The Labour Party’s electoral landslide in 1945 – which included a full 40 Scottish MPs - and subsequent nationalisation programmes ensured a period of relative health for Scotland’s traditional industries. By the mid-1950s, however, signs of stagnation were once again apparent, not least in the unemployment figures, although these were mitigated somewhat by the expansion of the public and service sector following the introduction of the Welfare State.

A by-election in 1945 also saw the SNP claiming its first parliamentary seat – although Labour was to snatch it back in the general election a few weeks later. Further splits in the party, together with post-Nazi suspicions of nationalism, led to the growing success of the avowedly apolitical and gradualist Scottish Convention, whose Covenant of 1949, advocating a Scottish parliament within the UK, attracted some two million signatures.

The same decade was one of rapid expansion and consolidation for the Edinburgh International Festival, founded in 1947 with the aim of helping to cement European peace through the arts, and accompanied from the outset by the unofficial 'Fringe' which dwarfs it in size today. Also in 1947, as the government assumed greater responsibility for cultural as well as social provision, the newly-established Arts Council of Great Britain set up a separate Scottish Committee, forerunner of today’s Scottish Arts Council.

These ambitious attempts at wholesale restructuring, however, led to tens of thousands of jobs in mining, railways and engineering being lost within a decade. Grievances arising from this shift towards a lower-paid, more service-based economy, together with generally waning rewards from the promised technological revolution, fomented discontent with the then Labour government, as did well-intentioned but heavy-handed programmes of urban slum clearance and resettlement. A further factor was Scotland’s burgeoning anti-nuclear movement, galvanised by the deployment of Polaris submarines at the Holy Loch naval base in 1960 (with the Cuban missile crisis just two years away, the sense of becoming a front-line nuclear target should not be underestimated) and the opening of the Dounreay fast-breeder reactor in 1966.

The most notable single result of these stresses was the landmark SNP by-election victory at Hamilton in 1967. With the party quick to capitalise on the discovery of North Sea oilfields in 1971 under the slogan 'It’s Scotland’s Oil' – a message lent considerable extra force by the UK energy crisis of 1973 - they went on to gain first seven, then 11 seats in the two general elections of 1974. Devolution, alongside continuing economic and industrial turbulence, thus came to dominate the decade’s political agenda, culminating in the infamous Scottish referendum of 1979, which saw a majority voting in favour, but failing to reach the required threshold proportion of the total electorate – an amendment clause inserted by opponents of Home Rule.