INTRODUCTION

THE ELECTION OF a majority Labour government at Westminster in 1945 ushered in an era of rapid social and political change, as returning servicemen and servicewomen voted for a change of government from the wartime coalition to a Labour Party that had campaigned on a platform of radical change. The heavy defeat of the Conservatives under Winston Churchill, the wartime leader of the country, had been unexpected, and the new Labour government set in train an ambitious programme which involved the nationalisation of key parts of the economy, such as railways, coal mining, electricity supply and so on, and reforms in health, education and social security, based on the Beveridge Report of 1942. From 1945 to 1951, the Labour government continued to intervene in many areas of British life that were previously unregulated, including the licensed trade, partly as a result of ideological conviction, partly as a continuation of wartime regulation.

Rationing, which had been introduced in wartime, continued through the 1940s and was ended only by the new Conservative government at Westminster in the early 1950s. The 1950s saw high employment and a modest increase in levels of affluence. The Scottish economy began a long drawn-out change from one dominated by employment in manufacturing industry to a service-based economy. The share of the service sector in employment in Scotland rose from 24 per cent in 1951 to 33 per cent in 1971, 66 per cent in 1991 and 70 per cent in 2000. This was linked to a rise in female, often part-time, employment and, by the mid 1990s, there were more women than men in the Scottish workforce, though many of them worked part-time. The proportion of married women in the female workforce rose dramatically from only 23.4 per cent in 1951 to 60.45 per cent by 1991. These changes in society, together with legislative changes, such as drink-driving laws and the smoking ban, had a profound effect on Scottish drinking places, and the stand-up, men-only pub faced a real challenge to its survival by the early years of the twenty-first century.