Month: October 2022

The new economic case for independence – Five Key Takeaways

Speymouth October 17, 2022

Business for Scotland didn’t comment when the Sustainable Growth Commission report was published. It was too conservative for us on spending, undersold Scotland’s economic potential – both for growth and in wellbeing terms – and the conditions for the introduction of a Scottish pound were overly restrictive. We have no such reservations about today’s economic […] Source

Building a winning case

Speymouth October 16, 2022

On Saturday, a full 48 hours before the publication of the Scottish government’s paper setting out the economic case for independence and its plans for the currency and the border with England, Blair Mcdougall, the former chief of Better Together was tweeting the imminent release of a video which he claimed…

An Architectural Brigadoon: The Two Fires of Glasgow School of Art

Speymouth October 16, 2022

Glasgow Cool of Art: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library, by Johnny Rodger, The Drouth, 2022, pp 170.  For all their remarkable persistence, cities are made from fragile components. Buildings, roads, railways, pavements, sewers, canals, bridges, parks, telegraph poles… every part of the great glorious mess demands constant human attention otherwise it will […] Source

Trauma Zone UK

Speymouth October 16, 2022

The new Adam Curtis documentary ‘Trauma Zone’ is about the build-up to the Putin era. Its premise is the idea that for a very long time everyone in that society knew that nothing really worked anymore but there was nothing they could do about it. “In 1992 Russia began an experiment in extreme capitalism…” As […] Source

Robbie Coltrane – A Not So Still Life

Speymouth October 15, 2022

I only ever met Robbie Coltrane once. That was in 2005, when I interviewed him for the Herald newspaper a week or so before he opened in Peter McDougall’s short play, The Brother’s Suit. We met in the now long closed BBC Club, a stone’s throw from BBC Scotland’s then HQ on Queen Margaret Drive […] Source

The new Tory magazine: Chancellor Monthly

Speymouth October 14, 2022

Liz Truss has attempted to save her political career by throwing her Chancellor under the bus and sacking him for doing what she wanted him to do and making a screeching U-turn on her flagship policy, announcing that she will not after all be cutting Corporation Tax but will instead be…

The growing distrusst in the Tories

Speymouth October 13, 2022

It’s day two in the court case that is only happening because the Conservatives and their Labour fellow travellers refuse to accept the democratic will of the people of Scotland as expressed through the ballot box in last year’s Scottish Parliament elections. As far as those parties are concerned Scottish democracy…