SCOTLAND likes to describe itself as a civic-minded nation: one where everyone has a stake in shaping the country’s future.
But genuine inclusion isn’t just about being invited to the table after the agenda has already been set. It’s about who gets to help set that agenda in the first place. For many communities, particularly those whose voices are rarely centred in political life, that opportunity simply doesn’t exist in a form that’s accessible to them.
I saw this first-hand when I launched Chai Aur Chaat in Glasgow in the run-up to the 2026 Holyrood election, with one aim: to help South Asian women engage with the democratic process in a space designed around them.
We talked through the basics: what the Scottish Parliament actually does, the difference between a constituency and list vote, and party manifestos.
What struck me wasn’t just the turnout, but the appetite. The questions kept coming, the discussion kept going long after we’d planned to wrap up, and it became clear this couldn’t be a one-off.
These women aren’t “hard to reach”: a phrase I hear applied to communities like ours far too often. They’re easy to reach.
What’s missing is a space actually built for them: one that runs in a language native to them as well as English, which, as far as I’m aware, nothing else in Scotland’s civic landscape currently offers. It’s worth asking, though, how well does Holyrood itself reflect the Scotland these women are part of?
Scotland is more ethnically diverse than it has ever been, and on paper the current parliamentary session looks like progress, with eight MSPs of colour including Anas Sarwar, Irshad Ahmed, Yi-pei Chou Turvey, Iris Duane, Zen Ghani, Simita Kumar, Q Manivannan and Michelle Campbell, sitting across different parties and constituencies.
But progress on paper can mask a more fragile reality. Of the seven MSPs of colour elected in the previous session, six lost their seats entirely, meaning much of the current cohort is effectively new rather than representing a sustained increase in representation.
That matters because representation isn’t just about who’s in the chamber on any given day; it’s about whether people have the time to build expertise, shape policy, and open a pipeline for others to follow.
Consider Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s former first minister and first of colour, a milestone that only became possible because he’d already spent over a decade as a sitting MSP, building the standing needed to lead.
Or Sarwar, who lost his constituency seat at the last election but remains in parliament because, as his party’s leader, he was returned via the list vote.
These examples point to a system where representation for people of colour often depends on exceptional circumstances rather than being a stable, sustainable feature of how Holyrood works.
If parties want this kind of progress to mean something, they need to think seriously about how candidates of colour are supported into, and kept in seats over the longer term, not selected only when it’s politically convenient.
That instability is hard to track properly, too. There’s no official demographic audit of the Scottish Parliament, so even a basic picture of who’s elected, re-elected, or loses their seat has to be pieced together rather than published as a matter of course by the institutions responsible for it.
This is where some new research becomes relevant.
Pass the Mic, founded by the campaigner and researcher Talat Yaqoob, have worked with the university of Strathclyde to analyse coverage of Scottish Parliament elections, and one early finding they’ve shared publicly is stark: only 1.6% of those interviewed during their analysis of Scottish Parliament election coverage were women of colour.
The fuller findings are due to be published on June 29, and I’d encourage anyone interested in how our media shapes political life to register for the accompanying webinar.
Even on its own, that 1.6% figure tells us something important. Coverage isn’t just a mirror of who holds power, it’s part of what shapes who feels able to seek power in the first place, and who feels their views are worth seeking out at all.
If women of colour are almost entirely absent from the voices Scotland’s media turns to during election periods, that sends a message, whether intended or not: your perspective isn’t part of this conversation.
And that message lands on the woman who assumes politics isn’t for people like her, and on the young person who never sees anyone who looks like the women in their family, quoted on the issues affecting their community.
Invisibility in coverage and instability in representation aren’t separate problems; they reinforce each other and they’re exactly the gap that spaces like Chai Aur Chaat is trying to close from the ground up.
None of this is about which party governs Scotland, or scoring points across the political divide. Every party has a stake in a parliament, and a media, that reflects the country it serves. That’s a civic argument, not a partisan one, and it should not matter whether you’re a Unionist or a nationalist, whether you’ve lived in Scotland for generations or you’re a newer Scot building a life and a sense of belonging here.
So at the end of June, we’re bringing the group back together, this time to let them set the agenda. Over the coming months, we’ll be working through the topics they’ve told us matter most: education, finance, employment, domestic abuse, and how local councils actually work, among others.
On the surface, a network like this might look like a social gathering, in practice, it’s civic education: the kind that rarely makes it through a letterbox, and almost never reaches the women who need it most.
As we get ready for the next Chai Aur Chaat gathering, I’ll be thinking about both halves of this picture: the women who’ll be in that room, shaping the conversation rather than waiting to be asked into it, and the wider institutions, parliament, media, political parties, that have work to do in making sure people like them are seen, heard, and represented, not just welcomed in as an afterthought.
Because our voice matters. It’s time our institutions started acting like they believe that too.
Nuzhat Uthmani is a lecturer in primary education at University of Stirling and an anti-racist educator. David Pratt returns in two weeks.
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