One Tree Falling

When the times darken will there be singing even then? There will be singing even then. Of how the times darken. The quote is a translation by Edwin Morgan from Bertolt Brecht’s Svendborg Poems, published in 1939 while Brecht was living in exile in Denmark, having fled from Nazi Germany. It’s a quote I often […] Source

A Seat at the Table

As the general election looms – the political parties have tried to establish their messaging and define their pitch to the electorate. The SNP have created a message that they want to ‘Rid Scotland of the Tories’ and it’s both a weird and clever pitch. In doing so they want to grab on to some […] Source

Hard Talk on Leith Walk

Public libraries have been squeezed and under threat for many decades; a manifestation of what David Marquand and others see as a long running assault on the public domain. Thankfully, many in the city seem to be in good health and well used. One of Edinburgh’s busiest public libraries, McDonald Road, is currently celebrating its […] Source

Scotland: Britain’s military waste dump

Ever since the British Government started to base its nuclear submarines and their arsenal of nuclear missiles on the Clyde in the 1960s, there have been protests in Scotland against hosting weapons of mass destruction just a few miles away from the largest conurbation in the country. The British Polaris programme,…

British nationalism, the politics of warmongering

What do you do when you’re a right wing British nationalist government in an election yearand you’ve been 20% behind in the polls for months? Even with the assistance of a supine media which looks the other way when there is mounting evidence of your rampant corruption and chronic chaos and…

Peace Babies, Generation Yes and the End of Britain

A brief New Year series of posts where I expand on the six themes laid out here and give some more detail. Here looking at some of the generational forces and demographics driving the break up of Britain. For the past ten or twelve years the independence movement in Scotland has seen itself as the lead […] Source