Professional politician? No, a leader needs a track record grounded in real life experiences

THIS WEEK we found out many of our police stations are falling apart, our children are leaving university with more debt than ever before and, across a wide range of wellbeing measures, Scotland is in ...

Resident Evil – Chinese communism?

WUHAN, one of China's largest cities, has been put into full quarantine by the Chinese state. Eleven million people cannot leave their city until further notice. This has been done to help control the spread ...

Mummy luxuries, toilet training and… child genius?

The Mummy Diaries – Week 24

I REALISED pretty quickly that as a parent, your time is very precious. I mean, everyone says the time passes so quickly. And it does. The ...

Will British corporatism replace EU mercantilism?

WE ENTER the decade (no pedantry please about when decades kick in) in new political conditions: it’s not so much a Tory government with a healthy majority for the first time in 23 years and ...

The Flat Earth Society is alive and well in Scotland

THE SCOTLAND of my youth had much to be proud of. It had, after the Treaty of Union in 1707, spawned the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, a flowering of intellectual and cultural endeavour ...

What can Eurosceptic Unionists bring to Scottish politics? Causality…

A TEDIOUS DRAMA has been played out in the last week or so.  Nicola Sturgeon once again went into a bar, twirled her hair and tapped her trotters against the bar, then ever so subtly ...

Is now the time to change the BBC's culture through a new business model?

IN A FREE SOCIETY with plural news media there is probably little point criticising the content of its output.  But Britain’s broadcasting plurality is moot; the BBC dominates, and these are strange times when the government ...

The importance of a university Business Committee

YOU MAY NOT have heard of it but the University of Edinburgh’s General Council consists of graduates, academic staff and members of the supreme governing body of the university, the University Court:

Filling the vacuum increasingly left by Scotland's Conservatives

SCOTLAND is increasingly looking like a one party state, which wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1970’s Eastern Europe.  We have an SNP which is ever more authoritarian and whose politicians believe in high ...

England - not bothered about Scotland?

CONVERSATIONS in the South of England over the festive season have convinced me of a change taking root. It’s a driven by the political re-focussing towards the needs of the North of England as an ...

Back to reality – meltdowns or swimming and pancakes?

The Mummy Diaries: week 23

AWW, and it was just like Christmas Eve all over again in the Hargan house last Sunday night. Kids bathed, into pyjamas and into bed. Clothes and ...

Beware the “level playing field”– it is a dangerous myth

WE ARE GOING to hear a lot about “level playing fields” in the upcoming months of EU negotiation.  Consumers should beware; what sounds like a sentiment for fairness ends up being precisely the opposite.