When Canadian air force officer Captain Hamish Blair was stationed at Scapa Flow during the Second World War, he wrote a poem entitled The Bloody Orkneys. This bloody town’s a bloody cuss – No bloody trains, no bloody bus, And no-one cares for bloody us – In bloody Orkney After nearly a dozen verses, he […]
Now that the heady sense of liberation following Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement of her resignation has begun to die down, it is time to think of the real, underlying problem of her tenure. The real issue was not her own political personality, so much as the way the Scottish Parliament was set up. Now the former […]
One of the many important topics that has been largely unremarked in this leadership race is what the next PM will do about Scotland. It is no secret that Boris Johnson was a red rag to the nationalist bull – partly because of his policies, which had something in common with David Cameron’s ‘devolve and […]
A friend of mine who works at a major think-tank in Moscow went recently to a business conference at a remote town in eastern Siberia. When I asked him about the mood among the people he met there concerning the war in Ukraine, he said, ‘People were drinking ‘to our Victory’ and dreaming of capturing […]
Out here in seaward Argyll, people often say of worrying weather, “Aye, there’s a change on”. Since the inconclusive May election, I have begun to think that this expression applies to Holyrood politicians too. Something is happening today in nationalist politics which requires an explanation but so far has not been given one. What are […]
It may not look like it from the outside, but the independence movement in Scotland is riven by a fundamental question – should an unattached Scotland join the EU or should it become genuinely independent like, say, Canada or New Zealand? SNP voters are split on the issue, which is why the party leadership has […]
The Scottish National Party’s approach to government is evolving towards what, in the 1930s, Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy called “ideocracy”. He coined the term in the context of the new ‘Eurasianist’ movement which he helped found amongst émigré Russians in Austria and Germany. It implies a sort of right-wing, nationalistic socialism, which has a lot in […]
