Today’s Thinking

Tom Gallagher

Serve the party and no questions shall be asked

THE DUST is beginning to settle after Derek Mackay was forced to resign on 6 February, within a few hours of being due to deliver what would have been his fourth budget as Scottish Finance ...

Jonathan Stanley

Plaguespotting the Coronavirus outbreak shows how little we have really progressed

ATTITUDES TO HIV have changed markedly through the decades. We can believe this is part of some greater social progress and of course this thought is comforting. We could instead believe it is not our ...

Tom Gallagher

All change in Ireland? And what will the impact be in Britain?

LEO ERIC VARADKAR thought that bashing Britain over Brexit would be the campaign theme that would enable his Fine Gael Party to achieve a second decade in power. But instead, at 41, he looks washed-up ...

Tom Gallagher

How Brexit exposes Sturgeon as a lame duck leader

DURING THE 43 MONTHS between Britain voting to leave the EU and the deed being accomplished on 31 January 2020, Nicola Sturgeon’s performance on Brexit can be filed under the category ‘passive aggressive.’ When it ...

Dr Sutherland MacNeill

Ballantyne – a risk worth taking

MICHELLE Ballanytne is ruffling a few feathers. Last night I met her on the campaign trail as she seeks to become the next leader of the Scottish Conservative & unionist Party, at a very well ...

Michelle Ballantyne

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 ...

Jill Stephenson

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 ...

Andrew Coventry

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 ...

Linda Holt

Scottish Conservatives: a dearth of energy imagination and courage?

NO MATTER how they spin it, the general election result for Scottish Conservatives was grim. The party lost more than half the Scottish MPs it won less than two years previously. The failure was all ...

William Ross

Stands Scotland where it did?

AFTER THE AGONY of three years, the end came with shocking swiftness. At 10.00 pm on Thursday 12 December, the BBC exit poll was read out. There would be a Conservative majority of about 80 ...

Dr Sutherland MacNeill

BREXIT'S ALIVE! But without the Brexit wingmen Flash Boris could not have saved the Universe

WELL, WHAT A WEEK THAT WAS! We made it. We vanquished Corbyn the Clueless, Chairman of the Radical left, and saw a massive pro-Brexit majority returned to Westminster. The Queen's Speech, admittedly very awkwardly drafted, ...

Dr Sutherland MacNeill

Unionism is strong but its parties are establishment stooges – we have to do better

THEY RANG THEIR BELLS loud all winter but Friday 13th was the conclusion of five years of noisy unionist parties not listening. Instead of a vibrant multiparty democracy we have three establishment stooges vying for ...