This study is concerned with the course of politics in Scotland in the years between 1945 and 1979. This was a period bookended by two general elections that, in their different ways, seemed, both to contemporaries and to subsequent observers, to mark significant shifts in the political and economic priorities of the United Kingdom government. At the same time, Scottish politics underwent a profound, and complicated, realignment, as the fortunes of the Unionists –as the Conservatives continued to be known in Scotland until 1965 –declined, the Scottish National Party (SNP) began to gain previously unseen levels of popular support, and, ultimately, Scotland came to be viewed as an electoral stronghold of the Labour Party. The post-war era produced, as a result, two significant political shifts in Scotland. The first was an explicit decoupling of Scottish electoral politics from broader British trends. There had, of course, been certain features unique to the Scottish political landscape in the 1940s and 1950s, not least the relative strength of the Unionist Party; still, in the immediate post-war years Scottish politics was, in its essentials, shaped firmly by the two-party contest that defined politics at Westminster. Yet by the 1970s this was no longer true, as the rise of the SNP and the waning of Scottish Conservatism, as well as the halting return of independent Liberalism, created a more unpredictable four-party political contest in Scotland. The second development was a corollary of the first, as, from the late 1960s onwards, the electoral successes enjoyed by the SNP prompted a debate over the constitution and proposals for a devolved assembly that would come to dominate Scottish, and, at certain moments, British, politics in the decade that followed.

Together, these changes point towards the fundamental questions that motivate Politics and the People. Why did Conservative support in Scotland fall so sharply from the 1960s onwards? Why was it the SNP, rather than the Liberals, that appeared to benefit from the fading of the two-party politics of the mid-twentieth century? And what was the impact and legacy of the turn towards constitutional reform that took place in the aftermath of these electoral shifts? These are questions that have, to be sure, received detailed consideration from historians and political scientists.

The middle decades of the twentieth century have often been overlooked in accounts of modern Scottish politics. While there has been some consideration of the political impact of the Second World War, and, in particular, of Thomas Johnston’s tenure as Secretary of State for Scotland in the wartime coalition government, broader assessments of the period remain rare. This relative neglect is, perhaps, understandable: by the 1940s the distinctive radical tradition that had shaped the Scottish political left in the early twentieth century had faded, assimilated within a Labour movement now increasingly British in outlook; equally, with the partial exception of the Covenant campaign of the late 1940s, there were as yet few signs of the vociferous debate over Scotland’s constitutional status that would become so characteristic of Scottish politics after the late 1960s. From a parliamentary perspective, as Ewen Cameron has suggested, mid-century Scottish politics can present an ‘uninteresting landscape’, with few Scottish MPs enjoying prominence at Westminster and election results seeming to largely echo wider British trends. It was not until the 1959 general election, when Unionist support slipped despite the Conservatives enjoying a third successive electoral victory at a UK level, that Scottish politics began to follow a visibly divergent path.

The outward ‘Britishness’ of Scottish politics in the immediate post-war period is, on one level, to be expected. The extension of the franchise after 1918 had, alongside the continued growth of a national media, helped to foster a more uniform British political culture centred upon events at Westminster. Similarly, the increase in state intervention in the economy during the Second World War, and the subsequent nationalisation of key industries and establishment of the welfare state by the Labour government returned to power at the 1945 general election, can plausibly be viewed as having encouraged Scots to consider themselves as participants in a national, ‘British’, economy. Nonetheless, discrete Scottish patterns could still, at times, be glimpsed beneath this relatively harmonious surface. Most notably, the economic settlement that emerged after 1945 provoked sustained opposition. While such hostility was visible across Britain, what in England was understood as a question of competing economic philosophies was in Scotland imbued with an additional constitutional significance.

