‘Today, amid the new neatness required by capital as it turns dirty old cities into presentable products and symbols, Dundee may find it lonely, and eerily quiet, at the top’.
Brexit, the people and the politics of loss
‘The foundational reality of British democracy is that the winner takes all. This reality cannot be reconciled with the current national crisis in which everyone, ultimately, must lose something.’
Solidarity in a neutral Scotland
‘So perhaps Scotland can respond to world events by providing something that Ponsatí and the legions of others in the world today repressed by their own states so desperately need: a place of sanctuary for the ever greater number of persecuted that only a small neutral state can offer.’
Expiring Capital – on leaving Edinburgh
‘I continue to believe that the working class people that I was privileged to know in Edinburgh, who first made me feel at home here, deserved the keys to the city because they cared for it, worked it. It no longer has a place for them and as a result I cannot locate a place for myself in this city.’
How Yes can remain relevant in the face of political exhaustion
‘The rest of us – Yes, No or Undecided – need to make a claim for changing Scotland regardless of its nation status. For power to reside here, rather than elsewhere. This must take the form of articulating distinct responses in Scotland to another era of crisis’.
Coming of age: 2017 as year of resistance
“If 2016 was the year in which millennials realised that they had to confront the true reality of their meagre inheritance, 2017 must be a year in which resistance to authoritarian nationalism takes definite form. The awful questions that the past twelve months have posed can only be answered if we first understand this moment as a generational coming of age.”