When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he immediately set about having a referendum in Wales and Scotland for devolution, both countries voted in favour of it. The first First Minister of scotland was called Donald Dewar, but he died suddenly of a heart attack not long after winning the first election, and was replaced internally shortly thereafter by Jack McConnell, who remained First Minister until last month when the leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond, won an assembly election for the position, following his parties narrow and last minute victory in the scottish elections. The SNP won by a majority of only 1 seat, I think, and since this wasn't enough to secure Salmond the chair by default, they had to form a minority coalition government with a further 2 Green party MSP's, who reached a compromise between their two manifestos. The other two parties, the lib dems and the conservative's were obliged to honour the manifesto they were elected upon and were therefore unable to reach a mutually agreeable compromise with them. As it stands the SNP, therefore, have limited powers to have their motions passed through the scottish parliament. The SNP's main agenda is to form an independent state, separate from Westminster, and all of the other parties oppose this, so it will be difficult for them to pass a motion for having a referendum on independence. They are aiming to have a referendum in 2 or 3 years, probably after Gordon Brown has lost the next UK wide general election and the Conservatives get back in. They are even less popular in Scotland than the Labour party. At the moment, I don't know what limited powers the devolved scottish parliament has, I think it's probably a grey area on the whole, but as for the specific details laid out in paper I don't really know what they are good for. Not shy of attracting any controversy through the years, one thing they are good at is pishing our money away on badly designed parliament buildings. It seems as though our first two First Ministers acted with pretty much the same agenda as the British government, which isn't surprising since they bore the same political tripe. But now, the SNP are not popular with the Labour government so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Gordon Brown expressed his welcomings to Alex Salmond with the same level of disingenuity that Tony Blair would have unintentionally displayed.

I've always like the SSP. They have some support, but largely their vote is taken away by the more popular and long standing SNP. The SSP stand for the legalisation of all drugs, hence their limited political influence, and sadly this year they lost all of their seats in scotland. During the swearing in procedure at one of the elections, Colin Fox, their now leader, subverted the procedure by closing his eyes and singing a song by the Scottish bard Robert Burns, much to the chagrin of the speaker of the house. He expressed his regret after this, I don't know why. Nearly every time I attended a protest in edinburgh against the Iraq Invasion he was there on his soap box.