Post-War Scotland

The core factual spine of this card is Established: the founding dates of the NHS, the New Towns, the oil discoveries, the election results and the referendum figures are documented in statute, in UK Parliament and National Records of Scotland material, and in peer-reviewed history. The characterisation of the timing and pace of deindustrialisation is Established but contested in emphasis: canonical accounts (T.M. Devine, Christopher Harvie) have been refined by more recent scholarship (Jim Phillips, Jim Tomlinson, Ewan Gibbs) which stresses that decline was gradual and began in the 1950s, rather than being a sudden post-1979 event. Popular claims such as "one in five of the world's ships were built on the Clyde" are Shared/Traditional — repeated by museums and journalists but softer than the harder scholarly figures. Contested statistics are flagged in the closing Caveats section.

Scotland emerged from the Second World War (Card #23) into a period of profound reconstruction under Clement Attlee's Labour government, elected in the July 1945 landslide. The centrepiece was the welfare state, and above all the National Health Service. Because Scotland retained its own distinct legal, educational and administrative institutions, the NHS was created for Scotland by a separate statute — the National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1947, which received royal assent on 21 May 1947 and came into force, alongside the rest of the UK NHS, on 5 July 1948. The Scottish service was accountable to the Secretary of State for Scotland rather than to the Minister of Health in London.

Scotland had a genuine and frequently cited claim to have anticipated the NHS. The Highlands and Islands Medical Service (HIMS), established in 1913 following the Dewar Report of 1912, was a state-funded medical service covering roughly half of Scotland's landmass and some 300,000 people in the crofting counties. Funded by an initial Treasury grant of £42,000, and administered centrally, it guaranteed doctors a minimum income, subsidised travel, and ensured that inability to pay did not prevent treatment. It is widely regarded as one of the world's first state-funded healthcare systems and a direct influence on the later NHS — the Beveridge Committee took evidence from it, and the Secretary of State for Scotland told the Commons in 1946 that HIMS had "provided the necessary pointers" towards a comprehensive national service.

Alongside health came public ownership. The Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946 brought the mines under the National Coal Board on "vesting day", 1 January 1947; in Scotland the NCB took over around 225 collieries. The railways were nationalised into British Railways in 1948. Iron and steel were nationalised in 1949–51, denationalised by the Conservatives in the early 1950s, and renationalised in 1967 as the British Steel Corporation. For Scotland, nationalisation initially meant investment, improved conditions and welfare provision for miners and railwaymen — but it also concentrated decisions about "economic" and "uneconomic" pits in a central board, and Scottish collieries were among the earliest on the closure lists from the late 1940s onward.

Housing was the other great front of reconstruction. Scotland — and Glasgow above all — entered the post-war period with the worst housing conditions in Britain: overcrowded nineteenth-century tenements, often with shared outside toilets. The response combined wartime bomb-damage repair with mass slum clearance. Local authorities, overwhelmingly Labour-controlled, built council housing on an enormous scale: Glasgow constructed more high-rise public housing than any other city in Western Europe, developed four huge peripheral estates (Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok) and, later, landmark high-rise schemes such as the Red Road flats (1964–69). At its peak roughly two-thirds of Glasgow's housing was council-owned. The results were mixed: modern flats offered hot water, inside toilets and separate kitchens that tenants prized, but peripheral estates often lacked amenities and some later deteriorated badly.

The most ambitious expression of post-war planning was the New Towns programme, enabled by the New Towns Act 1946 and driven by the Clyde Valley Regional Plan's finding that Glasgow was dangerously overcrowded. Development corporations, accountable to the Secretary of State for Scotland, planned and built five New Towns:

• East Kilbride (designated 1947) — Scotland's first, in Lanarkshire, intended to take Glasgow "overspill".

• Glenrothes (1948) — in Fife, initially linked to a planned new coalfield.

• Cumbernauld (1955) — famous for its innovative (and controversial) megastructure town centre.

• Livingston (1962) — in West Lothian.

• Irvine (1966) — in Ayrshire, Scotland's only coastal New Town.

The New Towns rehoused hundreds of thousands of people from west-central Scotland, especially from Glasgow's slums, and were deliberately designed to attract new, lighter industry and to model modern planning and architecture. They were, in the words of one recent scholarly study, "a key element of the planned Welfare State." A sixth New Town, Stonehouse in Lanarkshire, was designated in 1973; the project was abandoned in 1976.

