A long journey that finally brought the islands together

Nowadays, each year brings another miserable round of cuts while councillors express frustration over the limitations placed upon their desire to innovate or develop services.

Devolution to Edinburgh has led to centralisation of powers and accountability, at the expense of councils. A funding formula which cruelly punishes depopulation and falling school rolls has meant a 17 per cent cut to the Comhairle’s revenue allocation in the past decade.

In contrast, from this perspective, the mid-1970s were a golden age in the Western Isles. Having been fundamentally reorganised, local government was also well resourced and the new Comhairle was blessed with high quality leadership – both elected members and officials – who made the most of it.

These people also had considerable political courage. They inherited a vast discrepancy in service levels between north and south and immediately made it their highest priority to “level up”, particularly in the fields of education and communications.

From the outset, they adopted a strongly pro-Gaelic policy and backed exciting new developments in the arts and publishing, sometimes in the face of criticism. They forged strong connections with national politicians and Europe, to the great subsequent advantage of the islands.

There is a lot to learn from looking back these 50 years – not least that the creation of a unitary authority was, for the Western Isles, a huge success story whenever there has been enough money and vision to make a real difference.

MORE WIDELY, May 16th 1975 deserves to be remembered as a landmark date in Scottish political history. At the stroke of midnight, local government structures which had evolved over centuries – county, town and district councils - were swept away and a new era began.

For the Western Isles, from the Butt of Lewis down to Barra, it was an event of particular significance. For reasons buried deep in history, the islands had been divided along lines which were determined before the concept of local government even existed.

In the 1660s, there had been a divvy-up of Scotland’s sheriffdoms which made Lewis part of Ross while the other Outer Hebridean parishes, along with Skye, came under Inverness. And thus it had remained.

The boundary was not even formed by sea, which might have made some sense, but by the Clisham so that Harris and all points south were administered from Inverness while Lewis alone was an outpost of Dingwall.

In the 1660s, that probably made little practical difference. By the mid-20th century it mattered a great deal as divergence had developed in many respects. There was little communication between north and south, despite the shared culture and interests.

In local government terms, this had made even less logical sense since 1918 when the Parliamentary constituency of the Western Isles came into being with a single MP representing the islands. For almost 60 more years, that numerically tiny constituency would straddle two local authorities.

The undoubted losers in this arrangement were the Inverness-shire islands. While all the Highland local authorities had been dominated by landowning interests, this affliction was particularly evident within Inverness County Council which treated its island outposts with proprietorial parsimony.

When Comhairle nan Eilean came into being, by far the most urgent of the challenges it faced was to bring services in the Inverness-shire islands up to the same standard as those which prevailed in Lewis. To the great credit of the council’s early leadership, they embraced that challenge with vigour and courage.

By the time Comhairle nan Eilean achieved full control, it was already engaged in intensive lobbying to accelerate the demise of an archaic system which saw children from Harris, Uist and Barra sent off to no fewer than 13 schools on Skye and the mainland to continue their secondary education, while others remained in junior secondaries.

It was one of the missions which the early Comhairle nan Eilean eventually accomplished, to the lasting benefit of the islands.

THE MOVEMENT towards reform of Scottish local government had begun in the mid-1960s when the Labour government set up a Royal Commission under Lord Wheatley to recommend a new structure. The main thrust of its conclusions was to create a two-tier system – regional councils big enough to be strategic in their vision and district councils to deal with more local issues.

The three island groups – Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles – did not fit neatly into this pattern and the case for “islands authorities” forced its way into the debate. The Wheatley Commission’s initial recommendation was that these should become “districts” within a Highlands and Islands Regional Council area.

Two members of the Commission, the Liberal MP for Inverness-shire, Russell Johnston, and a formidable Tory, Betty Harvie Anderson, produced a minority report which proposed special status for the three islands groups. Before the Wheatley proposals could be fully debated, the 1970 General Election intervened and a Conservative government emerged.

In February 1971, the Tories produced their own response to the Wheatley recommendations. Remarkably, they accepted the creation of large authorities including Strathclyde and Lothian in full knowledge that they were likely to be both powerful and Labour-controlled.

An equally useful act of political magnanimity was to accept a Highland Region which spelt death for Tory/landlord control of local government in the old Crofting Counties. As far as islands were concerned, the Secretary of State for Scotland, Gordon Campbell, agreed that Shetland and Orkney would become “special areas” within Highland region. After further lobbying, in December 1971, Mr Campbell announced that the Western Isles would also be a “special area”.

