In news which has shocked all of Scotland, Alex Salmond has suddenly passed away while on a trip to North Macedonia. Whether you support Scottish independence or not, he was without doubt a giant of Scottish politics who transformed the Scottish political landscape for good, a truly monumental individual, and as…

Yet again Scotland’s languages are making the news, following on from Andrew Marr’s factually incorrect and ignorantly dismissive comments about Gaelic, for which he eventually apologised, this time it’s Scots which is the object of British nationalist ignorance. The graciousness free zone which is the Scottish Tory MSP for Mordor Stephen…

Keir Starmer’s government has not been in power for three months, but it is already shaping up to be as vile and corrupt as the Conservatives it replaced. A new poll has found that Starmer is now viewed as more sleazy than his predecessor Rishi Sunak. A YouGov poll asking people…

Keir Starmer’s hypocrisy is off the charts, over 43,000 Palestinians and Lebanese have died, the great majority innocent civilians, in Israeli attacks since October 7 last year, none of which have elicited much in the way of sympathy or concern from Keir Starmer, yet when Iran launched its missile attack on…

This is an expanded version of a piece I wrote for The National a few days ago. I’m reposting it here with some additions in the light of Marr’s apology for his insulting and ignorant comments about the Gaelic language and its place in Scottish culture. It’s the sad and ignorant…

Before Labour’s inevitable victory in July’s Westminster general election, I predicted that Starmer’s government would soon become very unpopular as voters realised that the ‘change’ which he had promised was no real change at all, it was simply the continuation of the same old damaging Tory neoliberal nostrums, delivered somewhat less…

On Wednesday it will be the tenth anniversary of the independence referendum. This is always a poignant time of year for me, not only because of the what might have been had Scotland grasped the thistle and chosen independence on that fateful day, but because this time of year is also…

It’s only been nine weeks but we already have resounding answer to the question of how much influence Labour’s Scottish branch office has over policy making in Keir Starmer’s government. The answer to that question is none at all. Prior to July’s Westminster general election Anas Sarwar loudly proclaimed that he…

Last weekend, there were elections in the Germans states of Thuringia and Saxony. In both these states the far right Alternative für Deutschland party, which favours the ‘repatriation’ of immigrants and even of some naturalised German citizens – the ones who are muslim or not white of course – performed alarmingly…

With the SNP conference about to start and the post mortem of the party’s poor performance in July’s Westminster general election under way, it’s fair to say that there is now general agreement within the wider Scottish independence movement that the independence strategy inherited from Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon is…

Words have a dictionary definition, they also have emotional colouring which can be either positive or negative, that emotional coloration is an essential part of the word’s meaning and it is disingenuous to use a word with a strongly negative emotional colouring and to pretend that your use of the word…

To paraphrase the famous phrase attributed to the American author Mark Twain, there’s lies, damn lies, and Westminster promises to Scotland. The respect agenda and the promise of greater devolution made to Scotland by the Better Together parties during 2014’s Scottish independence referendum were comprehensively trashed by the Conservatives in the…

Do you remember how during the SNP leadership contest in 2022 that Kate Forbes uttered some fairly measured criticisms of the record of her rival Humza Yousaf and the Scottish media dined out on how nasty and bitter the leadership race had become? It’s the Scottish Tories’ turn for a leadership…

This decision has been brewing for a while now, but it’s time to give up on Twitter, a platform which has now been comprehensively captured by racists, the far right and the culture warriors. Twitter was always problematic, but since it was taken over by controversial billionaire Elon Musk it has…

There’s a striking feature of the media’s coverage of the outbreak of far right violence which has overtaken much of England in recent days. For the most part it is being presented as a British issue when it is in fact an English one. The Sunday Times has the headline “Riots…