Michael Russell was one of the most prominent nationalists to lose his seat in the Scottish parliamentary election earlier this year. His article in
today's Glasgow Herald is not quite as supportive of party leader John Swinney as one might have expected. On the question of Swinney's challenger for the leadership, Russell writes:
I hardly know Bill Wilson, but the SNP establishment attacks upon him have been daft and self-defeating. The interviews he has given have shown him to be intelligent, articulate, and passionately concerned. Those are virtues which are needed in the SNP, and he is entitled to put his case for a different route for the party, a case which he argues courageously.
Russell still plans to vote for Swinney to retain the leadership, but conditionally:
The first condition is that he accelerates the process of internal renewal starting with one-member-one-vote, and proceeding thereafter to a complete constitutional, organisational, and campaigning overhaul to free the party from the dead hand of its statist past.
The bit I liked was freeing the party "from the dead hand of its statist past." Let's here more about this. As I wrote
here, Scotland needs a more capitalist political culture.