A look at the landscape of Scottish Politics after 10 months of SNP minority control…

Scotland is a very different place right now. Oh the lochs are still there, you can still drink your way from lowlands to highlands on the whisky trail (at a slightly higher premium thanks to the Chancellor) and the haggis hunting season is about to start once again in earnest, but the old order changeth.

Following the introduction, by Liberal Democrat MSPs, of STV for local government elections, Labour lost control of many fiefdoms that it had ruled with an Iron fist for a generation. The roll back of Labour dominance extended from urban to rural regions across the country and there is a genuine recognition that they haven’t yet come to terms with this. Coalition administrations are the order of the day and some strange bedfellows have been brought together in the process.

But the biggest changes to have been wrought are undoubtedly within the Scottish Parliament itself. On its best ever night and floated on the momentum of six figure donations from across corporate Scotland, the SNP came to power with a single seat advantage over Labour. That solitary seat cost Labour their grip on power and Jack McConnell his job. In a demonstration of principles over hunger for power, the Liberal Democrat group in the Scottish Parliament resisted the overtures of the SNP and elected to go into opposition leaving the nationalists to govern alone.

To give them their due, they’ve had a pretty good year so far, with some easy wins based on the delivery of populist promises such as the freezing of the council tax and the removal of bridge tolls over the Forth and Tay rivers.

But even now the wheels appear to be coming off the nationalist wagon. It started on the day that the SNP brought their first budget to Parliament. It took just 18 seconds for the SNP to ditch the first of their landmark promises when they decided to abandon their key pledge to repay all Scottish graduate student loan debt in full. Many commentators have remarked that their wafer thin majority may have actually been delivered by students voting for this exact promise. Many more policy u-turns like this one and the SNP experience of minority government may indeed turn out to be a short one.

* Alex Cole-Hamilton headed up the Lib Dem List of candidates for the Mid Scotland and Fife region in the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections, and stood against Gordon Brown in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath in the 2005 general election. Alex has kindly agreed to write a monthly column on Scottish politics for Lib Dem Voice. We are currently looking for someone from Wales to do the same. If you’d like to volunteer, please contact our commissioning editor, Stephen Tall at .

Alex Cole-Hamilton recently topped the mid Scotland and Fife regional list for next year’s Scottish Parliament elections - giving him a very good chance of being a Lib Dem MSP from next May. For Lib Dem Voice he tells us how he reached the top of the list, and what the future looks like for the Liberal Democrats in Scotland.

It hasn’t really sunk in yet, but as top of the mid Scotland and Fife regional list I could well be the youngest of what is expected to be a significantly larger Liberal Democrat contingent elected to Holyrood next year. Indeed, polling carried out both by professional pollsters and other political parties show the Scottish Liberal Democrats well in contention to become the largest party in the Scottish Parliament next May, winning in seats and regions across Scotland and I could actually be part of that. For myself and many others like me, there has never been a better time to be a Scottish Liberal Democrat. There is a real belief that our star is rising.

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