How we found 93 per cent of No voters would like to vote tactically to defeat the SNP

TWO YEARS AGO a few Aberdeen City and Shire Better Together veterans, including the two chairmen Ian Lakin and Professor Hugh Pennington (better known as Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid bête noire) got together to create Scotland Matters. 

Devolving more powers – or launching union-focussed parties – offer no solution to the nationalist threat

ONE OF THE REASONS for the deep and debilitating incoherence of the unionist response to the SNP’s Covid-fuelled resurgence is that different parts of it seem to be trapped at different, equally useless stages of ...

For secession to be democratic a majority of Scots must vote to leave the union

THERE IS NO INTERNATIONALLY AGREED principle for the maintenance or breakup of states even within Europe. While Czechs and Slovaks are rightly proud that their ‘velvet divorce’ break-up of the former Czechoslovakia in 1992, was ...

£3m is needed this winter to stop closures of outdoor education centres – and it’s needed now

THERE IS a very blunt message coming from those who run Scotland’s outdoor education centres and we all need to pay attention. They are telling us that around half of the 36 centres currently operating will probably have to close by ...

Pandemic planning needs to keep the City alive now – or there shall be nothing left open for the future

EDINBURGH CITY COUNCIL is at it again, planning the big picture future whilst the city slowly stops turning.  

Wednesday this week brought a report to the Planning Committee to commission a ‘Strategy for Princes ...

Scotland during the Covid Pandemic: a pseudo-communist state

THERE HAS BEEN a disproportionate level of scrutiny and criticism from the media of the UK Government’s Covid response compared to that of the Scottish Government’s. Perhaps one area in which both the UK and ...

We must make the union feel real, not a political abstraction

DOUGLAS ROSS made his first speech as Scottish Tory leader at a Conservative Party Conference on Saturday. It was a belter – though not because it criticised the SNP. Instead, Ross eviscerated his own party.

Sturgeon’s leadership style examined: there’s more to it than being a communicator

ON THE DAY that Nicola Sturgeon denounced Margaret Ferrier for her incomprehensible decision to not self-isolate after testing positive for Covid, Twitter has been rife with comments on her leadership.  This is based on her ...

Repeated and embarrassing U-turns show Sturgeon is more Heath than Thatcher

NIGHTMARES follow a mad inexorable logic, like a runaway train heading for collision. Increasingly, that’s what I feel when I watch the First Minister during her daily briefings. She has set a course through the Covid-19 pandemic, and follow that course she must, ...

Both Sturgeon and Johnson are on shoogly pegs of their own making

AS I WRITE, on the morning of Tuesday 22 September, we are poised to enter a second lockdown. The four nations seem to be unified, with what looks like an agreed set of carefully choreographed ...

Six is not a number it is arbitrary and dystopian

WE ARE NOW officially living under the Rule of Six. The police are charged to enforce it. In Scotland, more than six people (not counting children under 12) from a maximum of two households are ...

It’s time for Scottish unionists to oppose nationalism

I HAVE been selected as the prospective candidate for the Westminster constituency seat of Airdrie & Shotts by the Scottish Unionists. I expect there to be a by-election in the coming months.