If you’re used to Westminster’s bipolar politics, Scotland’s multi-party system can seem baffling. And so it’s easier for the London media to focus on the rotting corpses of the dying regime – older men raging against their own irrelevance – than follow the forces reshaping Scotland.
The path through the five Holyrood elections to date has been cut by a group we could call ‘the radicals’. These are the people who, as bombs blew Baghdad to bits in 2003, abandoned uninspiring Labour and Scottish National Party (SNP) campaigns, and elected the ‘rainbow parliament’ that included six Scottish Socialist Party MSPs and seven Greens.
In 2007 these same people swung behind the SNP, giving the party a one-seat plurality and stretching political possibility enough for it to win its majority in 2011.
