Tamil Referendum in Glasgow

Maryhill has a special place in urban folklore. It’s the spiritual home of Partick Thistle, a gangland where the Maryhill Fleet once roamed, and for the fearful bourgeoisie of Glasgow’s west end it’s “bandit country”, just beyond the Byres Road.

Yesterday, Maryhill defied the new world order to play a minor role on the epic stage of global politics. At 8.30am, shops lifted their shutters and the rattling noise of corrugated metal woke the dead. A queue of voters huddled together in the damp cold, waiting outside Woodside Hall in Glenfarg Street to cast a precious vote for Eelam, which means homeland in Tamil. Maryhill was chosen as a polling station in a global referendum organised by expatriate Tamils in their tense stand-off with Sri Lanka, a country that has resisted their independence.

Woodside Hall has the air of dank municipality — it’s more accustomed to jumble sales and ska discos than making history — but the Maryhill referendum is a fascinating story of democracy withheld, with more plotlines than a political thriller and enough constitutional twists to send Scotland’s political intelligentsia into paroxysms of near-erotic delight.

Full article via Sunday Times webpage here.

the political baground here.