Not unbelievable at all. A coalition of pro-indy parties, with a strong component of left-green in that coalition, is my own personal preference for the outcome of a 2016 independence general election. What party structures may manifest that... we'll have to see.

Great response, Iain. One of the things we're searching for in YesScotland, given plurality of movement, is great unifying positives - and I think a "YES Scotland - NO Trident" demonstration is one of those. No matter what one thinks of the conventionalism of the SNP leadership, they cannot touch the commitment to getting rid of Trident. Even the victorious side has made it a disqualifying condition for NATO membership - add to that, Salmond's commitment to write non-nuclear status and anti-proliferation into a Scottish constitution. A serious show of feet'n'noise around this would be very useful, IMO.

Great response, Iain. One of the things we're searching for in YesScotland, given plurality of movement, is great unifying positives - and I think a "YES Scotland - NO Trident" demonstration is one of those. No matter what one thinks of the conventionalism of the SNP leadership, they cannot touch the commitment to getting rid of Trident. Even the victorious side has made it both a disqualifying condition for NATO membership - add to that Salmond's commitment to write non-nuclear status and anti-proliferation into a Scottish constitution. A serious show of feet'n'noise around this would be very useful, IMO.

The Centre For Interdisciplinary Methodologies sounds a bit like my Kindle library... but also sounds like a lush gig Will. Will dive into those links greedily.

Hi Leigh Fascinating comment, I'm clearly not well versed enough in the competing politics of community / regeneration investment (though I should be, clearly, as a fan of Variant and its critique for many years). My positive reading of Creative Places was precisely because it threw its criterion net much wider than Florida's hyper-competitive Creative Class grid (which he intensified with his later "What City Are You" work). You equate such culturally-oriented regeneration competitions with "broken-window" policing. I think that's harsh. In terms of the conviviality and festivity of an "area" - and we'll come to the constructions of community in a minute - is it so bad to turn to your cultural, affective, practical and historical resources? What has El Sistema done for the Raploch, for example? Or what of the Govan Folk University at the Pearse Institute I lectured at recently, who were excited at the idea of constructing a narrative about creativity between themselves, Gal Gael, Govan Film City and the Centre for Human Ecology, focussed by the CS competition? The question is whether the local "meshwork" catalyzed by a bid for the money is intrinsically worthwhile in itself to build, whether they get the award or not. I accept to some degree your anxiety about competition. But the question is whether something as genuinely interesting as East Kilbride's CraftTownScotland becomes an examplar for a general ambition for places to combine self-production, arts and culture, community power. That is, beyond the three years that the Creative Places competition runs, what wisdom does it feed back into Scottish government rationality about how to support and nurture a higher quality-of-life in Scotland's towns and villages? To me that's the value of Creative Places - but I'm wondering what your alternative would be. And please understand that much of this happens, for me, within a much wider framework (outlined by Tim Jackson and New Economics Foundation) of a post-consumerist, low-carbon lifestyle as demanded by our threatened planetary boundaries. Only a systemic investment in the "quality" of Scottish lifestyles, rather than just their economic "quantity", will to my mind shift the governing imperative away from "GDP-as-usual".