Category Archives: Politics

The Parallel with Parnell

Posted on April 20, 2017 by

(corrected Aprol 25th) This last year has been a busy one for anyone in politics. One year ago the SNP retained its hold on the Scottish parliament. Last June, the David Cameron government committed harikari over Brexit and just when … Continue reading →

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Derek’s Deckchair Dispositions

Posted on December 18, 2016 by

Our Finance Minister Derek Mackay  may be new to his job but the boyish looks deceive; he is no rookie. Bred in the rough-and-tumble West Central politics of Renfrewshire Council, he built the SNP Group there into  formidable opponents of … Continue reading →

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Phoenix: Rising Fast…but Then Ashes?

Posted on December 3, 2016 by

Jet-lagged and shocked by temperature differentials, this may not be cohesive. especially after a 3-month hiatus in writing this blog. A month in the capital of Arizona is a real experience of the American Dream writ large. At 4.3m people … Continue reading →

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Britain’s Dinosaur Defence

Posted on August 22, 2016 by

On a recent visit to the Royal Yacht Britannia, I was struck by two ‘birds-eye’ illustrations hanging in the corridor of the state rooms. One shows the Coronation Naval Review at Spithead in 1953 and the other the similar Silver … Continue reading →

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Dunkirk Spirit Doesn’t Age Well

Posted on August 7, 2016 by

During the last decade or so, arguments that Scotland’s future rest within the union have revolved around two key points: 1) economic advantages of being an integral part of a ‘large’ country; 2) the glorious history that nations of the … Continue reading →

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Chiels That Winna Ding?

Posted on July 29, 2016 by

In the midst of a Twitter storm this week, I realised that the bulk of the 3,000+ responses to a chart I published were from unionists, almost all of whom appeared to insist that the only debate that could be … Continue reading →

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Not Brexit; Engleave

Posted on July 18, 2016 by

Three weeks on and the reverberations of June 23rd continue to cloud any clarity of the political future for Britain. The now headless Brexiter movement has slid from media view and left a new government under Theresa May to sort … Continue reading →

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Why Bait the Bear?

Posted on July 10, 2016 by

A recent NATO summit in Warsaw agreed to deploy four multi-national battalions (from USA, UK, Germany and Canada) to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The British are to be in overall charge and the contingent is to consist of a … Continue reading →

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Foreignacy

Posted on July 4, 2016 by

Opinionated though it may be, it’s not often that this blog has the temerity to launch a new word into the already crowded seas of English vocabulary. But the second decade of the 21st century, the world appears to be … Continue reading →

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This Scuppered Isle

Posted on June 26, 2016 by

Three days on and the enormity of what happened on June 23rd still has not registered in all its implications either with me or the population at large. The jubilation shown by Brexiteers at counting stations appears to have evaporated … Continue reading →

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