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Escaping the shadow of euroscepticism
The referendum campaign devoted much attention to how and whether an independent Scotland would negotiate to stay in, re-join, or even leave, the European Union. But the bigger question by far is what sort of member state an independent Scotland would be? And could it escape the tarnished eurosceptic reputation that the UK has created…
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Stress fractures in the Nordic model
When the Social Democrat leaders in the Nordic region gathered last November just outside Oslo, the mood might have been expected to be upbeat. Stefan Löfven had just become Swedish prime minister, ending eight years of centre-right rule that had attacked some of the main tenets of Nordic social democracy.
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Why centre parties have lost their way
In electoral democracies generally, the traction and attraction of the main parties of the centre-left and centre-right have diminished so much that they struggle to maintain a grip on power, let alone dominate and swap power between them as they did from the 1950s to the noughties of this century.
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Latvia: no template for Scotland
It’s a commonplace of Scottish political discourse to compare our nation of 5.2m to independent near-neighbours such as the Nordics – Denmark, say, with its 5.6m – or, more recently, the Baltics, with their 6.2m in three countries. ‘We could be just like them.’ But comparisons can be facile. Latvia, with its 2m people, is…
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Does classic British social democracy have a future?
Back to The Future of Socialism, by the Labour MP and former Cabinet minister Peter Hain is a bold effort to reimagine for today the most influential text by a British social democrat of the last century.
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