Until the 1970s, methods of direct democracy remained outside the political and constitutional traditions of the United Kingdom. True, there had been limited local plebiscites on the question of prohibition earlier in the twentieth century. Equally, the Edwardian era witnessed attempts to introduce the referendum as a means of resolving controversial political and constitutional issues; most notably, opponents of Irish home rule advocated a referendum as a means of demonstrating the lack of popular support enjoyed by the Liberal government’s proposed constitutional reforms. Nevertheless, in general the referendum was viewed as being incompatible with Britain’s parliamentary traditions. Moreover, from the initial creation of a mass electorate in the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, the authority of Parliament remained, with perhaps a few momentary exceptions, largely unquestioned, a popular consensus rooted in both the historic prestige enjoyed by the House of Commons, which transcended political divisions, as well as the central role that the battle for the franchise had played within the nineteenth-century radical tradition inherited by the Labour Party. And while a progressive account of British political history might stress the measured expansion of the electorate, the dominant view remained that those returned to Parliament were elected to exercise their judgement, not take formal direction. In Vernon Bogdanor’s phrase, beyond their participation in elections, in this period ‘the British constitution knew nothing of the people’. Britain was understood to be a representative, parliamentary democracy: famously, when rebuffing Winston Churchill’s suggestion in May 1945 that a referendum be held to ascertain if the public wished the wartime coalition to continue until the final conclusion of the Second World War, the Labour leader and then Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, described the referendum as ‘a device … alien to all our traditions’, which had ‘too often been the instrument of Nazism and Fascism.’

During the 1970s, however, UK governments resorted repeatedly to the referendum as a method of answering constitutional questions that appeared to be impossible to resolve via traditional electoral politics. In March 1973, following the imposition of direct rule from Westminster, a border poll was organised in Northern Ireland in an ineffectual effort to legitimate the new constitutional settlement. Two years later, the first nationwide referendum was held to determine whether the UK should remain within the EEC.

In the week prior to the March 1979 devolution referendum, the novelist William McIlvanney, a convinced supporter of a devolved assembly, offered a gloomy prediction of the likely outcome of the poll. Sensing a prevailing mood of ‘indifference’ and ‘virile apathy’ among the Scottish electorate, McIlvanney wondered whether this attitude of ‘hesitancy’ towards the constitutional question masked a deeper crisis of confidence, whether Scots were, in fact, too ‘feart’ to vote for devolution. McIlvanney concluded by confessing his own ‘wee fear’: ’what’, he speculated, ‘if we get a bare majority in favour of the assembly but fall well short of the 40% limit’? He accepted that such a result, which he likened to a ‘hung jury’, might ‘be a peculiarly Scottish response’; it was, all the same, one he hoped would be avoided. Of course, as we have seen in the previous chapter, McIlvanney’s forecast of the dread scenario of an inconclusive outcome came to pass, and the Labour government’s devolution proposals collapsed. Vindicated by subsequent events, McIlvanney’s evocation of the atmosphere surrounding the devolution referendum has been of lasting influence, not least because of the cartoon that accompanied it, drawn by James Turnbull and frequently referenced thereafter, which depicted a timid, thumb sucking, indecisive Scottish lion, chained to a ball marked ‘apathy’ and announcing bluntly ‘I’m feart’. The 1979 devolution referendum, and the ambiguous verdict it produced, has, as a consequence, come to symbolise the uncertainty and doubts of a Scottish public yet to be fully convinced that constitutional reform was worth the associated risks. It would, in this reading, require the experience of the lengthy period of Conservative government that followed the 1979 general election, and the unpopular economic policies imposed during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, to convince a decisive majority of Scottish voters of the merits of devolution. By early 1994, it was possible for John Smith, by then the leader of the Labour Party but a veteran of the constitutional debates of the 1970s, to describe devolution as ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. Smith’s assessment was seemingly confirmed by the overwhelming support recorded in a referendum for the devolved Scottish Parliament legislated for by Labour after the party’s return to office in 1997.

The 1997 referendum certainly revealed the extent to which devolution enjoyed a broader base of support across Scotland than had been the case in the 1970s.

