Sometimes, journalists talk about elections in Scotland, Northern Ireland or even Wales as though they are merely proxies for each nation’s respective constitutional questions. It can feel as though we don’t have our own schools and health services to run well or badly, or our own rusting railways.
In reality, for example, the trouncing of Edinburgh’s Tories last week – they went from the second-biggest group on the city council to the fifth – had as much to do with cars as constitutional arrangements.
They focused much of their campaign on allowing traffic more access to residential streets. Unsurprisingly, the parents of the children they were proposing to sacrifice to the gods of petrol weren’t so keen, whatever they may have thought of the 1707 Acts of Union. They seem to have preferred the SNP’s alleged ‘war on cars’.
