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The National Health Service (NHS), set up in 1948, extended care to all citizens – young and old, rich and poor. However, in spite of the excellence of the service, Scots are among the unhealthiest people in Europe. They lead the world in heart disease and lung cancer. Why? Because of a poor diet (too many deep-fried Mars bars), cigarettes and alcohol.
In the 1990s, Scots were consuming 33 per cent more alcohol and tobacco, 48 per cent more biscuits and 50 per cent more carbonated drinks than the UK average. Again, there is a class dimension. The average age of death in some areas of Glasgow, such as Shettleston, is lower than for those living on the war-torn Gaza Strip!
Education
The 1945 Labour government’s proposed changes for education did nothing to alter the fact that around 80 per cent of Scottish children left school with no qualifications in the 1950s. It also didn’t make the system any more inclusive – children were divided at the age of 11 by an examination into senior and junior schools. Senior schools trained pupils for university; junior schools trained the new manual class of workers.
What changed education was the following:
The introduction in the 1960s of what is known as the ‘O level’, which acted as a halfway house between nothing and the higher qualification that was necessary for entry into university
The establishment of comprehensive education, which abolished the divisive junior and secondary schools
Higher education in Scotland has expanded. Currently, more than 50 per cent of pupils are enrolled in such institutions. But before sounding the trumpets, remember there is a way to go before the education system provides all children with equal opportunity. In Scotland, in many respects, your post code determines your opportunities.
Housing
The private market in housing (see Chapter 15) was a dismal failure in providing decent living conditions. Slums and squalor were the lot of the majority of Scots. To correct these abuses, a massive programme of council house building was initiated. By the mid-1960s, Scotland had more people living in council estates than many eastern European states did under Soviet rule!
These estates were constructed to deal with overcrowding in the i
With the flight of the more enterprising and ambitious residents, most of the council estates began to literally fall apart. Nowadays, they house the elderly and the young unemployed with families. Some council estates have become a byword for alcoholism, drug use, petty crime and vandalism.
The solutions of yesterday have become today’s problems. Nowhere is the divide in Scottish society more evident than in housing.
Unemployment
The Labour government of 1945–51 came to power committed to full employment. That commitment was shared by the Conservative Party. This goal was made possible by the long economic boom lasting into the 1960s.
However, from the end of the 1960s onward, unemployment has consistently been higher in Scotland than the average for the UK as a whole. In 1961, with little more than 10 per cent of the UK’s population, Scotland had more than 25 per cent of the long-term unemployed. In the 1980s, the unemployment rate was ru
Indeed, the national figures masked a social catastrophe in some parts of Glasgow. In the 1980s, Glasgow Provan had an unemployment rate of 35 per cent for males between the age of 16 and 69; three out of five men receiving benefits had been out of work for more than six months. When unemployment reaches this level, the effects become multifaceted. People’s lives become blunted and restricted on a whole series of levels.
Is it any wonder, given these figures, that people wanted to leave Scotland to find work and wages elsewhere? From 1961 to 1987, the natural increase in the population was 431,000, but those leaving amounted to 561,000. Emigrants were mainly aged 25 to 45, the most productive group for any economy.
Nationalising the utilities
The programme of welfare reform was matched by a programme of nationalisation in which coal, steel, railways, gas and electricity were taken into public ownership. The trade unions and the Labour Party had been campaigning for this for many years, and miners held street parties on hearing the news. But it was still the old private owners who dominated the new boards set up to run these industries, and public ownership didn’t put an end to strikes. The coal industry was particularly militant in the 1970s and 1980s.
Sectarianism on the decline
Catholics were routinely discriminated against in Scotland (see Chapters 14 and 15), but in the aftermath of the Second World War, things began to change. This was partly due to the changes in the economy (see the next section), which destroyed the economic basis of sectarianism, but it was also due to the determination of the Churches and politicians.
There was greater interaction between Catholics and Protestants throughout Scotland. No longer did the Catholic Church insist on Catholics marrying Catholics – that signalled a massive rise in what were called ‘mixed marriages’. By 2001, more than half of Scots Catholics under the age of 34 were married to non-Catholics (compared to only 2 per cent in Northern Ireland).
