Thinking of Tomorrow from Today: The limits of growth and innovation

What do we owe the future? A million-year view, William MacAskill, Oneworld Books Review by Hillary Sillitto William MacAskill is a young Scottish philosopher now working at Oxford University. Taking a million-year view is quite a challenge. Indeed, as he says, “there are few attempts to make predictions … more than a decade in advance.” […] Source

A Profound Moment

The week saw the passing of Ian Hamilton at the grand age of 97 years old. A ‘life well lived’ as the saying goes. He was responsible for the return of the Stone of Destiny to its rightful place. It was not, as some Scottish media had it ‘stolen’ by him and his colleagues. For […] Source

This Tory government is detestable

The Tories, whose relatively few supporters in Scotland spend their time on social media telling us how much they hate the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon – whom they usually refer to by some infantile insulting nick name – and (irony of ironies) ‘nationalism’, are this weekend clutching their collective pearls at the…

Under what circumstances, if at all, would the SNP government move to open defiance of Westminster?

Question 4: Under what circumstances, if at all, would the SNP government move to open defiance of Westminster? On Twitter you meet all sorts: English nationalists fixated on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Scottish nationalists dreaming of the proclamation of the Provision Government in 1916 or the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet declaring in 1990 […] Source

Preparing to win the next UK General Election

It is safe to say now that the Conservative party has made a catastrophic mistake by choosing Liz Truss as its leader and as Prime Minister. After just four weeks in office – during two of which there was no government business due to the royal commournathon, Truss has taken the…

Lessons From the Edinburgh Agreement that Westminster Forgot

  NEXT WEEK the Supreme Court will adjudicate on the Scottish Parliament’s right to hold an independence referendum. The case comes almost exactly ten years after the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement, setting out the basis for a referendum on Scottish independence.  Prime Minister David Cameron and the then Scottish…

Dying to be British

This Conservative government is literally killing us. I wish that was just rhetorical hyperbole, but sadly it’s a stark and cruel truth. Researchers based in Glasgow have calculated that due to the Tory austerity policies which slashed billions of pounds from social security payments and public services that between 2012-2019, almost…

Stronger Things

Continuing his guest-residency Gordon Guthrie reflects on the British crisis, the SNP’s lack of strategy and future choices. Question 1: Which election is the referendum? next Holyrood?, Special Holyrood?, next Westminster? And what is the referendum-election question? should Scotland be independent or does Scotland have the right to an indyref? To describe the SNP’s current […] Source