Talk:Unionist Party (Scotland)

Name of Scottish and UK party

Using "Tory" for the UK party is not the formal title and can we stop this constant change on it.

Glancing through the linked paper I can't immediately see where it says why the term "Tory" should be used instead of Conservative or "Unionist" for the independent party, the latter of which strikes me as the most natural official term.

The Scottish Conservatives website gives the name on the front page as "Scottish Conservatives" - the URL scottishtories dates back some years and the party seems to be moving away from using "Tory". Timrollpickering 00:21, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Re: Name of Scottish and UK party

"Using "Tory" for the UK party is not the formal title and can we stop this constant change on it."

Socialist is or was not a formal title for the Labour party but was used to describe them. Why is Tory so problematic as a collective term for the Scottish Unionist Party and the Conservative and Unionist Party in England and Wales?

"Glancing through the linked paper I can't immediately see where it says why the term "Tory" should be used instead of Conservative"

Because they weren't Conservatives.

Reference - Page 6:

"It is significant that Unionism’s distinctive symbolism and imagery was jealously guarded by the party in the fifties, to the extent that the term Conservative was expurgated from all official Unionist literature until the Party re-incorporated the term Conservative into its title in 1965, a term it had not used since before 1912."

"or "Unionist" for the independent party, the latter of which strikes me as the most natural official term.""

For themselves. In association with the Conservative party, Tory would be the term to use. Again, why would that be problematic?

"The Scottish Conservatives website gives the name on the front page as "Scottish Conservatives" "

Which they are now but were not before 1965 when they "expurgated" the name.

" - the URL scottishtories dates back some years and the party seems to be moving away from using "Tory"."

If they were their top story would not read "Tories back in South Ayrshire" Fletchtoun 01:43, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

"Tory" today is primarily a nickname whose use is not accepted by all, especially as it's often used in a very POV sense - see Tory for some of the objections to its use. "Conservative" is the official title of the current party and as Wikipedia is not paper there is no need to resort to disputed abbreviations.

"Unionist" seems the more natural term to use for the SUP, not least because that is derived from the formal title and again not a slang term. Also it gives clear disambiguation between the English & Welsh Party and the Scottish Party. Certainly this idea that "the Scottish Party declined to use the term 'Conservative' therefore it's free reign to call both the Scottish party and the rest 'Tory'" strikes me as absurd. Timrollpickering 02:56, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Proposed split

Yep, I'd support that. --Mais oui! 12:21, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Why what would be in the page? Dermo69 4th sept

Party colours

Does anybody know what colours the Unionist Party used? I assume a shade of blue? Although some Unionist parties in NI use a sombre red. --Mais oui! 08:20, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Not necessarily blue at all! There was an article on party colours in the Summer 2004 edition of Conservative History Journal by John Barnes.

(Barnes himself was adopted as PPC for Walsall in 1963 and soon found that his blue rosette made him look like a Liberal there! The Conservatives had traditionally used red and Labour yellow, later yellow & red. Barnes used a red, white & blue rosette and blue & white on the manifesto cover, but the committee rooms still used red for Conservative voters and blue for others on canvass returns.)

The National Union (of the English & Welsh party) only resolved to standardise to blue in 1949 but had no power to enforce it. Well into the 1960s some local parties were using many different colours, partially because of tradition but partially also because locally blue was associated with another party. The article notes for Scotland "where colours were reported, they were predominantly red, white and blue" (page 28). A 1959 survey shows that a lot of conformity had taken place - in Scotland 55 associations used blue (quite a high level of conformity compared to 368 out of 547 south of the border), 5 red, white and blue and 3 National Liberal or Liberal Unionist associations blue and yellow (elsewhere this was often used in the 1930s when Conservative and Liberal associations joined forces because of the National Government). Timrollpickering 00:48, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Very good. Thanks.

