Financial nationalism means being closed, financial patriotism requires being open

MANY PEOPLE get upset when a company established in Scotland or the UK is sold to a foreign investor, even if there is no loss of jobs or investment. They often demand the government must ...

Why Ireland's economic model doesn't help Scottish separatism

MUCH OF the Republic of Ireland’s support for the EU in recent Brexit negotiations was smothered in barely disguised Anglophobia. 

A feature of this was the promotion of a healthy and wealthy ...

Flags, more flags, everyone’s flags – except our own

FLAGS have long been emotive emblems. From 1789 and throughout the nineteenth century, the warring sides in France were recognisable by their respective flags, the fleur-de-lys for conservative, clerical monarchists and the blue-white-red tricolour for ...

The Imperial Model revisited – did we take a wrong turn into Lockdown?

HISTORIANS are sure to pore over this ‘unprecedented’ period for centuries to come. It is my belief that in the fullness of time, they will come to regard our response to the Sars-CoV-2 virus as ...

Prosecution for what you say in your own home remains likely in Scotland

PRESUMABLY, when the SNP Government set out to toughen up the law in relation to hate crime, it wasn’t the intention to criminalise conversations over the dinner table. 

Just like it probably ...

The gestures of jesters – Labour's £15-an-hour pledge is the abdication of government

THERE ARE TWO ways to fight elections. One is to pose sincerely an alternative vision for the country, to contest the throne of government and to promise a better kingdom from kicking out the old ...

Locked up for no reason? There is a fundamental problem of mass screening for Covid

AS A BLOSSOMING lockdown sceptic, I developed a big problem in the summer, which has tortured me since – this does not feel like an exaggeration. It must have been the 14th July I had ...

Branding Scotland’s mainstream majority as ultra-unionism is a separatist slur

LAST FEBRUARY Colin McKay of STV described a conference in Newcastle run by that mildest of pro-UK campaign groups, These Islands, as “ultra unionist ….mostly male and not much youth  on show”

Nikita Sturgeon’s Porridgeburo drops a Cherry bomb too hot to handle

IT HAD TO HAPPEN eventually. A Stalinist party machine has disappeared an erudite Trotskyist. The ice pick was swung in the dark, no press release from a party that wastes no second attacking others.  

We have to end the culture of fear to save young people's lives

I HAVE been thinking about fear a lot recently and the power that it has to alter and control peoples’ behaviour.  

At the beginning of the week when I switched on my ...

The SNP’s creation of a single state police force has failed us

ON THE 7TH OF AUGUST 2012, the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act received royal assent. It was the most radical step yet taken in public sector reform and served as the SNP’s flagship justice ...

Britain united against Covid is better than Scotland divided against itself

WHEN AN UNEXPECTED virus has wrought pain and suffering across the land, leaving many families grieving; when the Government response has caused the economy to go into reverse, with uncertainty and unemployment hanging over millions ...