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  Ma freen wis a big shoat gowfer Noo fawin doon tae an auld loafer Wha cam tae Bute tae retire the green Whaur he’d won the Bennie at seeventeen. Waaker Cup an Scottish Champ, Noo he shuffles aboot like ony tramp Wance he bate the Inglish, ten nane They looed the pro wha recitet poems fur thaim. Lit up their  wunnerfu lives at kenspeckle dinners An made them aw feel like gowfin winners. How borin, tae live yer lives Wi ten caurs up yer castle drive A bank o yer ain and fower ‘wives’!   But when he cam here, did he get askedRead More →

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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 →

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Given the Brexit vote many unionists, both elected members and ordinary members, are re-considering their previous loyalty to their political party and are recognising that as Nicola has said the Union that they had previously supported no longer exists and that it now looks like only full Independence for Scotland can protect Scotland’s place in the EU. The former Presiding Officer last week urged me to write an article outlining what I had gone through when I left the Conservative Party in 1985 to join the SNP. I was quite chuffed that she wanted me to do so, until she went on to explain thatRead More →

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I am a political junkie – there I have said it out loud!  Not that there has ever been any doubt about my status. There is a family joke that infers that should there be a by-election in say, Outer Mongolia, then I will stay up all night to watch the results as they come in!  There may just be a grain of truth in this as, since becoming franchised some 5o years ago, I have always known how I would vote and have campaigned with passion and commitment for an Independent Scotland. In fact, it is probably true to say that I “live andRead More →

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by Steve Daley Scotland’s economy is strong with certain sectors such as the construction sector outperforming the rest of the UK. However Scotland’s economy recently has been slowing for the last two consecutive quarters. Tourism is a huge part of Scotland’s economy with an expenditure of nearly of nearly £5 billion and with 40 percent of that coming from oversea students It has been noted numerous times how British Air Passenger Duty (APD) is the most expensive air passenger tax in the world with only five other European countries using this regressive tax.  With APD being devolved to the Scottish Parliament, it is no surpriseRead More →

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There is little doubt these years are proving increasingly impossible for Labour but I believe the key moment occurred many years previously, in the mid 1990’s. The SNP Executive Committee had to make a key strategic decision, to join the Constitutional Convention or to remain on the outside. The Executive was divided with some favouring joining with the Unionist parties and others, myself included, who were firm in our belief that if the SNP stayed on the outside, keeping the pressure on and threatening electoral defeat on the unionists if there was any backsliding then that was the best way of ensuring a new ScottishRead More →

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Former Professor of Media Politics at the University of the West of Scotland, Dr John Robertson writes ‘So, on the objective evidence presented here, the mainstream TV coverage of the first year of the independence referendum campaigns has not been fair or balanced. Taken together, we have evidence of coverage which seems likely to have damaged the Yes campaign.’ Roughly two years ago, in January 2014, as a member of no political party, I concluded an interim research report, titled Fairness in the First Year, on BBC and STV/ITV coverage of issues, relevant to the outcome of the forthcoming Scottish Independence Referendum, with the aboveRead More →

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So at the end of last year I was looking on the web , as you do , and an event caught my attention – the SNP will host it’s first ever conference specifically for Disabled Members, so I contacted them to see if I could get involved in any way. They asked me if I would like to do a workshop and I said yes , I am co-running the workshop with my good friend Fran Macilvey, an author and public speaker from Edinburgh. Fran, like myself, was born with Cerebral Palsy and has shared her life experiences in her autobiography “Trapped- My LifeRead More →

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At the start of the year we bring you an article by Iain Lawson. Many of you will know him. He explains who he is if the first part of the piece. I write this in the last few days of 2015 which has been a brilliant year for those of us who support Independence. We deserved it after the enormous disappointment of the referendum where despite a great campaign and the conversion of hundreds of thousands of our fellow Scots to Independence, we narrowly failed to win. Unionists I am sure hoped that was the end of it but as we all know nowRead More →

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I think it is important to do a column from a disability point of view on independence, from my perspective I campaign and advocate for people with a disability every day, I have a greater insight than most as I have Cerebral Palsy. I was very disappointed that Scotland lost the Yes Vote by such a narrow margin, but it is perhaps an early indicator that one day we will get our independence. In the lead up there were a number of different campaigns running, such as Disabled For Yes representing people with disabilities who recognise the advantages of independence. The realisation the campaign aimsRead More →