Ideally we should probably use red, white and blue in the party clours template, but I'm not sure that that is technically possible, so let's just leave it as blue for the time being. I think that the material you have there should certainly be included in the article though: party clours is a standard element in articles on political parties. Very interesting too! --Mais oui! 09:19, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure we could make such a sweeping statement. The article doesn't go very deeply into Scottish colours at all, but elsewhere there was huge divergance and often the colours reflected the individual colours of the historic patrons in a particular area. A 1927 (English) Central Office record noted the following in use:

• Red - in some ways arguably the historic colour of the Tories (it was the colour of crown loyalists in the Exclusion Crisis) and Conservatives (and the racing colour of Lord Derby, the party's longest serving leader). It was in broad use in Northumberland, County Durham, most of Cheshire, Liverpool, and Birkenhead as well various seats in Staffordshire, Worcestershire, West Wales and Middlesex.
• Orange and Purple - or probably Gold and Purple, the Abergavenny colours, in use in virtually all Kent and Surrey constituencies as well as others in south London, Sussex and Hampshire.
• Pink
• Pink & White (which were Disraeli's colours when he first stood at Wycombe)
• Pink & Purple
• Pink & Red
• Yellow (a rarity for Conservatives but it was the Lowther family colour and in use in Cumberland and Westmoreland)
• Orange (in Lambeth and Rugby, the latter as late as 1959)
• Black & Yellow
• Purple & Primrose

Other examples include Greenwich using Crimson in 1874 (when Gladstone stood in blue along with a Radical in Green), then in following decades Labour took over Red and the Conservatives took Scarlet & White. Labour moved to Red & Yellow in 1931, possibly due to a Communist candidature, whilst in 1935 the Conservatives shifted to Blue (with no Liberal).

Now obviously that list covers England and Wales and it's entirely possible that in Scotland a colour was adopted much earlier than 1949. However given the widespread use of blue in 1959 that would suggest either that it was blue (which in turn would clash with the earlier reports of red, white & blue) or that no standard colour had been adopted before and so a standard could easily take effect. And also what about other parties using blue a lot, such as the Liberals? 1927-1959 saw the emergence of the National Liberals, who took a lot over to the Conservatives (indeed the use of Blue & Yellow generally signified a Conservative-Liberal effort rather than historic links with Charles James Fox) possibly throwing further spanners into the works. We'd need a clear source for the Unionists using anything approaching a common colour scheme in earlier years - until then I reckon the widespread Blue recorded in 1959 is the only thing that fits the bill. Timrollpickering 10:16, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Origins

The 'origins' section is rather vague and woolly. Can someone with access to a proper history of the party re-write this in a more informative way. It would be useful to know who were the people involved, especially in 1912 and why they followed a different path to the Conservative party in England and Wales. On a similar vein, if someone has the info could they write an article on the Scottish Conservative/Tory party from 1707 until 1912(or seperate Cons/Tory articles) as there seems to be a severe lack of pre-1900 specifically Scottish history available. Thanks Galloglass 02:47, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

The 'the'

M'lady, I promise not to go on and on.....But, to mine eyes yesterday, the correct lines would be: 'for local government', 'at the local government level', etc. After some googling, it now seems to me that the definite article in the latter phrase is more pervasive in the US and is therefore apparently some kind of Americanism (please forgive, we unfortunately exist), and I will happily demure on this since the article subject is a Scots pol party. I try quite hard when editing UK related articles to employ all the relevant style (British spelling etc) I can, but apparently I missed one here. That *miss* in my estimation should invite a normal corrective edit from you, and that's it.

And no, this has nothing to do with my earlier misreading of WP edit code on a previous edit. And for what it's worth I have been trying to cut down on my typos.... I think if you would be less interested in attempting to make me look dumb you could see that I am putting forward a good faith effort to improve this particular article, which as it happens was rather sloppy, and could still use some more de-opinionating.

As an aside, I will be happy to oblige and add my two cents if you ever need any help with the Amero-lingo over here. Unless, of course, you think our topics aren't worth editing.--longlivefolkmusic 03:04, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

About your edit summary, when I said it was a 'point I made before', it was true - I made an edit several weeks ago which I (partly) summarised as "removed redundant 'the'".

