A couple of weeks ago, I attended an “in conversation” event with the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild at Harvard University.
Today in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister will explain her decision to authorise airstrikes against Syria alongside France and the United States.
The sight of Scottish ministers boarding flights to far-flung destinations in order to “sell Scotland to the world” has been a familiar one for more than half a century.
In his new book, “The End of British Party Politics?”, the political scientist Roger Awan-Scully captures the paradox of last year’s general election in Scotland.
Perhaps it’s a case of the mid-term blues, but Scottish politics seems to be stuck in a bit of a rut right now. Nearly two years ago, it looked as if Brexit would serve to re-ignite the independence debate, but instead it’s entered political deep freeze, sustained by little more than platitudes and increasingly eccentric publications from inside the Yes movement.
“Scotland”, declared a young Alex Salmond in May 1975, “knows from bitter experience what treatment is in store for a powerless region of a common market.”
The Scottish Labour Party, I think it’s fair to say, hasn’t had a good decade.
A few days after a majority of Britons backed Brexit in June 2016, this newspaper reported that Nicola Sturgeon had been in talks with London Mayor Sadiq Khan and the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo.
Shortly before the second general election of 1974, the late John P Mackintosh attempted to explain the rise of the Scottish National Party to a predominantly left-wing (and English) audience in an essay for the New Statesman.
In “Painting Nationalism Red?”, an engaging new pamphlet published by Democratic Left Scotland, the journalist Neal Ascherson pays tribute to Tom Nairn as Scotland’s “pre-eminent political intellectual”.
