Scotland's Parliament: Devolution, the Media and Political Culture

This chapter considers the relationships between constitutional change, the news media, and the reshaping of political and communicative boundaries in the United Kingdom. We need to think again about these spaces because they are being reshaped from above and from below. The first source of pressure is the ineluctable march of the European Union into the heartlands of political life. And secondly, there is the imminent impact on the British state of an autonomous, national, Scottish polity, the first major step in a wider process of constitutional reform. Although the EU provides the wider framework for this discussion, the devolution of powers to a new Scottish parliament is my principal focus here. This is already propelling questions of media policy onto the public agenda in Scotland and provoking the development of a new political culture.