Search

This thesis explores the experience of work and industrial relations at the British Motor Corporation’s commercial vehicle assembly plant at Bathgate in West Lothian, from its establishment in 1961 until its closure in 1986. The plant opened in Scotland as a result of a government regional development policy which sought to create jobs and ameliorate the rundown of heavy industry in areas of high unemployment. The thesis considers the role of such policy in shaping industrial development since 1945, and, using the oral history testimony of former Bathgate workers to examine the impact of economic and social change on Scotland’s industrial population, contributes to the regional policy literature by extending the analysis beyond questions about its efficacy and considering the experiences of the workers and communities directly affected by such initiatives. What emerges from this study of regional policy from the perspective of the shopfloor is the extent to which the plant’s establishment on a greenfield site, in an area of high unemployment, very much on the periphery of the UK motor industry and with little tradition of mass assembly production processes, shaped the subsequent evolution of its working conditions, industrial relations, and worker attitudes, as well as its position within the Bathgate community. The Bathgate experience therefore illuminates a number of key debates in the wider historiography of Britain and Scotland since 1945, not only in relation to regional policy itself, but also with regard to the motor industry, its industrial relations, and the development, in the post-war context of relatively high wages and the increasing stability of work, of a more typically ‘affluent’ working class. The thesis is divided into two parts. Part One explores some of the issues surrounding the plant’s establishment in West Lothian, particularly the regional policy aspects, and the plant’s position within and relationship to both the wider BMC – later British Leyland – organisation and the British motor industry more generally. Part Two draws extensively on the influential ‘affluent worker’ thesis, as well as the literature around the industrial relations of motor manufacturing, in developing and exploring questions related to the way in which work was experienced at Bathgate, and the extent to which the attitudes and behaviour of its workforce came to reflect those which typified the motor worker elsewhere. Throughout, the thesis engages with and adds nuance to debates over the role of shopfloor organisation and strike activity in damaging the performance of British motor manufacturing, and, by drawing on the oral testimony of former Bathgate workers themselves, offers a fresh perspective on the post-war experience of regional policy both in a particular, under-researched regional policy plant, and in Scotland and Britain more broadly.

Between 1950 and 1999 the Scottish death rate, standardised to the 1950 population, declined from 13.1 per 1000 to 7.8 for men and from 12 per 1000 to 6.3 for women. The main aim of this thesis has been to establish the key influences on this doctrine. Thomas McKeown examined the decline of mortality in an earlier time period (up to the 1970s) and concluded that: falls in deaths from infectious diseases were responsible for the majority of the decline in mortality rate; and the main influence on their decline was standards of living, in particular diet. The causes of death which contributed most to the decline in mortality rates 1950-1999 were established by digitising GRO(S) mortality records and calculating ‘potential lives saved’ . This method allows an estimate to be made of the number of deaths which would be expected to occur in 1999, taking into account changing age structure, if the death rates from 1950 still applied. Tuberculosis (TB), stomach cancer (SC), ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke were selected as case studies; these accounted for over 70% of the decline of male and female mortality. The trajectory of decline in these causes of death was then considered in detail and set in social and medical context. The thesis has reached an alternative conclusion from that of Thomas McKeown. It is argued that improving standards of living were responsible for some of the decline in SC and haemorrhagic stroke mortality, and the pre-1950 decline of TB; however, the main influence on the decline of TB, IHD and ischemic stroke mortality post-1950 was medicine. Using the wider definition of the influence of medicine adopted in this study, medicine is considered to account for the majority of the decline in the identified causes of mortality. Medicine has, at last, delivered important contributions to the life expectancy of the Scottish population.

This is a study of the transition of the political community of Paisley in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, from one dominated by industrial paternalism and local Liberal Party hierarchies to one in which deferential modes of electoral behaviour had broken down. It questions many historiographical conventions and orthodoxies regarding the rise of' the Labour Party in Scotland and, by focussing on the language of political discourse, seeks to highlight an important historical continuum in the evolutlon of challenges to Liberal dominInance from both 'left' and 'right' in the form of locally defined Radical Tradition. Through the extensive use of the local press, company records records and trade union and party minutes, the study considers political change in its wider economic, industrial and cultural context, developing a theory of political change which reaches out to an appreciation of how 'community' forms determined both the pace and character of change. Beyond this, however, changes in Paisley are further considered in their national context. Through the use of national party archives, the collected papers of prominant political leaders and parrliamentarians and a wide variety of secondary sources, a picture of Paisley as a community which, whilst following many, national trends, proved locked in nineeteenth-century patterns of status politics far longer than comparable Scottish burghs and Engiish cotIon towns. The analysis of the evolution of political change, as presented in this study, moves bevond conventional class-based models of party politics to an appreciation of the totality of the political experience as the product of the continual re-definition of popular political traditions, and in this case, the emergence of new strands in a Radical thread.