Just before the Chancellor Rachel Reeves made her Spring Budget statement this week, the Guardian newspaper published a story reporting on the new austerity cuts that she was set to announce, the headline ran: “Further benefits cuts planned as Rachel Reeves forced to find extra £1.6bn.” This headline is, to put…

It cost £2.3 million, it lasted four years. It originated in a politically motivated complaint from a notorious attention seeker with a habit of making nuisance complaints to the police, but Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform has finally come to an end – without any charges being brought against former first minister…

The head of the DWP, the Department of Wickedness and Persecution, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, the mad axe-woman of Westminster, today announced the biggest cuts ever to sickness and disability benefits, kicking away the crutches of some of the most vulnerable in society. The scale of the cuts is…

You may not have noticed, on account of doing something far more engrossing, like de-fluffing your navel, but last week Scotland was ‘graced’ – I use the term advisedly – by a visit from Russell Findlay’s boss Kemi Badenoch, a woman who makes the notoriously ill-tempered and uptight deputy leader of…

Labour’s plan to target the disabled and the long term sick have been widely trailed in advance. The final details are to be announced at the end of this month, but it is expected that those on long term sickness benefits will come under greater pressure to find work or risk…

Reform UK’s Nigel Farage mini-me, the notoriously bad tempered Richard Tetchy, sorry, Tice, was in Scotland this week in order to pretend that he and Farage’s private limited company masquerading as a democratically constituted far right English nationalist party actually care about Scotland. Spoiler alert, he failed miserably. It has been…

Anyone who’s not a fan of Putin or who hasn’t drunk deep of the MAGA Kool-Aid was horrified by the disgusting scenes in the Oval Office yesterday when America’s extortionist in chief and his pet rodent JD Vance ambushed the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was in Washington DC ostensibly to…

My friend Mary (known to her family as Maureen) Docherty passed away this morning. Mary was a huge lover of Scotland and a long time supporter of independence. Mary was one of the first people I met through this blog. Back in the blog’s early days, before the independence referendum when…

Nigel Farage, the man who makes you wish for a time machine so you could go back to the 1960s and insist his father used a condom, has announced that he’s planning a trip to Scotland in order to boost his far right band of millionaire enabling English ethno-nationalists in plenty…

Labour held its Scottish conference in Glasgow over the weekend. Naturally, it featured U-turn Sarwar and the pantomime Dame misrepresenting NHS Scotland, never mind that Labour is making a far worse job of running the NHS in Wales. Anas Sarwar is his own man, he makes his own decisions, and it’s…

This weekend sees the Labour party’s Scottish conference in Glasgow, when it was planned, it was going to be a triumphal occasion when Labour gloated about the destruction of the SNP, Labour’s impending return to power in Holyrood with Anas Sarwar as the next First Minister, and the final putting to…

Yet another Scottish opinion poll, this time by Norstat (formerly known as Panelbase) for the Sunday Times has confirmed the picture that is becoming clear from other recent opinion polling, Anas Sarwar and the Labour party in Scotland are in deep, deep trouble and unless there is some miracle between now…

This week, yet another UK- wide opinion poll put Nigel Farage’s hard right anti-immigrant fan club Reform UK ltd. in poll position in Westminster voting intention. The poll, by YouGov, gave the Faragistes 26%, Labour 25% and the Tories 21%. This was shortly followed by another poll, this time carried out…

We have become so used to the lies and betrayals of the Labour party that a term for them has entered the language, ‘jam tomorrow’. The term was first used in the Lewis Caroll novel Alice Through the Looking-Glass, published in 1871, but by the latter half of the 20th century…

You could be forgiven for forgetting that Keir Starmer used to be a human rights lawyer, after all, Keir Starmer seems to have forgotten too. The world was in shock on Wednesday morning after Donald Trump announced that he had unilaterally torn up the two state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem…