For a weary travelling public hoping returning ScotRail to public ownership would bring light at the end of the tunnel, it must seem that an April’s Fool has been played on it.
In Scotland, the sense of Britishness has remained relatively constant – albeit only for a quarter of people who chose this identity. Meantime, the sense of Scottishness has increased quite markedly, being the choice of nearly six in ten people.
Poverty, deprivation, inequality and wealth are recognised to still stalk society in Scotland, they are never tied by the SNP or Labour to the divisions of class and class structure of contemporary capitalist Scotland.
Past Labour Party leaders have an unfortunate habit of praising former Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair said in 2013 that Thatcher was ‘a towering political figure … I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them’. Before him, in 2007, Gordon Brown proffered she was a ‘conviction politician’ who ‘saw the need for change’.
Twenty-five years ago this coming Monday, on May 6, 1999, Tommy Sheridan was elected to the Scottish Parliament as a Scottish Socialist Party member for Glasgow. Can a pro-independence socialist party, whether the SSP or not, rise again?
Labour has made an unwise and foolish promise about how quickly it will deliver upon the New Deal for Working People
Forty years ago, the year-long miners' strike began on 6 March 1984, ending on 3 March 1985. By far, it was the biggest battle between the state and unions since the 1926 General Strike.
THE Scottish Government published its first prospectus in June of its Building a New Scotland series of papers promoting the case for independence. Called Independence in the Modern World – Wealthier, Happier, Fairer: Why Not Scotland? it set out an ambitious aspiration: for Scotland to become a Nordic-type society.
FOR an iconic lyricist that penned classics for The Clash such as English Civil War (1978), Something about England (1980), and This is England (1985), Joe Strummer had a strange but somewhat late and close relationship with Scotland.
WE are now one year into Nicola Sturgeon’s third SNP Scottish Government and 15 years since the SNP won office at Holyrood. But now, the combined CalMac crisis and Ferguson Marine fiasco have pushed Sturgeon and the SNP Government further towards the rocks in the eyes of the public.
