It Used To Be An Octopus

Tell that to the young people today and they won't believe you. But it did. Hanging on as a fragment of her former self, I'm guessing that Cressida, our tidal octopus will get removed this year, rather than leave a rusty fragment that could cause an injury. The big news today of course was someone else's departure - Nicola Sturgeon surprising people by announcing that she will step down as First Minister when her party elects a successor. Should there be a Scottish General Election instead? Always a difficult call as technically we only elect MSPs, who then confirm a leader. If a party leader was to lose their seat while their party won the election there isn't a call for a new election. And yet, as at Westminster, it does feel that there is something a little off when a party changes leader mid-term. Should there be a more formal process - a formal deputy leader who can step up in the event of the party leader leaving office for whatever reason but if they too leave office a general election is automatically triggered. I guess it depends on how radically different the incoming leader is from their predecessor but as that is impossible to quantify there probably needs to be a simple rule. Oh for a written constitution rather than letting politicians make it up as they go along. It feels less important than automatically triggering a by-election if an elected representative changes their party or goes independent. That should definitely be a rule in my opinion. Anyway Nicola gave a leaving speech which people probably either thought was dignified and candid or concealing some great secret depending on your opinion of her already. Which is ironic considering that idea of entrenched opinions was something she mentioned in her speech. I think she is being very optimistic to think that her departure will change that very much as the independence/union divide in Scottish politics is not going away any time soon. But maybe there is hope. I saw a tweet this week from an arch-unionist asking who benefits from the failure of the Scottish Government's bottle recycling scheme. Unless it was some deep trolling, and he did point out the scheme was flawed, it did seem to recognise it was a good thing to do, even if it wasn't necessarily being done as well as it might. Scottish politics needs more of that but sadly too often pro-independence people want the current system to fail ('Westminster bad') as a way to boost support for independence and pro-union people want the SNP to fail ('SNP bad') as a way to protect the union, whether or not they would otherwise support something that might make living in Scotland here and now better.