We should reject compulsory by-elections for MPs who defect

DISCUSSION SURROUNDING compulsory by-elections for MPs who defect from the party whose platform they were elected upon has recently restarted after the defection of 11 MPs to the newly-formed, ‘The Independent Group’ (TIG). People have ...

Holyrood smacking ban is nanny-statism dressed up as children’s rights

THE SNP GOVERNMENT has pledged to support a Bill to ban parental smacking, brought forward by Green MSP John Finnie.

His legislation, the virtuous-sounding Children (Equal Protection from Assault) (Scotland) Bill, is ...

SNP's soft-touch sentencing is no justice for the victims

THE SNP GOVERNMENT has confirmed it will introduce an order, which will effectively ban judges from handing out prison sentences of less than a year. 

This is an alarming policy, particularly at ...

Questions just keep piling up on the car park tax

IT HARDLY SEEMS POSSIBLE that even more confusion could be created around the proposed SNP-Green “Car Park Tax”, but events this week have just muddied the waters still further.

The new Workplace ...

Venezuela's tragedy: The collapse continues

VENEZUELA'S COLLAPSE CONTINUES and its complex humanitarian emergency is worsening. The Catholic NGO Caritas has just reported that child malnutrition has exceeded critical emergency levels in two states, Vargas and Zulia.  In ...

A Spectacular election approaches in Spain

AFTER THE RESTORATION of democracy in 1977, the first thirty years of competitive politics in Spain was a two-horse race. The Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE) under the moderate Felipe Gonzales and the centre-right Popular ...

Climate thoughts for today's schoolchildren

YOU PROBABLY don’t need me to tell you this. You or members of your extended family are the ones who go to school, not me.

There are subjects with a right and ...

Anti-Social Behaviour and how we can combat it

IN PARLIAMENT, my colleagues and I spend a lot of time discussing high profile crimes. However, we rarely discuss anti-social behavior, which can have a major impact on the quality of peoples’ lives; the cohesion ...

Scotland's drug deaths could be cut if we cared enough to intervene

YOU WOULD THINK it was the late 80s again. Yet Scotland, with about 8 per cent of the UK population, accounts for two thirds of deaths related to counterfeit alprazolam. Latest figuresshow that in total ...

Parking up the wrong tree

WELL, WHAT ARE WE to make of the Scottish government’s budget? More importantly, perhaps, is what are we to make of proposals for the “car park tax” – officially known as the Workplace Parking Levy ...

Car Park Tax fiasco shows SNP is past its-sell-by-date

YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL when a government is past its sell-by-date. It appears out of ideas, it starts making elementary mistakes, and it gives gifts to political opponents.

And so it is ...

Self-serving intellectualism ignores the EU's failures

ON 25 JANUARY one hundred European intellectuals released a manifesto, drawn up by the French writer Bernard-Henry Levy, which urges civic resistance against the advance of European populism.

This Briton is slightly ...