Certain people I know and certain people I read have been describing the past year as something horrible. You only have to go back one hundred years to see how foolish this assessment is. Imagine you had just celebrated Christmas in 1916. There is every chance you would have lost …

To give Scotland a different EU status to any other part of the UK would in effect be to give it independence.  It might be the case that the UK would continue to exist in some odd way still technically united, but for how long could such an arrangement last? …

Just after the Brexit vote I came back from holiday and found a string of messages from Pro UK people. They were worried. Nicola Sturgeon was continually on the television complaining about something or other. Far from encountering systematic bias from the BBC, she was getting encouragement. At least she …

Something rather interesting just happened to Scottish politics, but I’m not sure anyone noticed. There is so much comment and speculation about day to day political events that there is a tendency to miss the essential. The complexity gets in the way of our ability to see the simplicity. The …

There is a stuffy consensus in Scotland. There always has been. Perhaps it has to do with the Presbyterian idea of the elect. We are exceptional. We are different. Wha’s like us. It makes our newspapers exceptionally dull, because almost no-one questions the assumptions which are shared even by political …

The left lost the economic battle when the Berlin wall came down. No-one after that could take socialism seriously as a way of running an economy. Given the chance people living in a socialist society will vote with their feet. Of course there are those who are either too young …

Many Scottish nationalists are impatient and permanently angry.  The hundreds of thousands who joined the SNP after losing the referendum in 2014 are both a blessing and a curse. Of course, they are better than the alternative. Remember when there was the idea that the SNP would somehow fade away …

There is an odd concept in Scottish politics that things that are paid for by someone else are free. The SNP in particular has based much of its populism on providing these “freebies” to their supporters. We now have “free” prescriptions, “free” eye tests, “free” passage over the sea to …

I find the coverage of United States politics in Britain very strange. Why are we all so interested? Most Americans are fairly clueless about the details of British politics. They might know who the Prime Minister is, but beyond that it all gets rather hazy. Then again I remember meeting …

Imagine if Yes had won the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 by 52% to 48%. There would have been much celebrating and there would have been the expectation that soon Scotland would be independent. Imagine however if someone resident in Scotland, but born in England had been so horrified by …

I was born in a small village in rural Aberdeenshire and grew up speaking both English and Doric. It was natural for me to do so because these were the languages that were used in daily life. My father worked in the oil industry and so for a while we …

How do we respond to the latest threat from the SNP to break up our country? We must respond in a variety of ways. One of them is humour. The gorillas are on the loose again beating their chests and drinking epic amounts of Ribena. This naturally makes them a …

Whichever fat fingered BBC technician “accidentally” substituted some film of a psychotic rampaging gorilla for the latest film of Nicola Sturgeon making threats deserves some sort of award. Give that man a Nobel Prize for services to humour. There is a long history in Britain of turning people like Sturgeon into …

It is only through writing that I can really know what I think. My views develop and change. The fundamentals don’t normally change a great deal, but the details do. My method is not scholarly. I find most academic writing to be desperately dull and pointless. I rarely now write …

There is a reason I’ve been writing so much since the EU referendum and with perhaps a higher intensity than before. I returned from holiday in early July only to find one of my friends and colleagues in absolute bits. I remember that whole period of uncertainty leading up to …

When I stand at my bus stop waiting to go home I watch the lorries pass by. Nearly every single one has a combination of Scottish flags somewhere in the cab. There is usually a phrase about Scotland being bonnie or being forever. Sometimes there are bits of tartanry dotted …

I am running out of things to write about Scottish politics. Maybe it is just that I have written too much. I certainly imagine that my opponents think this. There is a special place in their hearts for me. Eventually they all blow up and say something nasty even if …

As I frequently say I am in the business of questioning assumptions and I don’t think there should be things that cannot be said. This must be said. So let it be said. At some point in the past fifty years or so someone decided that there was a thing …

I never thought economics was a subject worth studying until 2008. But suddenly with the worst economic crisis since the 1930s making a difference to all of our lives, I thought it best to try to come to some sort of understanding of what was going on. I didn’t, of …

Everyone must respond in their own way to the continual attempts by the SNP to break up our country. We all have different experiences and make different choices based on those experiences. I’ve been in the debate from the beginning. I thought at the start that it was a simple …