On:
In: Stephen Bird

  Although I was not at Annual Conference this year, I did enjoy watching much of it from home and I am delighted in one way to see the back of it.   Away back in the Spring of this year when we thought there was some political certainty, SNP Government, place in Europe etc we were looking forward to building our Local Government campaigns from the Autumn with candidates selected before Conference and campaign strategies in place. Such fond memories.   Then came what Macmillan called “events dear boy, events”.   First an unexpected contest for Deputy Leader and although it turned into aRead More →

On:
In: Jim Lynch

I was at the SNP Conference in Glasgow on Friday and Saturday last week and met many old friends and made some new ones.  As happened before, I feel the venue is too big, too many offshoots, but then again it is a pleasure to see so many people I do not recognise – once upon a time you would know most, but now we’re getting somewhere we have thousands of members.  It’s great.   Happily, we had no major rows, but then again, we do not wish them, the days when we could have a public dispute are largely gone, our enemies, particularly thoseRead More →

On:
In: Grant Thoms

Every day it seems, another No voter makes the case for why an independent Scotland is right, now. The disillusionment with the Brexit Britain they find themselves in is turning even some of the most ardent Unionists into Independistas.   From either ends of the political spectrum – Paul Mason on the Corbynite left to Allan Massie on the right – there is a sense that the case for Scotland ploughing its own furrow as a modern European democracy is gathering pace.   Whilst there is a growing groupthink that Scotland in Europe is a much more viable position, equally there is a recognition thatRead More →

On:
In: Stephen Bird

It’s perhaps worth bearing in mind that under normal circumstances we would be heading headlong to another General Election at a rate of knots. That many, perhaps most, commentators do not assume so is largely down to the Fixed Term Parliament Act. This was a price the Tories paid to get back into Downing St on the back of the Libdems. But does it really matter? We currently have perhaps the most xenophobic and imperialist Government ever seen in the UK. Theresa May’s collective of zealots will be willing to make people pay any price just to prove that “Brexit means Brexit”. Collapse in sterling?Read More →

On:
In: Guest Blogger

I’ve always known and feared that a day like this would come, when the Government of the UK abandoned all pretence of decency and showed the ugly, snarling face beneath the mask. I’ve always known it was there, layered away, momentarily dormant but virulent in potential, ready to burst forth like a fever from the pores of the host. If you looked carefully you could sometimes spot its outline. In newspapers that had never quite abandoned their “glory days” of cheering on the blackshirts and who still spouted their vile xenophobia, often poorly and gratingly disguised as jocularity. In the rhetoric of the pet politiciansRead More →