Pat Kane (Glasgow, Scottish Futures): Not much mental or media space for Gordon Brown's constitutional reforms in Scotland at the moment, where the citizenry are still shaken by the first terrorist act on Scottish soil since Lockerbie in 1988, and more concerned with have-a-go heroes than anything else.
Yet in the legal response to the Glasgow Airport bombings, we see signs of how the constitutional cultures of the nations of these islands might co-evolve. The independent decision by the Lord Advocate (our Attorney-General) Elish Angiolini to transfer custody of the terror suspects from the domain of Scottish law, to the Metropolitan Police in London, has been regarded smoothly by Alex Salmond: "much better for law officers and politicians", he noted, "to act in the public interest than have a wrestling match over jurisdiction".
So the arrival of terrorism in Scotland seems to have immediately resulted in a reinforcement of the operational functioning of the Union. The "wrestling match" will doubtless resume around other issues – but you have to admire Brown's historical luck here. What better environment under which to bind one of the more restive parts of the island into a new, constitutionally-shaped UKanian unity (about which Nairn and Ascherson have already made cautionary noises) than a terror-driven culture of social fear? Left-wing SNP MSPs like Bill Wilson, have tentatively suggested that Salmond may be subverting his own case for independence, by staying silent about the toxic domestic consequences of being part of a geopolitically-tainted 'United Kingdom'.
But beyond the terror dimension, the danger for a SNP government perpetually keen to be percieved by the Scottish electorate as "constructively cooperating with Brown", is that they end up inadvertently co-operating in his hegemonic construction of a "New Britain". As an eagle-eyed commenter at the Herald's website noted: "without doubt there will be a clause somewhere defining the UK as 'indivisible' (like in the Spanish constitution) and if Scotland signed up to that we'd be stuck forever!" The anoraks shouldn't throw their coats up in the air quite yet.
