Carlos Alba: Is Sarwar right to channel his inner Thatcher?

For someone who never ventured north of the Border if she could possibly avoid it, there’s a bitter irony that Margaret Thatcher continues to command such an influential – and divisive – influence on the way Scotland is run.

More than 30 years after she left office, and 11 years after she died, the big political questions here continue to be discussed and resolved in the context of how close or distant they are to the decisions made by her government.

For an entire generation, Thatcher unwittingly set the parameters for the kind of country Scotland wanted to be. For most Scots who lived through the 1980s or, like me, who came of age during that decade, the answer was clear - not the kind you have in mind, Prime Minister.

For us, the most seismic political event of the 1990s was not the birth of New Labour or the creation of a Scottish Parliament, but the fact that, in the 1997 General Election, not a single Tory MP was returned north of the Border.

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Even after all this time, Scotland’s political lexicon is framed by references, both explicit and implicit, to the party of Thatcher and her enduring legacy.

Last autumn, Sir Keir Starmer sought to detonate a controlled explosion by praising the former prime minister’s “driving sense of purpose”, as a dog whistle to a particular section of the, mainly English, electorate that he is seeking to cultivate ahead of the impending general election.

While the gambit appeared to have the desired effect, north of the Border it set off a firestorm, with Humza Yousaf taking to Twitter to fulminate against the Labour leader’s ‘insult to Scotland’.

Margaret Thatcher's legacy still resonates in Scotland (Image: PA)

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