By James Browne
And they’re off. The Scottish General Election campaign has begun.
I am now ready to call the result.
The first draft of this piece was a Jeremiad about how shite Scotland is and how a diddy vote for our diddy politicians in their diddy parliament would change nothing.
Our economy is in the toilet, floating some way above our infrastructure. The savage cuts (sorry, savage reforms) about to hit our public sector will pull the chain once and for all. And so on and so on. You get the idea.
But then something strange happened. Optimistic feelings of future possibilities began to dance in my brain.
I think this may be because I watched Gnomeo and Juliet recently and anything seems a better option than having to go through that grotesque horror again. Further, the Montague and Capulet malarkey got me thinking about rivalries, alarums and excursions at Holyrood, in fair Edina, where we lay our scene.
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And a penny dropped. This is a great time to have an election. The electorate are at least interested, having noticed that rich people are shafting the rest of us. This despite the various distractions strewn the voter’s way (the bright shiny wedding of over-privileged strangers, our brand new shiny war in Libya, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean). You see, the settled will of the Scottish electorate has already been decided. They are intractably opposed to the ConDem coalition’s ideological reshaping of the economy to benefit those who have. The people have not spoken yet, but we can hear what they say. They want an SNP/Labour coalition. No. I haven’t been drinking. OK. I have been drinking. But no more than is usual for breakfast on a Wednesday. And Glenkinchie is so light it barely counts as proper drinking. The reason this seems improbable – OK, impossible – is the slavering hatred between the two parties. But, aside from the constitutional thing, are they so different? They’re both left(ish) of centre. They both have no hunger to be a colonial administration for Cameron. They both portray themselves as being bulwarks against savage cuts (sorry, reforms). Take the heat out of the clashes between Salmond and Gray and you get the impression they have to hunt for things to disagree over. X modern apprenticeships rather than Y. Glasgow Rail Link this. Council tax that. These are policy differences rather than ideological gulfs. Surely, there’s an argument that Scotland’s two largest parties come to a compromise on constitutional arrangements and join forces to fight the progressive fight against No.10. Now, of course the politicians and activists would never wear it. As is traditional in Scotland, they hate most those who are nearest to them. But the combined membership of the SNP and Scottish Labour (depending on who you believe) is about 30,000. In 2007, the two parties shared 1.3 million consituency votes. This is supposedly a democracy. Surely those 1.3 million outweigh 30,000, no? If the Scottish parliament is to be something other than a diddy chamber for jumped-up councillors, then it needs to be true to its founding principle: a new politics, one that respected the settled will of the Scottish people. Our poor, wee, hudden doon country is in a bad place. We need imagination and courage from our political leaders to get us out. And sometimes “thinking the unthinkable” means more than deciding to shaft the public sector. Sometimes it means rethinking old hatreds. Sometimes, in extremis, it even means listening to what the people want.Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
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