Porous and Resilient: Tales From a Cancelled Country, ed. by Alan McMunnigall, Brian Hamill & Stuart Blackwood

Citation

McKeever GL (2016) Porous and Resilient: Tales From a Cancelled Country, ed. by Alan McMunnigall, Brian Hamill & Stuart Blackwood. Review of: Tales from a Cancelled Country: An Anthology of Fiction, ed. Alan McMunnigall, Brian Hamill & Stuart Blackwood, Glasgow: thi wurd books, 2015, 166pp. ISBN: 9780993175800. Glasgow Review of Books. https://glasgowreviewofbooks.com/2016/05/06/porous-and-resilient-tales-from-a-cancelled-country-ed-by-alan-mcmunnigall-brian-hamill-stuart-blackwood/

Abstract
First paragraph: Back in early April, Darren “Loki” McGarvey wrote a piece for STV in which he explained why he would not be voting SNP in this year’s Holyrood election. Reflecting on his own experiences of social deprivation in Scotland, he articulated a sense of discomfort with SNP policy being expressed by many on the left. The alliances formed under the pro-independence banner for 2014 were always fragile, always contingent. The energy of the Yes campaign was drawn from discourses of social justice and while there were disparate views offered by the Greens, the SSP, within the broad church of the SNP and well beyond the confines of party politics, a temporary will to collaborate prevailed. Yet for McGarvey, Nicola Sturgeon’s government had since revealed its flirtation with radical politics as rhetorical window dressing, shrouding “a tolerance for low taxation coupled with moderate incremental reform.”

Journal
Glasgow Review of Books