Nat watching

I managed to catch parts of the coverage of the SNP’s conference this weekend on BBC Parliament. It’s got me thinking about various issues related to how Scottish politics is developing with the new minority SNP government at Holyrood and the impact that could have on UK-wide politics.

I am deliberately avoiding thinking too much, or indeed blogging, about the Lib Dem leadership contest until I have sufficient time and the inclination to properly engage with it. So this was good displacement activity.

It was interesting watching how a party that had fought for more than 70 years to achieve some kind of power dealt with their first conference after becoming the government. Weren’t they having a good time! As an English Liberal Democrat I admit to a few twinges of jealousy.

I will leave more serious thoughts about the politics to another time, but I did want to write about how nice it was to see proper television coverage of a party conference. Well done BBC Scotland for getting it right. What I saw was a balanced thoughtful discussion of the issues. No over concentration on personalities. Attempts to make it interesting, but without being gimicky. A lot of this I think must be put down to the style of Brain Taylor, BBC Scotland’s political editor, who comes across as being someone genuinely interested in politics, sceptical and challenging, but without the sneering approach of some others I could think of. This is how it should be done.

But then of course there was the added bonus of being able to watch the coverage of a party conference without having to look at Andrew Neil.

This content was originally posted on my old Process Guy blog.