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.