Scottish independence. An analysis of speeches made by Jack McConnell

Abstract

The Scotland Act 1998 created the Scottish Parliament and Executive. The First Minister of Scotland is the head of the Scottish Executive. Since 2001, Jack McConnell has been the First Minister of Scotland. In this Master’s Thesis I present an analysis of six speeches made by Jack McConnell between 2003 and 2006, to see if he is establishing a political discourse that contains an image of Scotland as an autonomous political unit. It seems from the evidence of those six speeches that the First Minister of Scotland is not establishing a political discourse that contains an image of Scotland as an autonomous political unit. To help explain the First Minister’s decision not to create an image of Scotland as an autonomous political unit my work draws on three hypotheses. These three hypotheses are the political party constraint, the political constraint and the financial constraint hypothesis. Discourse analysis is the methodological approach, with the work of Laclau & Mouffe and their concept of ‘hegemony’ as the centrepiece of the analysis.