Beneath the reconstruction lay a deep structural weakness: Scotland's economy remained heavily dependent on the Victorian staple industries of shipbuilding, coal, steel and heavy engineering, all facing intensifying global competition and shifting demand. The Scottish economy was relatively healthy from 1945 to the mid-1950s, but from then the staples began to contract, and Scottish unemployment ran persistently at roughly twice the English rate.

The scale of decline is best captured in employment share. Adding manufacturing, coal mining and construction together, industry's share of all Scottish employment fell from 46.7% in 1962 to 39.1% in 1978 — a gradual erosion — before collapsing to 28.0% by 1988. In coal, Scotland employed roughly 77,000 miners at nationalisation in 1947 (some sources cite "over 80,000" in the late 1950s); the workforce had roughly halved by 1964 and halved again by 1979. Shipbuilding, which at its peak before 1915 was said to build around one-fifth of the world's ships on the Clyde (a popular claim; harder figures put the Clyde at about 31.5% of UK output in 1911–12), still produced about a third of British tonnage in the early 1950s but declined sharply thereafter. Scottish steel employment fell from 25,570 in 1974 to 18,860 in 1979.

Governments tried to offset this with regional policy, using grants to attract new industries to unemployment "black spots": the Rootes car plant at Linwood (Hillman Imp, from 1963), the BMC truck and tractor plant at Bathgate (1961), and the Ravenscraig strip steel mill near Motherwell. These "branch plants" created jobs but were often peripheral to their parent firms' operations, and most closed in the 1980s–90s (Linwood 1981, Bathgate 1986, Ravenscraig 1992) — closures sometimes called Scotland's "industrial clearances."

The emblematic industrial confrontation of the period was the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971–72. UCS was a consortium formed in 1968 from the amalgamation of five upper-Clyde yards (Fairfield at Govan, Alexander Stephen at Linthouse, Charles Connell and John Brown at Clydebank, with Yarrow associated). In June 1971 Edward Heath's Conservative government, pursuing a policy of refusing support to "lame duck" industries, declined a bridging loan and allowed UCS to go into liquidation, threatening thousands of jobs.

Rather than strike, the shop stewards devised a novel and disciplined tactic: a "work-in." The workers would continue working, completing existing orders and occupying the yards, to demonstrate that the business was economically viable — and, crucially, to counter any image of shipyard workers as "workshy." The campaign was led by a group of young shop stewards including Jimmy Reid, Jimmy Airlie, Sammy Barr and Sammy Gilmore. Reid, the campaign's most famous voice, insisted on tight discipline in a celebrated address to the workforce as the work-in began at Clydebank on 30 July 1971: "We are not going to strike... there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying [drinking], because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, and with dignity, and with maturity."

The campaign attracted extraordinary support: on 18 August 1971 more than 200,000 workers across Scotland stopped work and around 80,000 marched through Glasgow; a Glasgow Green rally featured Tony Benn, and entertainment from Matt McGinn and Billy Connolly (himself a former shipyard worker). In February 1972 the Heath government performed a humiliating U-turn, committing £35 million and restructuring the yards: Govan Shipbuilders took over Govan, Linthouse and Scotstoun, while Clydebank was sold to the American Marathon company for oil-rig fabrication. The outcome was a partial victory — around 6,000 to 6,500 of some 8,500 jobs were saved, and shipbuilding continued on the upper Clyde, though at a permanently reduced scale and with significant union concessions. It was a significant later echo of the "Red Clydeside" labour radicalism of an earlier generation (Card #22), demonstrating that organised Scottish labour could still force a government's hand.

The economic historian G. C. Peden, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), questions Christopher Harvie's description of the Thatcher years as "instant post-industrialisation". Industrial employment peaked in the mid-1960s, and industry's share of jobs had already fallen from 39.3 per cent in 1965 to 32.3 per cent in 1979. The fall then accelerated, to 17.7 per cent by 1993, but it continued long after Thatcher left office, reaching 11.1 per cent in 2007. Services rose from 48.7 per cent of employment in 1965 to 81.5 per cent in 2007. Industrial output fell far less than industrial employment, and rose modestly from the late 1980s.

