A time of year for Celtic demon wrestling

THREE days after the astonishing finale to the Holyrood election campaign, some folk are coping better than others with the result. Jack McConnell hasn't yet formally acknowledged the SNP victory, ex-Labour minister Allan Wilson is threatening legal action over his 48-vote defeat in Cunninghame North, and some papers suggest the London-based Cosa Scotia - Gordon Brown and Sir Menzies Campbell - are hatching a third Labour/Lib Dem pact to see Alex Salmond and the Nationalists off. Enough.

It seems some people must explore all democratic dead ends and culs-de-sac before they can accept a change of direction. But the public has demanded it. And the media should stop fanning the dying flames of denial and dissent. Because there are bigger fish to fry. The change we are facing in Scotland is certainly historic. But it's nothing compared to the change our cousins in Northern Ireland are preparing to face tomorrow.

While Scotland and Wales are grappling with the indigestible (minority rule, horse trading and coalition), Northern Ireland will witness the utterly inconceivable when Stormont resumes with Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sitting side by side at the helm. The "Ulster" public is holding its collective breath to see if their First and Deputy First Ministers can even speak to one another. To have arrived here, Irish politicians have had to defeat feelings of bitterness and memories of violence more recent and vicious than anything Scottish politicians or voters can imagine.

All the Celtic countries - Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland - are now wrestling with their own demons. Trying to contain contradictions instead of feeding them. The Scots, like the Northern Irish, are trying to evolve new systems that bring diversity to government without loss of focus or direction. If Hugh MacDiarmid were alive today - "I'd aye be whaur extremes meet," - he should be delighted. From today, extremes must meet within government. Scotland 2007 is now a land where power must be shared to be realised - where the voting system means one party states are a thing of the past.

The Scottish Parliament must now be the plural place Scotland has always been.

The SNP victory has produced an underweight baby - a difficult birth after a long arduous labour. But the new, uncertain democratic life created at 5:30pm on 4 May is precious. And not just to those who conceived it. Try snuffing it out, and I'd wager even some Labour supporters will cry foul. If Jack, Gordon, Nicol and Sir Ming want to know what it feels like to be shunned in their own homeland, they simply need to try and engineer a stitch-up now.

Doubtless, coalition building may take days or weeks. But Alex Salmond could build momentum by announcing his intention to hand the decision on an independence referendum to a Constitutional Convention - very much as Mr Brown handed interest-rate setting power almost immediately to the Bank of England.

Key parts of civic society could use the time to correct shortcomings exposed by the 3 May voting debacle.

The Electoral Commission needs to restore faith in the various voting systems by telling us exactly what went wrong, fast. It's a case of publish or see PR be damned.

BBC network news producers should revise their election coverage while its greater absurdities are still fresh in the mind. On Friday's 10 o'clock News, Huw Edwards announced (and I roughly paraphrase): "In the elections, the Conservatives are top with 40 per cent of the vote. Our political editor, Nick Robinson is in Edinburgh to tell us more about the SNP's landslide."

Makes sense of that if you can. The London BBC cannot. Nor can the unitary British state it was invented to reflect. It seems that any event in Britain in which London does not participate is deemed "local". And when several "local" events take place simultaneously, the English one achieves pseudo national status, because it affects more voters.

Certain phrases made meaningless by the wasted votes farce should be redefined forthwith. "Turn-out", we're told was roughly 50 per cent. In fact "turn-out" was roughly 60 per cent because those who made mistakes were excluded (mistakes we still call "spoiling" the paper, even though there is no evidence of malicious intent).

Language and attitude must change because the "young" Celtic parliaments must test and stretch what's meant by government, or face massive disillusionment a few years down the line.

The test facing the SNP is far bigger than the immediate horse-trading exercise with Nicol Stephen. The next government must reclaim Scotland's talent from the margins, from contrarianism, bitterness, exclusion and self damaging behaviour. The task quite simply is to create more human wealth. Just as Marx argued wealth must be accumulated before redistribution, so human wealth must be accumulated in Scotland before the Nationalists try to take its people any further along the road to independence. Scotland's main resource has always been its wealth of knowledge. Our glory days slipped away with the greed of the British Empire - when Scots became adept at stealing wealth from Africa and Asia instead of creating it at home. A return to genuine wealth creation can only be achieved by liberating the human talent that's been stifled by centuries of under-achievement and decades of red tape, consultation-itis, duplication, over-government, project-mania and quangocracy.

The immediate future is not independence actually. But liberation of the national psyche. And that's no small task.