George Fergusson

Hurricanes are back in the news. Reports of 14,500 mph winds at Finnieston, not surprisingly, turned out to be wrong. Much more seriously, Hurricane Milton has done terrible damage in Florida and lives have been lost, though mercifully not on the cataclysmic scale that looked possible at one stage. But even if the Finnieston story is just a one-day amusement, there are serious implications for Scotland from Florida’s experience. Hurricanes will be in the news more frequently. They are relatively understandable – as well as dramatic – indicators of changes in weather and we should pay them heed.

George ‘Geordie’ Fergusson There's danger behind these Tory bids to dump European Court of Human Rights Tom Tugendhat, launching his Conservative leadership bid, said on BBC Today that he would be open to taking Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights. He's not the only leadership candidate to back this – Kemi Badenoch made a case for leaving too. Tugendhat emphasised that institutions were there to serve us, not us to serve them; and we should be willing to abolish them if they no longer suited.

There is a clear legal and moral case for destroying the Houthi missile and drone bases which are disrupting international shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It is far less clear why it should be the Americans and British leading these attacks.

The House of Lords’ role is back in focus with the Rwanda Bill. Reforming the House has been permanently on the agenda since the last major change in [1999], abolishing most hereditary seats.

Boris Johnson makes the case for our constitutional monarchy. Donald Trump makes one for a written constitution. How?

THE welcome news that Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner have been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) highlights a central dilemma in peace-making: the clash between justice and peace. These two words are too often bundled together like a single term.

RUGBY and family connections have long been familiar links between Scotland and New Zealand. But this month the deep historic relationship is strengthened practically by a new Scholarship highlighting two important stories: a dramatic battle between two converted merchant ships in 1917; and a young pilot’s self-sacrifice in 1941 which saved the lives in the mining village of Cowie in Stirlingshire.

ST Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean seems far from Scotland’s current political debate. But if Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t get approval from the Supreme Court in the case which started this week for the independence referendum she wants, the islands’ path to independence – by electoral mandate rather than referendum – may become an unlikely precedent for her fall-back position. Electoral mandates were how most British territories became independent during decolonisation.

MORE than a dozen years ago, I was present at a meeting of Ministers dealing with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The agenda included the problem of our German allies’ unwillingness to use lethal force in Afghanistan (though at the time they had more troops there than Britain did).

BORIS Johnson’s plan for a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland may have been cancelled to little surprise or regret. But a more important, realistic bridging role for Britain has taken two potentially fatal hits in the past month as well.