Henry Bell follows the threads of the history of the red flag in Scotland.

The red flag is a deceptively simple symbol. It can feel elemental: of course the people’s flag is red, of course red stands for revolution. So present in the song and history of the labour movement, its meaning can become invisible to us. We forget that it represents blood both shared and spilled, that it has been present at the making and unmaking of our world, influencing centuries of radical and progressive movements. The red flag is a symbol rivalled only by the crucifix and crescent moon in terms of the populations that have lived and died by it.

In researching the origins and shifting meanings of the flag for my book Red Threads: A History of the People’s Flag, I explored a history that moves the flag from the hands of kings to those of revolutionaries. It is a symbol that has been taken up in times of conflict for millennia and which continues to this day to inspire hope and fear. Jean Jaurès called its history ‘a sudden reversal of meaning that resembles a heroic play on words.’ It is a totem that has been at the centre of crusades, rebellions, mutinies and revolutions, morphing time and again with its circumstance.

We would struggle to find a first red flag anywhere in the world. In Scotland perhaps we might guess that the vexilla of the roman legion on the Antonine wall gave us a first taste of a red flag associated with war and power, but who knows what unwritten histories there are of flags daubed in blood or dye at Skara Brae or Kilmartin. Certainly when Mary Stuart became Queen of France in 1559 she would have visited the Basilica of St Denis – where she herself would later ask to be entombed. There in St Denis lay the Oriflamme, the red flag of her husband, the French king, which signals a fight to the death and which provides the clearest antecedent for the people’s flag. This was the royal battle flag that was seized and transformed by the Jacobins.

Though it was neither Jacobins nor Jacobites who first put the red flag in the hands of the workers in Scotland, it did travel alongside the late 18th century radicalism that Herman Melville described as ’live cinders blown across the channel from France in flames.’ The first known record of the workers’ flag in Scotland is from the Radical War of 1820. That year, weavers took part in an insurrection across central Scotland. Scottish artisans had been radicalised by falling wages, the threats posed by industrialisation, and their lack of political representation. In Strathaven, Lanarkshire, radicals and striking workers armed with pikes, a broken sword and a few guns were addressed by John Stevenson. He said:

“Is degradation and misery to be our sole inheritance – are we to be effectually and eternally the tools of a villainous aristocracy, who have shed the blood of three millions of men in the late revolutionary wars, and who would again shed the blood of half the human race to perpetuate their cannibal and desolating usurpation of the rights of industry? Fellow countrymen, we are for peace, law, and order, but we must and shall have justice … Rather than bow to such hateful despotism we must and will unfurl the red flag of defiance.”

This may be the first time anywhere in the world that the red flag was invoked by armed workers intent on establishing a government, and explicitly in defence of the rights of industry. Though the radicals had been drawn into the open by government spies and were easily suppressed, they assumed a mythical status in the pantheon of Scottish rebels. As well as its first outing in Scotland, the Radical War represents an early entangling of the red flag with the cause of national liberation, presaging another of its great transformations.

Over the coming decades the red flag in Scotland would be associated more with reform and trade association than it would with revolution. In 1839 at the head of large demonstrations of radicals on Glasgow Green, a red flag was raised. On it was the image of a hand clutching a dagger, and the words ‘O tyrants, will you force us to this?’ But the forceful message belied the aims of the demonstrations, for these were chartists seeking representation, not revolution. A more characteristic red flag from the 1830s – though one that didn’t garner the same headlines – is kept in the collection of Glasgow Museums and reads: ‘Financial Reform, Extension of the Franchise. Vote by Ballot. Free Trade.’

And yet the revolutionary potential of the flag remained, resurfacing in the European revolutions of 1848 and again in 1871 at the barricades of the Paris Commune. In the 1880s the red flag flew annually on Glasgow green in commemoration of the fallen communards and the hope of a new world. This revolutionary spirit, though representative of a minority in Victorian Scotland, would place the red flag at the head of a mass movement that within a generation would see Scotland at the global vanguard of Marxism and the red flag movement. Radicalised by war, profiteering and poverty, the workers of Glasgow filled Jamaica Street in November 1918 as John Maclean waved a red flag from atop a carriage. The crowd cheered on the German, Russian and British Revolutions. Hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland, particularly across the Clyde Valley and the Fife Coalfield, made the red flag a central part of their life, work and leisure in this period.

In Russia the red flag emerged from the first world war as the symbol of the world’s first Workers’ state. In Scotland however revolutionary fervour receded, though the red flag retained its power and relevance. In 1922 crowds in St Enoch sang the red flag as their newly re-elected Red Clydeside MPs headed for London. In the 1930s Scottish men and women fought beneath red flags in Spain. And by the 1940s it was the red flag of municipal socialism and reform that flew in Scotland. When Clement Atlee and the Rhodesian Miners Leader Lawrence Chola Katilungu led the 1946 May Day parade through the streets of Glasgow the red flags were not just those of communists and radicals but also of the Labour government. A couple of years later in 1948, when the National Health Service was created, doctors raised the red flag on the roof of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.By the 1970s the red flag had been relinquished by Labour and was moving back into the hands of communists, with the likes of Jimmy Reid representing the respectable and respected face of revolutionary politics at the UCS work in, and elsewhere on the Southside, Matt Lygate staging Maoists bank robberies for the Workers Party of Scotland.

The red flag found itself in Scotland – as it had around the world – closely tied to the fate of the industrial proletariat. Though its early meanings came from kings and emperors, and its first flight was in the hands of artisans, it was in the midst of Scotland’s mines and factories that it found its firmest meaning. Yet, even now with Scotland’s workplaces transformed by de-industrialisation, the red flag continues to fly – most memorably in recent times in 2021 at the Kenmure Street action. As local residents were freed from a border enforcement van and hundreds of police officers were whistled at as they left the neighbourhood, two red flags flew above the crowd.

Across the two centuries in which Scotland’s workers have flown the red flag it has been the symbol of chartists, anarchists, socialists, trade unionists and communists; it has flown at the head of a mass movement, and at the furthest fringes of political power; it has represented Scottish Workers, British Workers, and the truth that the workers have no country. On any given day it continues to fly on picket lines and highstreets from Aberdeen to Govan. Its future meanings for Scotland remain unwritten, but by looking at its past I think we can learn something about the breadth and unity of the Scottish left.

Henry Bell is a writer, poet and organiser living in Glasgow.