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This book reappraises Scottish politics in the decades after 1945, augmenting existing accounts of this period by foregrounding the importance of ideology and language. Founded upon original archival research, the book recovers the central role played within modern Scottish politics by an individualist, anti-bureaucratic critique of central government. Deployed initially by those on the political right to attack the programme of nationalisation implemented by the post-war Labour government, by the 1960s this rhetoric was being exploited by advocates of constitutional change. As liberty came to be framed in constitutional rather than economic terms, understandings of political representation also changed: crucially, the arrival of the referendum in British politics granted credibility to the belief that there existed a distinctive Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty.
Malcolm Petrie is Lecturer in Late Modern Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, and the Co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Scottish Magazines Network that inspired this edited collection. He has written widely on Scottish politics in the twentieth century, and is the author of Popular Politics and Political Culture: Urban Scotland, 1918-1939 (EUP, 2018). His most recent book, Politics and the People (EUP, 2022), examines political culture and national identity in post-war Scotland.
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