The worst blow came in 1979–83. North Sea oil pushed sterling up by almost 20 per cent between 1977 and 1981, while interest rates were held at 14 per cent or more for long periods to curb inflation. Industrial employment in Scotland fell by 28.5 per cent between 1979 and 1983. Regional aid, which had subsidised Scottish industry since 1945, was cut to about a quarter of its earlier level by the early 1990s, and loss-making industries were allowed to fail.

Many of the projects meant to modernise Scotland's economy had been politically driven. The Toothill Report of 1961 called for science-based and consumer industries, and governments steered car-making to Linwood and Bathgate, built the Ravenscraig strip mill (1958), a pulp mill at Corpach and an aluminium smelter at Invergordon. All had closed by 1992. The great success was electronics: "Silicon Glen" employment rose from about 30,000 in 1970 to 46,000 in 1997.

The recovery that followed was uneven. Once the worst closures were over, Scotland's GDP grew faster than in England's industrial regions, and by 1995 GDP per head had reached the UK average. Financial services grew from 63,400 jobs in 1985 to 112,700 in 2005, and Edinburgh became Europe's fourth financial centre by equity assets. But between 1977 and 1995 GDP per head rose by 73.8 per cent in Grampian and 57.8 per cent in Lothian, against 32.4 per cent in Strathclyde. In 1971 Aberdeen and Dundee each had just over 180,000 people; by 2001 Aberdeen had 213,000 and Dundee 142,000.

While the old industries declined, an entirely new one arrived offshore. After BP found gas in the North Sea in 1965, the giant Forties field — the first major oilfield on the UK Continental Shelf — was discovered by BP's rig Sea Quest and announced on 7 October 1970, some 110 miles east of Aberdeen, with reserves initially estimated at 1.8 billion barrels. Production followed a few years later: the first UK North Sea crude came ashore in 1975 (the small Argyll field produced first, in June 1975), with Forties beginning production in September and formally inaugurated by the Queen in November 1975. Aberdeen was rapidly transformed into Europe's leading oil-support port.

The political consequences were immediate. In September 1972 the SNP launched its "It's Scotland's Oil" campaign, coined by Gordon Wilson, arguing that revenues from oil in Scottish waters were being appropriated by the UK Treasury and would transform an independent Scotland's finances. The slogan gained enormous traction amid the 1973 oil crisis, when OPEC quadrupled prices, and it became central to the SNP's electoral rise.

Scottish nationalism had been a fringe electoral force for decades. Its watershed came at the Hamilton by-election on 2 November 1967, when Winnie Ewing captured a safe Labour seat, polling 18,397 votes — 46% of the total — with a swing of nearly 38%. The result electrified Scottish politics and forced the main parties to respond: Edward Heath's 1968 "Declaration of Perth" committed the Conservatives to considering Scottish self-government, and Harold Wilson established the Royal Commission on the Constitution (the Kilbrandon Commission, reporting in 1973). Ewing lost Hamilton in 1970, but the SNP had arrived.

The oil boom and the political instability of 1974 delivered the SNP's breakthrough. In the February 1974 election the party won 7 seats and 22% of the Scottish vote; in the October 1974 election it won 11 of Scotland's 71 seats on 30.4% of the vote (against Labour's 36.3% and the Conservatives' 24.7%), becoming Scotland's second party by popular vote — its best general-election performance until 2015. Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, that 30.4% translated into only 11 seats against Labour's 41; but with 11 nationalist MPs at Westminster and a wafer-thin Labour majority, the "Scottish question" moved to the centre of British politics.

Faced with the nationalist advance, and dependent on smaller parties after losing its majority, the Labour government legislated for devolution. The Scotland Act 1978 (royal assent 31 July 1978) proposed a directly elected Scottish Assembly, meeting in the former Royal High School building in Edinburgh, with a "Scottish Executive" headed by a First Secretary. The Assembly would have had limited legislative powers over devolved domestic matters — education, health, home affairs, legal matters, the environment and social services — while most other powers, and taxation, remained reserved to Westminster. Notably, the 1978 model listed the specific powers to be devolved (the reverse of the 1998 model, which lists only what is reserved).

The Act required a post-legislative referendum, and it was here that the decisive complication arose. During the bill's passage, a Scottish-born Labour backbencher sitting for a London seat, George Cunningham, successfully moved an amendment (on Burns Night, 25 January 1978) adding the notorious "40% rule." This required that, for the Act to be implemented, Yes votes had to amount not merely to a simple majority of those voting, but to at least 40% of the entire registered electorate. Because non-voters, the dead-but-still-registered, and the apathetic were all effectively counted as No, the threshold was extremely demanding. Critics from Donald Stewart to Tam Dalyell (himself a devolution opponent) regarded it variously as a "booby trap" or an "English trick."