The labour market also became less sectarian. The old signs saying that ‘Catholics need not apply’ went away, and the shift from industry to services saw the jobs market become religiously blind.
Welcome as these developments are, pockets of sectarianism still exist within education and sport. Schooling is still based on religious segregation, and there is the tribalism associated with the supporters of Celtic and Rangers football clubs. But generally speaking, a person’s religion plays very little part in determining voting behaviour or affecting his or her life chances.
The Scottish Economy: From Ships to Chips
The Scottish economy was largely based on heavy industry (see Chapter 15), but it was an economy that was kept alive through war – something that could not be guaranteed after 1945. Scotland badly needed to diversify into new kinds of economic activity. However, given the restocking boom that took place after the war and the emergence of the Cold War and the small wars that accompanied it, such as Korea, the old structure was in pretty robust health. Shipbuilding flourished, as did coalmining, engineering and steelmaking. Scotland was still a major player in world markets. Clyde-built still meant something.
Push the time clock on a decade or so, and things looked very different. Industry was losing 10,000 jobs a year. Shipbuilding – the jewel in the industrial crown – was being sunk by the more technologically advanced yards in Japan and Korea. The textile industries were being beaten on price and quality by competitors in places like India and Hong Kong. Coalmining, like steelmaking, was only being kept alive through government subsidies.
An unstoppable process of deindustrialisation was underway. This gathered pace under the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Many famous industrial landmarks, such as the Ravenscraig steel mill complex, the aluminium smelter at Invergordon and car making at Linwood, closed and became footnotes in Scottish industrial history.
It is possible to exaggerate the decline of manufacturing. Even as late as 2013, manufacturing accounted for nearly two-thirds of Scottish exports (although fewer than one in ten Scots work in the sector). Decline is always an uneven process, and there will always be long-established industries, like whisky, that buck the trend.
A new economy was in the process of being constructed on the corpse of the old. This economy was based on electronics, light engineering and services such as banking and retail. This shift had a profound effect on the labour market in Scotland. The old economy was based on muscle strength and craft skills; the new economy was based on brainpower. This meant that opportunities for women increased and many households became dependent on a second income. Whereas in 1911, the typical female worker was between 13 and 21 and single, from the 1970s on, the typical female worker was over 30 and married.
The increasing feminisation of the labour force has coincided with the increase in foreign ownership of industry in Scotland. The Americans (in the form of IBM,NCR, Timex and others) came in after 1945, attracted by a relatively low-paid, highly skilled workforce who could – particularly after the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973 – allow them a backdoor into European markets. Plus, we play golf and speak English!
Has this increase in foreign ownership been a good thing for Scotland? Historians disagree. On the one hand, there are jobs today in Scotland that were not there before. On the other hand, it has meant a de-skilling of the workforce because the jobs tended to be routine assembly of parts. Plus, these companies don’t stick around if there are juicier pickings elsewhere. Apart from IBM, most American multinationals, like NCR and Timex, have pulled out of Scotland.
Fighting for a way of life
The old staple industries did not go down without a fight. There were major strikes to oppose government policies toward coalmining and shipbuilding. The ‘right to work’ campaign in 1967, led by Communist shop stewards Jimmy Reid and James Airlie, was a protest against the closure of shipyards on the Clyde. The workers staged a work-in and refused to budge. Their action caught the imagination of the British people. The government was forced to nationalise the yards as Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. In the end, it did not save shipbuilding on the Clyde. When state subsidies were withdrawn, the industry all but collapsed.
Coalmining went the same way. In 1973, the National Union of Miners (NUM) won a spectacular victory over the Heath government’s economic policies by restricting supplies of coal to the electricity power stations. As a result, the British people were forced to endure power cuts and spend the night huddling around candles! A general election was held in 1974 over the issue of who runs the country: the unions or the government? The public voted for the unions – the Tories were out, and Labour was back in power.