However expected, a fourth consecutive victory is a stunning achievement for the SNP. For Nicola Sturgeon to gain votes and a seat after 14 years in government, and months of lurid scandal, is almost eerily impressive. The story of progressive Scotland she seeks to embody receives a much-needed boost. For the first time, Scotland has elected women of colour to Holyrood (the SNP’s Kaukab Stewart and Conservative Pam Gosal), and its first MSP who is a permanent wheelchair user (Labour’s Pam Duncan-Glancy). A clutch of dynamic socialist and ecological campaigners, mainly women, are becoming MSPs on an expanded franchise which gave votes to legally resident foreign nationals (but not to asylum seekers, as the Greens had proposed). Largely by coincidence, many of Holyrood’s loudest voices against trans inclusion have left parliament, and the new reactionary party actively campaigning on the issue – Alex Salmond’s Alba – was a resounding flop. Fans of sturdy social liberalis
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Mr Gove told the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee “we do need to look at every part” of the current constitutional arrangement “to make sure that it is fit for purpose”. The Cabinet Office Minister made clear the UK was “stronger together” as a new poll by Survation found 52 percent of Scots would vote for Scotland to become an independent country.
ONCE you are reminded of the late William McIlvanney, it’s hard not to start missing him, his writing, his coolness. We had news this week of Ian Rankin being entrusted to work up some of Willie’s literary notes, found in his papers. These are sketches towards an early 1970s prequel for his ground-breaking crime novel, Laidlaw, which Rankin – an avowed McIlvanney devotee – has turned into a fully realised work. “I would find myself waking up in the middle of the night with a line that felt like a Willie line and I would scribble it down,” says Rankin. As I’ve been sampling McIlvanney’s corpus in the last few days (“Corpus! Just don’t make a corpse of me in the process,” I can imagine him snapping), this seems a particularly appropriate method.