In October 1967 John Mackintosh, the Labour MP for Berwick and East Lothian and a Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, reflected on the rise in popular support for the SNP that had taken place since the start of the decade. Published in the Political Quarterly, Mackintosh’s assessment arrived a month before the SNP’s landmark electoral victory at the Hamilton by-election, when Winnie Ewing famously overturned what had been the largest Labour majority in Scotland. If Ewing’s triumph has come to be remembered as a seminal moment in post-war Scottish politics, one which signalled the onset of a new period in which the constitutional question would become increasingly unavoidable, Mackintosh’s prescient consideration of the SNP’s appeal offers a reminder that contemporaries were becoming conscious of the growing political significance of the SNP even before Hamilton. Certainly, by the mid-1960s it was evident that the SNP could run credible, if not yet successful, by-election campaigns. Further, as party membership rose, from around 2,000 in 1962 to perhaps 42,000 by late 1966, it became financially and logistically feasible for the SNP to contest general elections on a broader basis. At the 1955 general election there were just two SNP candidates; four years later the party was still only able to contest five constituencies. By the time of the 1966 general election, there were SNP candidates in twenty-three seats, and the party received five per cent of the Scottish vote. While not yet a serious political force, by the second half of the 1960s the SNP clearly enjoyed a support that was larger and more secure than it had been at any time since the party’s foundation. That the new, still minor, influence enjoyed by the SNP might have wider political consequences had been apparent since the March 1967 Glasgow Pollok by-election, when the party’s candidate, George Leslie, had polled twenty-eight per cent of the vote, a performance that enabled the Conservatives to record a rare gain from Labour in Scotland.

For Mackintosh, the paradox that required explanation was that the rise in support for the SNP had occurred during a period in which Scotland had, in social and economic terms, become ever more like the rest of Britain.

If the 1960s witnessed the entry of the SNP into the Scottish political mainstream after more than three decades on the fringes, then it was in the early 1970s that the potential threat that the party could pose to the established political and constitutional order became fully apparent. As any account of twentieth-century Scotland will narrate, the advances achieved by the SNP at the two general elections of 1974, when the party had seven and then eleven MPs returned to Westminster and, perhaps more significantly, polled twenty-two and then thirty per cent of the vote, transformed Scottish politics permanently. At the October 1974 contest the SNP overtook the Conservatives to finish in second place in terms of popular support; beyond the eleven constituency victories, the party had finished second in an additional forty-two seats. Scottish developments were granted further significance at Westminster as a result of the precarious parliamentary position faced by the Labour government after October 1974: the government’s majority in the Commons was just three, and would evaporate by 1977, granting the new SNP contingent added weight and influence. And while support for the SNP would ebb in the late 1970s and 1980s, the party would never again return to the irrelevance it had previously endured.

The striking upsurge in support for the SNP evident in the early 1970s can perhaps be explained by the political atmosphere in which the 1974 elections were held. The Royal Commission on the Constitution established by the Labour government in 1968 as a response to the SNP victory at Hamilton, now led by Lord Kilbrandon after the death of the original Chair Lord Crowther, published its final reports in October 1973, with a majority of the Commissioners supporting legislative devolution for Scotland, returning questions of constitutional reform to political prominence. Continued concerns over the state of the Scottish economy, and the initial rejection by the Heath administration of calls for government assistance for struggling industrial concerns, generated further discontent with the UK government among Scottish voters. Important here was the ‘work-in’ at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) in 1971–2.

The narrow victory of the leave campaign at the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the EU introduced a new constitutional divide into British politics; still, the political impact of the referendum remains difficult to assess. The binary identities that emerged after the poll overlapped imprecisely with existing political loyalties. There were also crucial territorial dimensions to post-referendum politics. While England and Wales delivered majorities for leave, in Northern Ireland and Scotland there was majority support for continued EU membership. Moreover, in Scotland, Brexit raised the prospect of a sequel to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Parliamentarians, a majority of whom had advocated remain, struggled to implement the referendum result.

By exposing the distance between the electorate and their representatives, and setting in opposition competing popular, parliamentary and territorial mandates, the impact of Brexit went beyond electoral concerns, bringing into focus questions of legitimacy, representation and sovereignty that are the focus of this chapter. The ‘high’ political consequences of Brexit are assessed first. The constitutional challenges raised by Brexit in a Scottish context are then explored. The final section considers the degree to which Brexit was an example of the rise of forms of political ‘populism’.