Scots are said to be more left-wing than the English but there are plenty of other myths – and surprising truths – about our politics. Here are five of them examined.
Archives for July 2015
Stale old news from Hume and Salmond
It’s the silly season, so before turning to Alex Salmond’s wishful thinking about the inevitability of a second referendum on independence for Scotland, here is an amusing story about David Hume.
Corbynomics: economic reason and political fantasy?
Jeremy Corbyn’s economic programme has been dismissed as “a return to Bennism and the 1980s” but is in tune with the views of many mainstream economists. So where’s the beef?
The SNP’s fighting 56 could end up feeble
It was 27 years ago when the Jim Sillars, flush from winning the Govan by-election for the SNP, taunted Scottish Labour MPs for being the ‘feeble fifty’, unable to defend Scotland against the excesses of Thatcherism. As the Westminster parliament begins its summer recess, we can reflect on what, if anything, the 56 SNP MPs have been able to achieve.
EVEL: Westminster is and will be England’s Parliament
Prof Jim Gallagher, former head of devolution in Whitehall, finds serious fault with the government’s plans for English devo and urges a much better consensus
Greece: the terror and the pity
We are witnessing politics at its most brutal and Hobbesian. Though we may cry out for pity it feels like there is precious little room for it in the committee rooms of Berlin and Brussels, where narrow, short-term national interests continue to dominate decision-making. What lessons can we learn from this? Perhaps none that is likely to be of much help in the short-term, but some that it would be useful to pay attention to in the difficult years ahead.
Breaking dementia’s silence with poetry
On the day that the world is shown potential break-through drugs for treating Alzheimer’s, we show via Paula Jennings how poetry can break down the barriers with others experienced by dementia sufferers
‘Tsunami’ – or the inevitable rise and rise of the SNP
A sympathetic but critical review of Tsunami: Scotland’s Democratic Revolution, the third in Iain Macwhirter’s series of books attempting to map Scotland’s fast changing political landscape where the SNP fortress seems unassailable.
The ‘greenest-ever’ Conservative Party? – the summer budget and the environment
In a year when the all-important UN climate change summit will take place in Paris and the UN’s sustainable development goals will be finalised, George Osborne’s summer budget fails to seize the moment to put forward progressive environmental policies.
Lexit: the Left says no to Europe
Labour’s former Europe Minister on why Owen Jones is wrong to campaign against the EU. It’s the politics of the current set of European leaders that’s wrong and should be changed