Sandy Matheson, the last Provost of Stornoway and later convener of Comhairle nan Eilean, recalls: “When the Wheatley Report came out it suggested that the Western Isles should be a second tier authority within a pan Highland Region.

“This was not acceptable to us in Stornoway Town Council so we convened a meeting in Stornoway of all five of the island District Councils, from Lewis to Barra, as well as Stornoway Town Council to oppose the Wheatley recommendations and support the note of dissent by Russell Johnston and Betty Harvie Anderson.

“In due course, Gordon Campbell decided to give the Western Isles the status of an ‘islands council’ and this was promulgated through the Local Government (Scotland) Act of 1973. In turn, that led to the formation of the Western Isles Joint Advisory Committee which I chaired and through 1974-75, the old councils worked in tandem with the new Comhairle”.

The 1973 Act decreed that “Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles shall be local government areas to be known as islands councils… on 16th May 1975, all local government areas existing immediately before that date shall cease to exist”.

At a dinner to mark the demise of Stornoway Town Council, Donald Stewart MP, himself a former Provost of the burgh, said that “the reorganisation of local government has caused heart-burning in many areas … However, the Western Isles seems to be the only area of complete satisfaction. We have shaken off Dingwall and Inverness and achieved the unity we had lacked for generations”.

There was £1000 left in Stornoway Town Council’s Common Good Fund which they decided should be spent “to preserve the council’s mementoes and thereby maintain the history of the Burgh”. The five District Councils, which since 1930 had served rural Lewis and the other islands with few powers and even less money, disappeared without trace.

Sandy Matheson recalls: “Initially there was a fear that the Stornoway councillors would commandeer the finances in favour of the town, but this proved not to be the case and indeed for the first few years progress in the town took second place to the needs of the rural areas which had previously been neglected by the County Councils of Inverness and Ross and Cromarty.

“The claim for an independent Western Isles authority had arisen regularly after the creation in 1918 of the Parliamentary constituency of the Western Isles. Indeed, one of the main proponents was my grand-uncle, Provost Roderick Smith, so I inherited his mantle”.

IT CAN HARDLY be claimed that the first elections for the Western Isles Islands Council – as it was still named – unleashed a wave of public interest. There were at that time 30 single member wards and in the first elections, in May 1974, 16 of them returned councillors unopposed.

Only one of the original members, Rae Mackenzie, is still a councillor. However, in one unfortunate respect little has changed over the decades. Only one of the 30 councillors who emerged in the first Comhairle was female – Kathleen Macaskill in the Dell ward, who later became a distinguished chair of the education committee.

By the time Comhairle nan Eilean – which by then had decided to give itself a Gaelic name – took over, it was clear that these first elections had produced a cadre of outstanding local politicians, most of them clergymen.

Rev. Donald Macaulay was the first convener which, at that time, also made him in effect the council leader. Donald was a wily operator with a radical outlook, particularly on issues relating to land reform. I remember him telling me his strategy within the newly created Convention of Scottish Local Authorities was to stay close to the leaders of the big Labour-run regional councils.

For them, he said, the needs of the newly-formed Comhairle nan Eilean were small change in the great scheme of council funding. “Don’t worry, Donald”, they would tell him. “We’ll look after you”. And they did.

The vice-convener, Father Calum Maclellan, Rev. Jack Macarthur, Rev. Roddy Macleod, Rev. Roddy Mackinnon … they were all high calibre politicians, on top of their spiritual callings. The fact that three of them represented Uist wards ensured there was no backsliding on the “levelling-up” agenda.

Sandy Matheson, who was subsequently convener, was chair of the development committee in the first Comhairle. These were exciting times for the island economy with Arnish in full flow and the HIDB an unrecognisably significant force compared to its diminished successor of recent times.

Looking back, Sandy Matheson says: “The creation of Comhairle nan Eilean was a good thing in political, financial and social terms. The introduction of the bilingual policy was only one of many benefits - as was the freedom to deal directly with Scottish Office, HIDB, Europe and even CalMac!”.

As with all anniversaries, it is important to look forward as well as back. Maybe the time is ripe for another campaign to bring a far higher degree of autonomy to the islands authorities – the true spirit of devolution. It might take time, but it would once again be a prize worth aiming for.