Political fever in Scotland – but is it passing or permanent?
From Scone to scone was not far this morning. Just a few miles along the road from the crowning place of Scottish kings – the scones were out in force at a Perth polling station.
In the kirk on the outskirts of town, business was brisk at the polling station from open doors. Nine hundred minutes to change the course of history or steady the status quo.
Not that the scone ladies were here for politics. No, scones are the thing – and what scones they are here. All twin-sets, rinses and, well, classically just Perth somehow.
Inviting us in to film, the Church of Scotland minister looked on approvingly at the parish munchers:
“Ah yes – we have a better class of sinner here in Perth,” he smiled.
Looking on at this historic day, where’s William McGonagall when you need him? We stood on the banks of the Tay by the road bridge. His deathless “Beautiful railway bridge o’er the silvery Tay” lines came to mind. What would the Bard pen about such a day as this?
Around the town – still – everyone is talking about it:
“What’ll it all mean for jobs in Aberdeen?” one scaffolder asks another as I walk by. You pick up such snatches everywhere you go.
Yes, it is one issue. Yes, it one day. But these islands have seen nothing like this level of political engagement for a very very long time. Northern Irish voters will know what I am talking about if they recall the overwhelming poll endorsement of the Good Friday agreement. But these events are islands in our sea of sloppy apathy, cynicism and disengagement.
South, to Dunfermline where – to continue our poetic theme – the king sat drinking his “blude-red wine” in the historic Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.
The word Bruce, etched into the skyline filigree sandstone parapet of the tower. For here lie Robert the Bruce and several more Scottish kings.
Quite where Scotland stands on the monarchy is distant to today’s history being made all around us, however.
And people are fully conversant that history is indeed being written in the scores of community centres, schools, churches where the people of Scotland have their 900 minutes.
At a polling station in Coldstream, close to the frontier with England, a woman tells us: “You would never see this amount of people at a general election.”
Nor, perhaps, would you see the piper marching voters to the poll in a distinct of Edinburgh today at 7am, 11am and 3pm.
Across Scotland there were reports and photos being posted up online of queues forming to vote before doors opened at 7am.
A populist political phenomenon it certainly is. The question, though is: is it passing or permanent?
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