Review: The First Decade of the Scottish Parliament

Abstract

You will perhaps forgive me an unwarranted digression of my own. McNair's opening comment suggested that 'for decades, indeed centuries, the Scottish media have been a source of national pride.' How touching. As a media practitioner for decades, if not yet centuries, I had not thought our efforts had generated such a response. To be fair for a moment, I appreciate entirely what McNair means. He is talking of the icons of Scottish national identity which coalesced around the recreation of Scotland's Parliament. This book intelligently assesses how that Parliament has done in its first decade. In pursuing such a task, the initial challenge was to define a benchmark against which to measure progress. Quite reasonably, many of the essayists choose the aspirations set out by the Consultative Steering Group (CSG), chaired by Henry McLeish and steered by civil servants, headed by the astute Robert Gordon.