Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945–1979. By Malcolm R. Petrie. Who Runs Edinburgh? By David McCrone

Abstract

Malcolm Petrie makes an important and original contribution to the post-war political history of Scotland. Politics and the People is not a general survey but focuses on a major theme: the arguments used by the political parties in their electoral appeals, and the underlying ideologies which these revealed. In 1979, the date of the devolution referendum which narrowly failed, the main political battle in Scotland still seemed to be between Conservatives and Labour. The Scottish National Party (SNP) was to be rejuvenated and radicalized by the policies of Margaret Thatcher (notably the poll tax) and by the emergence of ‘Scotland’s oil’ as a central economic issue. But between 1945 and 1979, Petrie argues, support for the SNP was growing at the expense of the Unionist/Conservative party and in some constituencies of the Liberal party. The themes of the SNP’s popular appeal were of a classic liberal, anti-statist type: hostility to centralization, denunciation of London-based bureaucracy (the ‘man in Whitehall’), and belief in local self-government.