This week was a very special moment for me. That’s right, in about my 50th watching of the West Wing I came to one of my favourite moments, the scene where James Taylor sings the Sam Cooke classic, A Change is Gonna Come.
Scottish and UK politics have certainly seen their fair share of change of the past few years with a lot more seemingly on the horizon, be that Brexit or the on-going constitutional debates. More broadly, however, there has been a change in the nature of politics and the role of the state leading to a dramatic polarisation of views on a number of issues and a more deep-seated anger at the political culture which shapes all of our lives.
Most recently this anger has rightly been levelled at the sexual misconduct scandals at Westminster but this has spread to Holyrood in the past two weeks with the resignation of a Scottish Government Minister and the Scottish Labour Party literally now having no leadership following the allegations levelled at Interim and Deputy Leader, Alex Rowley.
At least by Saturday there should be a modicum of clarity for Scottish Labour as the party chooses a new Leader to replace Kezia Dugdale who resigned at the end of August. That will either be Anas Sarwar MSP, the current Shadow Health Minister, or Richard Leonard MSP, newly elected to Parliament in 2016 but well known in the party from his previous role as Leader of the GMB Union in Scotland.
Meanwhile, the First Minister has been to London to visit Theresa May to discuss the implications of Brexit. It doesn’t seem like there was much outcome to the discussions, with the biggest resulting news story a tweet from the PM seeming to imply that Scotland was separate from the UK, perhaps just crowning off another bad week for Mrs May.
At Orbit, we have also been working on a number of what might be described as ‘change projects’, not least our own expansion and rebranding. This has meant adding four new members to our team to expand our capabilities to cover brand development, website design & SEO and digital marketing as well as rebranding ourselves and creating a new website.