All too often, the massed rows behind Nicola Sturgeon at FMQs can resemble a scene from one of Stalin’s party congresses. Row after row of poker-faced nationalists dutifully banging their desks at the latest edict from on high, interjecting occasionally with the latest pre-approved attack line or standard softball question to the Dear Leader: an army of grey-suited cyber-men, without the heart.
Yet the counter-argument to such a model of uninspired conformity can be found in the form of John Mason MSP, the maverick member for Glasgow Shettleston since 2011. Over the past decade, the nationalist nut has been more of a fixture in the national headlines than Rod Stewart or Kirsty Gallacher, so often has he blundered inelegantly into the political spotlight.
Whether it was lauding the Irish Republican Army as ‘freedom fighters’ or conflating the national deficit with debt, comparing the Celtic child sex abuse scandal to tax avoidance or accusations of trivialising rape culture, Mason has been a mainstay of the Scottish press for longer than he or his colleagues would care to admit.
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