Sceptical Scot has just celebrated its first birthday as Scotland’s premier non-tribal online cultural and current affairs magazine.

We have marked this quietly with a relatively modest revision to our design to modernise it but to keep it in tradition with the Enlightenment that is and remains our inspiration. We hope you like it and would appreciate your comments.

The thinking behind the creation of the magazine was that Scotland needed an online venue to reflect more soberly on itself and its future after the passionate hue and cry and occasional intolerable abuse as well as innovative, sometimes radical thinking of the 2014 #indyref. We wanted to set debates about Scotland’s prospects within a wider European and global context.

We hope we have succeeded at least partly in reaching these goals. But, if we are to expand our readership and enrich our content, we need to be able to fund ourselves more steadily than so far – not least pay some of our contributors and recruit other, new ones. Obviously, everybody makes demands on your money these days but ours are modest: donate a few quid when you sign up to receive the monthly newsletter we are planning to launch before the momentous May 5 elections to Holyrood.

These are more than likely to deliver another absolute majority to the SNP and that makes it all the more important that the Scottish Government be subjected to closer scrutiny and sceptical analysis than before. Not because it’s nationalist but because absolute majorities can bring democratic deficits. The fourth estate is here to draw attention to these and promote changes. That’s its job whoever is in power.

In the run-up to the elections and thereafter, with your help, we hope to be able to provide a richer, more varied diet of healthy sceptical analysis and comment and provoke a more sustained debate on Scotland’s future in the world.

Image by David McAllister