Reshuffling the sleaze

Rishi Sunak’s big shtick was that he was the ‘change’ candidate, just a few short weeks ago he was telling the Tory party conference that British politics have been locked into a cosy and damaging short termist consensus for the past thirty years and that he was the guy who was…

Tory Meltdown

The Tory meltdown is offering up a roll-call of incompetent, self serving failures, people you’ve never heard of, and people you hoped you’d never hear of again. Such has the party’s shift to the right that people like David Cameron are (re) presented to you as centrists, his actual time in office erased. Down the […] Source

On the March

A few notes on what just happened. Having been gaslit all week by the Tories and their press we are continuing to be gaslit about the events of the last 48 hours. We are being told that – somehow – the largely peaceful protest of between 800,000 and one million people marching to demand peace […] Source

When Propaganda Fails: on Poppy Sellers, Rioters and Douglas Murray’s Fever Dream

Bella was born out of a realisation that the media in the UK (but particularly in Scotland) was deeply flawed: captured by a handful of millionaires, wholly unrepresentative, deeply biased, and relentlessly representing narrow class and social interests. A new report out showed that there are “dangerous levels of concentrated ownership” in the UK media, […] Source

The alarming rise of the new fascism

The world is becoming a very dark and dangerous place. It’s not only the continuing war in Ukraine and the destruction and death being wrought in the Middle East, but there is also the alarming rise of fascism in Western countries. In the USA the Republicans have turned into an overtly…

King Charles must have known ‘his’ speech was reckless

IT was 1970 when a young Prince Charles addressed a conference about the countryside and condemned “the growing menace of oil pollution at sea” which he said “almost destroys beaches and certainly destroys tens of thousands of seabirds”. Source

Who Needs War?

Twenty years ago when so many of us were protesting against the looming invasion of Iraq by US/UK forces, a group of us in Edinburgh produced a leaflet with the title ‘Who Needs War?’ Of course, we were thinking of those who profit from war in various ways. Whether politicians who want to look ‘strong’ […] Source

Remembering Finlay Macleod

Finlay Macleod of Shawbost and Adabrock has passed away in Stornoway after a remarkable life. He was known as a talented polymath, a champion of gaelic, a historian and a researcher and carrier of invaluable knowledge and tradition. There’s a tribute here and the BBC has run an obituary in Gaelic of Finlay here.  Finlay […] Source