfare in pursuit of a wider ‘nation building’. Kilbrandon deliberately eschewed an Anglo-American model of welfare, looking instead to links with European traditions (Smith and Whyte 2008; Whyte 2014).

In recent decades, developments in social welfare have been inextricably intertwined with a rapidly unfolding political situation. A devolved Scottish Parliament was established in 1999. Until 2007, it was controlled politically by coalitions of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. While there were some nods towards Scottish solutions to Scottish problems during this period, the political culture of these administrations largely mirrored the New Labour dominance in Westminster. In 2007, the Scottish National Party won a narrow majority of seats in the Scottish Parliament and formed a minority administration. They followed up on this with a landslide victory in 2011, which afforded them a mandate to hold a referendum on Scottish Independence, held in September 2014. While the referendum resulted in a vote against independence, the process of the referendum itself has had a profound impact on Scottish culture. Alex Salmond in his resignation speech as first minister following the referendum, picking up on Yeats’ reflections on the Irish Easter Rising, noted that Scotland had changed—changed utterly. And, from whichever side of the Referendum debate one sits, it has. At a policy level, the Christie Commission (2011) into public services is increasingly spoken of as reflecting a particular ‘Scottish’ model of public services, proposing a different way of thinking about families and communities and offering the prospect of a more participative and dialogical democracy.

Some of this wider political and cultural movement has been reflected in policy initiatives in the fields of education and social welfare being employed to place some clear blue water between what is happening in Scotland and the rest of the UK, or at least England. In that sense, social welfare policy is co-opted to support a wider nation-building project. Gerry Mooney and Gill Scott ask some questions, however, as to what lies behind the rhetoric in such political directions, using the case of early years services to consider just how radical or progressive the Scottish Government’s claims to be the best country in the world to bring up children really are. But, they are undoubtedly about the imaginings of a Scottish approach—rhetoric and reality perhaps come together.

The final article in the issue, from disabled rights researcher and service user, Jim Elder-Woodward picks up another very current policy, but also intellectual, concern, around self-directed support. He traces the history of the independent living movement in Scotland but, helpfully, moves debate beyond the administrative and financial implications of this to locate it within wider, often contradictory, ethical frameworks.

In addition to the full-length articles, the issue also contains three commentary papers. Bill Whyte problematising the current regulatory regime raising an age-old question about whether human goodness needs to be, or can be legislated for or, indeed, whether attempts at regulation might in fact dissipate moral impulse and imagination. Mairi-Anne MacDonald comes down on the more optimistic side of this equation setting out her hopes for a social work based around values of co-production. Maggie Mellon’s piece, in which she outlines the role of the group ‘Women for Independence’ in influencing penal policy, provides a fascinating case study of the growing importance of civil society in public life. The issue is rounded off with a couple of book reviews, again reflecting a Scottish perspective.