Politics and the People: Scotland 1945 – 1979

By Malcolm R. Petrie

This book reappraises Scottish politics in the decades after 1945, augmenting existing accounts of this period by foregrounding the importance of ideology and language. Founded upon original archival research, the book recovers the central role played within modern Scottish politics by an individualist, anti-bureaucratic critique of central government. Deployed initially by those on the political right to attack the programme of nationalisation implemented by the post-war Labour government, by the 1960s this rhetoric was being exploited by advocates of constitutional change. As liberty came to be framed in constitutional rather than economic terms, understandings of political representation also changed: crucially, the arrival of the referendum in British politics granted credibility to the belief that there existed a distinctive Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty.