Author: Speymouth

The change Labour promises is just more of the same

Speymouth October 23, 2023

Last week, Labour won two by elections in formerly safe Conservative seats in Tamworth in Staffordshire and Mid Bedfordshire, in both cases Labour overturned huge Conservative majorities. In Tamworth the Conservatives had won 66.3% of the vote at the general election in 2019, making it one of the safest Conservative seats…

Falling Down

Speymouth October 22, 2023

Paul Tritschler’s longform essay on hope and despair… The old man always made one room presentable. Apart from the milkman, the meter man, the insurance man, or indeed me (a neighbourhood message boy), there was rarely a visitor, but it was nevertheless his routine before opening the front door to close all others to conceal […] Source

In Defence of Democracy, Decency and Humanity

Speymouth October 22, 2023

The storms raging across Scotland are a reminder of our fragility to the natural world, or more particularly the unnatural one we’ve created. It’s become a cliche to talk of ‘climate change becoming real’, or ‘coming home’. but here it is. Here are your flash-floods, your landslides and sand-bags, your power-cuts and transport-system collapse. Here […] Source

The British failure of democracy in Scotland

Speymouth October 19, 2023

In some parallel universe where British democracy is a functioning reality and the Scottish media is fair, balanced, and truly representative of the views of the population it is supposed to serve, today, Thursday 19 October 2023, would have seen the holding of the second Scottish independence referendum, a referendum which…

After Winning, then What?

Speymouth October 17, 2023

One of our neighbours kindly invited us around to dinner, welcoming us newcomers to Shetland’s Westside. After a lovely meal, her 11 year old son invited me to a game of chess and I accepted with every intention of letting him win. But somehow, deep cultural conditioning took over and I beat him. Twice. Raised […] Source

The BBC’s blink and you’d miss it SNP conference

Speymouth October 17, 2023

It’s the blink and you’d miss it SNP party conference, the conference of the largest political party in Scotland, the party of the Scottish Government and the third largest party in the House of Commons entered its second day on Monday. Not that you’d know this from most of the British…

Featured Writers from the Vaults

Speymouth October 16, 2023

We continue our series of featured writers looking this week at some fine writing from our vaults. We celebrate Khutso Dunbar, who has written a piece for Black History Month ‘Celebrating and Saluting our Scottish Sisters‘ ; Talat Yaqoob who has recently written on Russell Brand and the ‘culture of entitlement’; and Donna McLean who […] Source