Scottish Politics and Society

Abstract

Twenty years ago, a book on Scottish politics might have appeared an eccentricity. The ‘homogeneity thesis’ held that Britain’s unitary constitution rested on a uniform political culture in which issues of territory, religion, language and nationality had given way to a politics of class. In the early 1970s, Blondel (1974, p.20) could describe Britain as probably the most homogeneous of industrial nations, while Finer (1974, p.137), conceding that Britain had had its ‘nationalities’, ‘language’, ‘religious’ and ‘constitutional’ problems, insisted that these were no more. The mid 1970s provided a rude awakening, with the resurgence of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the renewed conflict in Northern Ireland, reminding us that the United Kingdom is a complex, multinational state. Since then, there has been a considerable body of writing on Scottish politics and government. Much of this has been polemical, advocating or opposing constitutional change, but a number of analytical works have sought to understand and explain institutions and modes of political behaviour neglected while the homogeneity thesis held sway. There has been a strong focus in the recent literature on nationalism, rescuing it from antiquarianism and trivialisation; but scholars have also recognised that there is much more to Scottish politics than nationalism.