The referendum was held on 1 March 1979. The result was a narrow Yes majority among those who voted:

• Yes: 1,230,937 (51.6%)

• No: 1,153,502 (48.4%)

• Turnout: around 64% (variously reported at 62.9–63.7%).

But because turnout was well short of universal, the Yes vote represented only about 32.9% of the total registered electorate — comfortably below the 40% threshold. In effect, a majority of voters backed devolution, but the Act could not proceed. This is the single most misunderstood point in the whole episode: devolution did not fail because Scots voted against it; it failed because not enough of the entire electorate voted for it under a special rule. The Scotland Act 1978 was duly repealed in June 1979.

The consequences were immediate and enormous. Aggrieved that a Yes majority had been set aside, the SNP demanded the government implement the Act anyway; when it refused, the SNP's 11 MPs put down a motion of no confidence. Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives tabled the formal confidence motion, and on 28 March 1979 the Callaghan government lost by a single vote — 311 to 310 — the first government defeat on a confidence motion since 1924. The margin was agonisingly fine: it hinged in part on the absence of terminally ill Labour MP Sir Alfred Broughton, on his deathbed and advised not to travel, who died five days after the vote. Callaghan famously mocked the alliance of opponents — the Conservatives who wanted the Act repealed, the SNP who wanted independence, and the Liberals who wanted to keep the Act — as "a massive display of unsullied principle," and derided the nationalists as "turkeys voting for Christmas." In the ensuing general election on 3 May 1979, the SNP lost 9 of its 11 seats, and Margaret Thatcher won a majority of 43, beginning eighteen years of Conservative government and, many argue, ending the post-war consensus.

The failure of 1979 thus closes this period on a paradox: a narrow popular majority for a Scottish Assembly that produced no Assembly, a nationalist high-water mark that collapsed at the ballot box, and a constitutional defeat that helped install a government Scotland had largely voted against. The long road back to devolution — the 1997 referendum and the reconvening of a Scottish Parliament in 1999 — is the subject of Card #25.

The welfare state, rising real incomes and slum clearance changed everyday Scottish life, producing a more "affluent" working class by the 1960s even as older industrial communities frayed. Social attitudes liberalised in step with the rest of Britain. Immigration added new communities: Italians (largely pre-war), Poles who settled after the war, and, from the 1950s–60s, migrants from Pakistan, India and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, who were concentrated especially in Glasgow and helped staff industry and the NHS. Distinctively, however, Scotland's dominant demographic story remained emigration: the country suffered a sustained "brain drain," with the 1960s in particular witnessing a net negative annual migration balance of around 40,000, chiefly to England and overseas — a barometer of the economic anxieties that underpinned the era's politics.

The sociologist David McCrone, also in the Oxford Handbook, describes how Scottish society was transformed. In 1921, 74 per cent of Scots worked in manual jobs, and in 1961 still 63 per cent; by the 2000s it was under a third. Yet Scots remained far more likely than the English to call themselves working class: in 1999 a majority in every occupational class did so, including professionals. McCrone notes that rates of social mobility in Scotland were almost identical to England's (47 per cent of men had risen above their father's class by 1997 in both countries), so the egalitarian self-image of "Jock Tamson's bairns" is more cultural than statistical.

Population was another distinctive feature. Scotland's population has hovered around five million since the mid-twentieth century. Of the 27 EU countries, only Hungary, Latvia and Estonia matched Scotland in having fewer people in 2001 than in 1971. Births in 2001 were only 40 per cent of the level a century earlier. Life expectancy was lower than the EU average by about four years for men and five for women, and the "Scottish effect" left Scots with higher death rates even after allowing for deprivation. Population shifted from west to east: in the 1960s Glasgow had twice Edinburgh's population, but by 2008 only 20 per cent more.

McCrone also links politics to national identity rather than simply to class. The collapse of Conservative support in Scotland was too rapid to be explained by Scotland being more working class. A growing "democratic deficit", in which Scots repeatedly got Westminster governments they had not voted for, did more to build support for home rule. About three-quarters of Scots gave priority to being Scottish over being British, a pattern that changed little after devolution.