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Margo Macdonald, 19 April
1943 – 4 April 2014
Who you are and what you do
obviously overlap but some public
figures make a significant statement by
their personality and character. That was
certainly true of Margo for reasons that
varied in different periods. In the 1970s
when she won the Govan by-election
and became a senior office-bearer in the
SNP, by being a politically successful
young woman with strong opinions and
confidence in her identity she put down
an important marker for women and
left nationalist politics. She personified
a more confident and assertive Scotland
for many ordinary people. But not
all. I remember canvassing in the 1978
Hamilton by-election and a woman in a
working-class area of Larkhall telling me
that she wouldn’t vote for Margo because
“she talked just like people around here”.
That comes into the same category as
a comment from the early seventies –
“nobody’s going to buy our oil”. The
deferential Scot was still with us then;
hopefully much less so now. Margo was
part of that transformation in the selfconfidence of non-elite Scots.
In the early years of Holyrood
the contribution was rather different.
The public welcomed having an
‘unwhippable’ voice in the land of the
bland and predictable. Because of her
more difficult relationship with the SNP
leadership, she lost some influence on
the party’s direction but she contributed
instead to public support for the new
parliament by showing that
there were independent voices and there
could be refreshingly open debate. Were
people going to identify with the Scottish
Parliament or become just as cynical
about it as they were about Westminster?
Having MSPs, of whom Margo was
outstandingly one, whom they could
identify and with whom they could
identify was important in those years.
In her last years she certainly didn’t
stop being a politician with strong views
on mainstream issues but her courage
and determination in continuing in such
an active role despite a very debilitating
illness. She didn’t just do the minimum
required by the job; she did much more
despite great difficulty in basic mobility.
She took on a major legislative change
which she knew would face intense
institutional opposition and would be
personally stressful. When it failed, she
took it forward again. Since we know
that the great majority of the public
support this carefully drafted assisted
suicide bill, it is reasonable to assume
that personally a majority of MSPs also
support it. Let us hope that this time
they have the courage to stand up to
the institutional pressures as Margo was
always prepared to do and support it.
Isobel Lindsay was a school friend of
Margo’s and a lifelong colleague