Starmer’s most shameful U turn yet

Another day, another Labour U turn. It has got extremely tiresome to write that sentence, and no doubt equally tiresome to read it. Keir Starmer’s right wing U turns have become drearily predictable. At this point the only question is how many more can Starmer squeeze in before the general election….

We’re all extremists now

It seems that we are all extremists now, Rishi Sunak has asked Levelling Up Secretary, the oleaginous Michael Gove, to update the Government’s definition of extremism so it has a much broader scope, encompassing those who “undermine” British values and institutions. The change is expected to be announced later this month…

Labour’s insidious threat to devolution

Anyone who was daft enough to have thought that a Conservative defeat at the next Westminster general election and Sunak’s replacement with a Labour government led by Keir Starmer would mean an end to British nationalist attacks on the devolution settlement is in for a very big disappointment. The right wing…

Repaying Westminster contempt in kind

After last Wednesday’s disgraceful scenes in the House of Commons when Speaker Lindsay Hoyle acceded to pressure from Labour leader Keir Starmer to trash Commons conventions and effectively to turn what was supposed to be an SNP Opposition day debate on a ceasefire in Gaza into a Labour Opposition day debate,…

Two words

On Wednesday MPs were due to debate and vote upon an SNP motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza describing the wanton slaughter of Palestinians by the misnamed Israeli ‘Defence’ Forces as collective punishment, which constitutes a war crime under international law. Starmer refused to support the SNP motion because…

Labour in Scotland: Lying for votes

The Labour party’s Scottish accounting unit held its spring conference in Glasgow over the weekend, an event mainly focused on creating the fiction that the Labour party in Scotland is is distinct entity with a political identity and policies distinct from those of the UK Labour party in the iron grip…

Chasing after crazy and a tale of two ships

The Tories are in meltdown this week as two by elections loom in what were nominally safe Conservative seats in the English Tory heartlands, although given the current state of the party there is no longer such a thing as a safe seat for the Tories. Febrile back bench MPs are…

What’s the point of Keir Starmer?

There’s currently a burning question in Scottish politics, although it’s not a question that gets any airtime in a Scottish media that’s obsessed with Nicola Sturgeon’s WhatsApp messages in a desperate attempt to create a political equivalence between the Scottish Government’s handling of the pandemic and that of Boris Johnson. So…

National service: Which nation? Serving whom?

When Better Together reeled off their list of the supposed benefits of being part of the UK for Scotland, they did not include conscription, compulsory service in the armed forces, as one of the attractions of the British state. And with very good reason, because being forced against your will to…

The feeding frenzy

The anti-independence media in Scotland, which is the overwhelming majority of that smug and self-satisfied Scottish institution, has over the past few days been indulging itself in its favourite pastime of a perspective free feeding frenzy of SNPbad. On this occasion the cause of its call for a procession of pitchforks…

Labour’s betrayal of Scotland

On Wednesday Anas Sarwar, the branch office manager of Labour’s Scottish accounting unit tweeted: “Every vote matters – and at the next General Election a vote for Scottish Labour is a vote to put Scotland’s voice at the heart of government.” However less than 24 hours previously Labour MPs had voted…

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…