The Scottish Party was formed in 1930 by a group of members of the Unionist Party who favoured the establishment of a Dominion Scottish Parliament within the British Empire and Commonwealth. They differed with the existing National Party of Scotland (NPS) on the grounds that their Scottish independence was ambiguous about the Empire, and also disagreed with the left-of-centre platform of the NPS.
The Scottish Party initially acted more as a think-tank than an active political party, but received overtures from the founder of the NPS, John MacCormick, to merge with the NPS to unify the elements of the Scottish independence movement. The party's candidate for the November 1933 by-election in Kilmarnock received NPS backing, and this co-operation concluded with the merger of the two parties in 1934 to become the Scottish National Party.
A minor, though unrelated, political party of the same name was founded in 2004 by a former member of the Scottish National Party, and changed its name to the Free Scotland Party shortly thereafter.
Famous quotes containing the words scottish and/or party:
“Better wear out shoes than sheets.”
—18th-century Scottish proverb, collected in J. Kelly, Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs (1721)
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)