I for one am enough of a nationalist, and have enough faith in the students and young workers of Glasgow and Edinburgh, to believe that these forces are also present in them.I will not admit that the great dreams of May 1968 are foreign to us, that the great words on the Sorbonne walls would not be at home on the walls of Aberdeen or St Andrews, or that Linwood and Dundee … [Read more...] about 1968 and the rise of campus radicalism in Scotland
Give us peace: the Scottish Tories
In 1968, a few months after Winnie Ewing’s shock victory for the SNP in a by-election for the hitherto safe Labour seat of Hamilton, Tom Nairn sought to get to grips with Scottish nationalism in the pages of the New Left Review.The Scottish National Party did not come off well. They were 'lumpen-provincials whose parochialism finds its adequate expression in the asinine … [Read more...] about Give us peace: the Scottish Tories
The sorcerer’s apprentice and Labour’s spent spell
Would it not be easier to cast a spell? To mutter some dark phrase, right there on stage in front of the remaining members, that sends everything back to a time when things were as they should be? Come, old broomstick, you are needed, Take these rags and wrap them round you! (JWvGoethe, Der Zauberlehrling) The headline speakers at Scottish Labour conference wrestled with … [Read more...] about The sorcerer’s apprentice and Labour’s spent spell