The Scottish Prohibition Party was a minor

Scottish Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: *Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland *Scottish English *Scottish national identity, the Scottish ide ...

political party A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific political ideology ...

which advocated

alcohol prohibition Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic be ...

. The party was founded in 1901. In its early years, Bob Stewart acted as the party's full-time organiser.Bob Stewart
Communist Biographies In 1908, Stewart and

Edwin Scrymgeour Edwin Scrymgeour (28 July 1866 – 1 February 1947) was a British politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Dundee in Scotland. He is the only person ever elected to the House of Commons on a prohibitionist ticket, as the ca ...

were elected to

Dundee Dundee (; sco, Dundee; gd, Dùn Dè or ) is Scotland's fourth-largest city and the 51st-most-populous built-up area in the United Kingdom. The mid-year population estimate for 2016 was , giving Dundee a population density of 2,478/km2 or ...

Town Council. From the 1908 by-election onwards, Scrymgeour stood for the party in the

Dundee constituency Dundee was a constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1832 to 1950, when it was split into Dundee East and Dundee West. From 1832 to 1868 it elected one Member of Parliament (MP) using the first-past ...

. Stewart acted as his

election agent An election agent in elections in the United Kingdom, as well as some other similar political systems such as elections in India, is the person legally responsible for the conduct of a candidate's political campaign and to whom election material is ...

in 1910, but fell out with him over his religiosity. He led a

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

split, the Socialist Prohibition and Reform Party, which merged with the

Communist Party of Great Britain The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPG ...

in 1920. Scrymgeour was finally elected as an MP for Dundee in the 1922 general election, when he and the

Labour Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the labour ...

candidate

E. D. Morel Edmund Dene Morel (born Georges Edmond Pierre Achille Morel Deville; 10 July 1873 – 12 November 1924) was a French-born British journalist, author, pacifist and politician. As a young official at the shipping company Elder Dempster, Morel ob ...

defeated the National Liberal candidates, one of which was future

Prime Minister A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister is not ...

Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...

. In Parliament, on issues other than prohibition, he generally supported the Labour Party. Scrymgeour lost his seat at the 1931 general election. The party was disbanded in 1935, against the wishes of Scrymgeour.

See also

References

Further reading