On:
In: Margaret Hamilton

Not so long ago I seem to remember the unionists criticising the S.N.P. for wrapping themselves in the Saltire as though this was a bad thing to do. Fast forward to this past week when the Scottish Conservatives have changed their logo. They have attempted to use the Saltire while trying to keep it incorporated in the Union Flag (please note flag, not jack!). Two shades of blue slashes with a slash of red. Rather obviously this has been named the double cross logo. Were P.R. or design people paid for this?   What’s in a Name? Meanwhile poor Jim Murphy just cannot keep upRead More →

On:
In: Clare Adamson

I was shocked to read in my local press this week that Labour controlled North Lanarkshire Council’s education chiefs are paying private firms £729million to build schools worth around just a fifth of that amount. North Lanarkshire Council have saddled a generation of taxpayers with an enormous debt by entering into a 31-year Private Finance Initiative to build schools. The local authority says the arrangement provides “excellent education in first-class facilities” for children. But so does prudential borrowing without the huge costs. PPP/ PFI funding has been widely condemned for offering poor value for money and this is why it was replaced by the SNPRead More →

On:
In: Uncategorized

The days since the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement have been marked by vicious and very personal attacks on the Scottish Government and Alex Salmond in particular.  For once the genesis of this is not in hatred of the SNP, Alex Salmond or the thought of Independence.  It is a reaction to the sudden recognition of how damaging the Edinburgh Agreement is to the Unionist cause by those that purport to represent it. So obsessed were David Cameron and his array of Labour and LibDem helpers in Better Together in ensuring that only one question would be put before the people of Scotland, they completelyRead More →

On:
In: Uncategorized

Last week was a fairly bad week for the Party, and there’s no getting away from that. Two resignations in the Parly group and a host of bad headlines about legal advice – and everyone’s lining up to give the government a kicking. It’s true that many of the activists are unhappy about Nato – I’d count myself amongst that. But then, it would be a very small party if everyone had to agree with every single policy, and the basic premise that people put aside differences to work for a common cause of a nuclear-free independent Scotland still holds true today as it hasRead More →

On:
In: Margaret Hamilton

I write this the day after S.N.P. conference finished. I saw on Facebook this morning that Douglas Fraser has likened the S.N.P. leadership’s control over the membership as akin to North Korean control. He really must get out of the press box when at these affairs. As in all large groups there will be the sheep that blindly follow the leadership but in the S.N.P. there are many who question and debate, sometimes vote with the leadership, sometimes don’t. I reckon this number is possibly reflected in the numbers in the result on the N.A.T.O. debate. Talking of which, the N.A.T.O. debate was the firstRead More →

On:
In: Jim Lynch

I was privileged to be at St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh this week and to see the arrival, and departure, of Prime Minister David Cameron and his entourage, all five cars of them.  Access to the public was denied to the street outside, with somewhere between twenty and thirty police on duty.  The most memorable moment of that event was when Michael Moore MP was going into St Andrew’s House and one of the assembled press called out “How does it feel to be the last Secretary of State for Scotland?”;  Mr Moore just carried on, but as I observed at the time, he wasRead More →

On:
In: Clare Adamson

I saw Douglas Alexander on the Politics Show trying to defend the indefensible: the Labour Party’s lurch to the right.   In doing so he quoted Aneurin Bevan, or should I say misquoted as he reversed Bevan’s original sentence “The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism”.  Bevan coined this phrase for his 1949 Labour conference speech. But perhaps Mr Alexander and other Labour politicians should read the 1959 speech ten years later and following Labour’s defeat in the general election, where Bevan references himself but also goes on to say: “.. The language of priorities was the religion of Socialism, and there is nothingRead More →

On:
In: Garry Knox

Meteors lighting up the clear night sky and glorious sunshine by day.  The gods had clearly blessed the first March and Rally for Independence. And what a great day was had by all 12,000 of us as we greeted friends from across the country and made our way from the autumnal colours of the Meadows to the splendour of a Princes Street Gardens still in summer bloom.  The azure sky provided a saltire-style background for all the tartans of Scotland and the standards of nearly every political movement in the country.  Further colour was added by our Catalan, Basque, Flemish and Venetian brothers and sistersRead More →

On:
In: Jim Lynch

It was my “pleasure” to turn on the TV a couple of weeks ago to be regaled with the Chancellor of the Exchequer , George Osborne, waxing lyrical about the dangerous situation of independence.  Now I have nothing against the dinner suit and black tie, I have one myself, rarely worn these days, but the sight of this harbinger of doom pontificating on the perils of independence while being responsible for even greater dangers to the disunited kingdom bordered on the ridiculous.  That’s an understatement, it did not border on the ridiculous, it was ridiculous. Three things emanate from this episode;  the first is thatRead More →

On:
In: Jennifer Dunn

It hasn’t taken long for newly elected SNP councillors to make their mark on Glasgow politics. This week, Feargal Dalton will put forward a motion to full council, calling for a memorial to the victims of famine to be built on the city. The memorial will commemorate the Irish Potato Famine, the Highland Potato Famine, and victims of past and current famines from across the world. There are famine memorials, particularly associated with the Irish Potato Famine, already in many cities in Ireland, the UK and further afield. Cardiff and Liverpool, which acted as a major transit point for both Irish people arriving in EnglandRead More →