"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

Scottish politics. The much-bemoaned sense of anti-climax
was, to his mind, inevitable; he didn't remember any party's
manifesto promising a Socialist Utopia (Creation of) bill,
least of all New Labour's.
The teething troubles, the jostlings, the stumblings and
the embarrassments were also inevitable. The new parliament was an infant
with much growing to do; it wasn't
supposed to spring fully formed from the loins of Zeus.
That Labour Lite (trade mark) should continue to fortify its centre-
right comfort zone, while cloaking it in nauseatingly touchy-
feely rhetoric, was no great surprise. That the SNP should
respond with leftist posturing, and that the impression
should be less convincing than Alex Salmond in a silk neglige, was no great
surprise. That the Tories should continue
to exert as much influence as a pissed conscience over a stiff
prick, no matter how much tartanry they affected, was also
no great surprise. In fact, that this new, allegedly consensual
and co-operative era of Scottish politics should very quickly
begin to resemble all the old, back-stabbing, eye-gouging
eras was pretty much what Parlabane expected.
Cynical as he knew this sounded, he nonetheless did
expect that progress would ultimately be made. Change,
though, would be incremental, not dramatic. Donald Dewar's
first-term agenda was rightly decried as a hyper-cautious
and anodyne snooze-fest, but there was also an argument
for getting used to the new vehicle with a few slow laps
before you tried flooring the accelerator.
And for a while progress was being made, though maybe
not so much by politics than in politics, which was arguably even more
important. With the excuse of blaming
the English now inadmissible (or at least, in the SNP's
case, mutated into blaming 'London-controlled Labour'),
a clearer sense of political self-identity was beginnlng to
emerge. The agenda was, if not dictated, at least and at
last influenced by the issues the Scottish electorate were
vocally concerned about, rather than by what effect a
Daily Mail front page might have on the swithering classes
down south.
With comparing themselves and their behaviour to England
no longer relevant (if it ever was), the Scots were forced to
take a more honest look at who they really were. Racism,
for instance, had been their grubby little secret for the best
part of a century, from the Church of Scotland's infamous
pamphlet on The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish
Nationality, to the revelation that the instance of assault
on ethnic minorities was three times the UK average.
'wha's like us?' myths of a warm-hearted and liberal
nation had long been reinforced by head-shaking (but
secretly delighted) disapproval as English football thugs
laid waste another foreign city. Bereft of such distractions,