I’m afraid I’m currently dealing with some family issues so won’t be blogging for a little while. My mother’s health has taken a turn for the worse and she is currently in hospital. I will be back when things settle down a bit.   _______________________________________________ My Gaelic maps of Scotland are…

On Saturday, as thousands demonstrated in the street outside his constituency office in protest against his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and to unequivocally condemn the war crimes currently being committed by the Israeli armed forces against Palestinian civilians, the Labour leader Keir Starmer unapologetically tweeted: “I changed…

On Wednesday in the House of Commons the SNP tabled an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for an immediate ceasefire in the conflict in Israel and Gaza which by Wednesday evening had claimed almost 13,000 lives, 1200 in Israel and over 11,500 in Gaza, including at least 4,710 children and…

Rishi Sunak’s big shtick was that he was the ‘change’ candidate, just a few short weeks ago he was telling the Tory party conference that British politics have been locked into a cosy and damaging short termist consensus for the past thirty years and that he was the guy who was…

The world is becoming a very dark and dangerous place. It’s not only the continuing war in Ukraine and the destruction and death being wrought in the Middle East, but there is also the alarming rise of fascism in Western countries. In the USA the Republicans have turned into an overtly…

One of the loudest claims of Better Together during the 2014 independence referendum campaign was that the Westminster system guaranteed vastly superior standards of democracy and civil liberties than anything Scotland could provide for itself, and that in an independent Scotland peaceful protest and the espousal of constitutional positions opposed to…

There’s something striking about the Scottish media’s treatment of the current constitutional impasse blocking the path to a second independence referendum. The Scottish media portrays this as exclusively a problem for the SNP, and no consideration is given to the anti-democratic stance of the British nationalist parties in both blocking any…

Keir Starmer is a coward. During Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday Starmer had six questions for Rishi Sunak, not one of which related to the topic which dominates the news headlines and which it’s no exaggeration to say threatens the outbreak of actual world war three. But it still wasn’t important…

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…

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…

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…

The SNP party conference is due to start in Aberdeen on Sunday, nevertheless that didn’t stop a reporter on Sky News as the Labour conference came to a close this week remarking that the end of the Labour conference brought the party conference season to a close. The SNP is still…

This is an expanded and extended version of an article I wrote for The National on Friday. There’s only really one story in town this weekend in Scottish politics, Labour’s not entirely unexpected win in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by election. There is no denying that the result is a…

The Conspiracy party conference has finally drawn to a shambolic close. The day after the Tory party conference ends always feels a bit like the first time you go outside after being ill with projectile vomiting and diarrhoea for a few days. Your head is slowly clearing but you still have…

I’m a bit late with this blog piece because I had a physiotherapy appointment on Friday and then we had friends from London staying over for the weekend. But things are back on track now. Last week Keir Starmer was in Scotland to insist that Labour is “the change that Scotland…