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.