If it needs to be reiterated, I've not really been accusing you of bad faith in most of these edits - in any case there's no real agenda you could have been furthering by making any mistakes 'deliberately'. The sarcasm in my edit summaries has been - it goes without saying - way out of proportion to the nature of the edits I've been making. It's just been my way of pointing out that if you're going to make stinging comments like "bad writing" or "ridiculous opinionating", and then proceed to make quite a sloppy edit yourself, you're not really in the best position to complain if someone chooses to give you a taste of your own medicine on the back of it. Actually, if I was going to get on my soapbox about the way Wikipedia works (and I know I'm in a minority), I wish we could just do away with the current form of edit summaries altogether - at least if harsh things are said in talk pages, it gives all parties the chance to say their piece. As it is, people can be left frustrated, feeling like their efforts have been dismissed out of hand.

By the way, America's a very fine country, worthy of fine articles, but I'm not sure I'd have the brass neck to contribute to them after all this. I'd probably remember how to spell 'favor' and 'labor', but I'd be bound to slip up when it comes to more random words like jewellery and aluminium. If it ever comes to it, I'm quite sure I could do with your help (I don't speak Polish either). Sofia9 04:18, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Electoral Performance

I think there might be an issue with the figures given for the parties electoral performance. The % figures from 1945 onwards (and possibly some from before that) are the total tally for both the Unionist Party and the National Liberals. So, for instance, in 1945 the Unionists only received 36.7% of the vote, whilst the table states they received 40.3 (which is the total you get by adding the 36.7% received by the Unionists and the 3.6 received by the National Liberals). MrPenguin20 (talk) 22:08, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Party Emblem

I'm aware that the party potentially existed in a time before any kind of party emblem (in the same way that the party colour is somewhat vague too), but does anyone have any information on any potential party emblem? E.g. like the Unionists version of the Conservatives Flame of Liberty? MrPenguin20 (talk) 13:24, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

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The Merger with the Conservatives

The Scottish Party merged with the nationalists in the 1930s and so this can't have had any bearing on the declining support for the Unionists that followed in the wake of the merger between the English Conservatives and the Scottish Unionists in 1965. The first two reasons given were probably true so I left them in. The bit about the dwindling empire was true but if there is any evidence that this fact would have caused a swing to Labour, it was not cited. Centuryofconfusion (talk) 14:50, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

The Scottish Party

The Scottish Party was formed in 1932 by elements within the Scottish Unionist Party who were drawn more to the dominion status that had been formally legalized in the cases of Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State in the previous year. Nothing in John Buchan's parliamentary speeches suggest that he was sympathetic to dominion status. At the time in question, and until 1934, he was the Scottish Unionist MP for the combined universities constituency. While in 1935 he did take up the position of Governor-general of the Dominion of Canada, there is no cited evidence that he was sympathetic to the Scottish party. The material that was removed seemed to be tangential to the topic of the article. Centuryofconfusion (talk) 23:43, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

The Suez Crisis

The Suez Crisis section was removed because it contained the unsourced opinion that the Suez Crisis in 1956 somehow had a bearing on the fact that the Scottish Unionists lost votes in the 1964 general election (mainly to Labour and the Liberals). The wider evidence from studying historical election trends suggests that the greater collapse in the unionist vote didn't begin until after the merger with the English Conservatives in 1965, and it wasn't until the 1974 election where North Sea Oil became a factor, that the Scottish Nationalist Party made significant gains for the first time. The Suez section was promoting the unsourced idea that a significant number of Scots only supported union with England in the first place because of the British Empire, and that with the Empire now in decline, more Scots would then wish to end the union with England. More evidence for this unlikely theory would need to be presented before it could be included in the article. Centuryofconfusion (talk) 00:09, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Define "Protestant associations" for Americans

In this sentence

"As the British Empire came to an end, so too did the primacy of Protestant associations"

I don't know what "Protestant associations" means. It's not defined or linked in the article. Are the associations organized groups, or is this refering to a tendency of Protestants to prefer vote a certain way? Are the associations the "Orange Lodges"? Thank you. Ttulinsky (talk) 17:19, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Loyalism

"the Scottish Orange Order has dealt more stringently with members associating with Loyalist paramilitaries"

Such as? Scotland is a safe haven for Loyalist terrorists. 51.37.190.28 (talk) 19:22, 18 December 2022 (UTC)