by Kevin Williamson STOP PRESS: He’s gone! The volatile situation in Egypt is thrilling, inspiring, unpredictable, dangerous, engaging, enraging and confusing. All over the world people are desperately searching for Continue reading
How does it feel – as an occasional Huff Post Blogger who knew there would never be any payment involved – to observe the whole enterprise being sold to AOL for three hundred or so million dollars? I suppose I should be outraged that my free labour has contributed to a valuation from which I won’t receive a penny of direct profit. But I’m not…
As the leader of the National Front in France congratulated David Cameron on his views on multiculturalism for what she claimed was an endorsement of her party’s views on the Continue reading
“In David Cameron we have a leader whose job is to quietly legitimise a semi-criminal, money-laundering economy” GEORGE MONBIOT To us, it’s an obscure shift of tax law. To the Continue reading
It remains one of the most remarkable electoral phenomena in post-war Europe that Scottish Labour has won every single British general election in Scotland since 1964. What makes this all the more remarkable is that the consequences of this have proved so devastating for the majority of Scottish Labour voters themselves. Like Gladstone’s repeated bouts of self-flagellation after purposively and, we must assume, successfully resisting the temptations of London’s East-End prostitutes, it seems that Scottish Labour voters just can’t get enough of Tory governments at Westminster.
By Kevin Williamson First things first. We’d like to congratulate our friends at Newsnet Scotland for what is quite a scoop. Namely, persuading Scotland’s First Minister to pen a thoughtful Continue reading
By Christopher Harvie I once went to a football match. Motherwell versus Hearts at Fir Park, in the spring of 1958. One-all. I enjoyed it, but I’ve never gone to Continue reading
Bella Caledonia recently published a disturbing email concerning the arrest in Pamplona of a young Basque woman, Edurne. Since then we’ve discovered that nine other Basques were arrested on the Continue reading
“Why is the Crown Estate still administered by Commissioners in London who are unaccountable to the Scottish Parliament and yet manage Scottish public land? Why, when all the planning and environmental regulation is carried out by Scottish local authorities and Marine Scotland at some cost to the public purse do net revenues still flow straight to HM Treasury?”
By Robert Dreyfuss It’s spontaneous, yes, triggered by the explosion in Tunisia. But contrary to some media reports, which have portrayed the upsurge in Egypt as a leaderless rebellion, a Continue reading
More Tales from the Mall from Ewan Morrison…What do a cigarette, a medieval game and a wrecking ball have in common? More fascinating facts from the Mall: “The whole point Continue reading
What about the train? Well ‘our’ high speed rail network ends at Birmingham. Tory-Liberal Transport Secretary Phillip Hammond inadvertantly spoke the truth when he told the Conservative conference last year: “We have committed to a high-speed rail network that will change the social and economic geography of Britain”. But it’s not just our infrastructure disenfranchisement. It’s about the continued control of society by private business.
It’s Burns Night tonight and many of us will be tucking into our haggis, neeps and perhaps a whisky or two (single malt of course). There may be speeches, toasts, Continue reading
We kick off our Burns week (#bellasburns) with some great music from Michael Marra, Dick Gaughan’s favourite song of all time (which says everything it is possible to say about Continue reading
The idea that blogging was the new punk, that citizen journalism would help transform the Scottish news experience and political agenda, that the unionist grip on news coverage would be blasted away is overblown. Partly because politicians don’t believe in anything any more.
“Appalled by the rigged referendum of 1979 which in closing the door to home rule, opened the gates to Thatcher, Morgan insisted on Scotland’s imaginative viability, as a place being transformed by artists whose cultural exertions would in time produce a politics worthy of their talent and tenacity. “
“Last night Edurne was seized at their Pamplona home by the Spanish police and is currently being held ‘Incommunicado’ in a Spanish prison.”
“The way forward is not to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic – it is to design a ship that won’t be sunk by an iceberg.”
Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP’s risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have Continue reading
By Mike Small As of December 2010 there had been a total of 348 British Forces killed in Afghanistan, whilst 3,115 UK personnel were evacuated from Afghanistan on medical grounds. Continue reading
A TOWN TAKES DIRECT ACTION TO DEFEND ITS LOCAL LIBRARY Public libraries are a precious reminder of what can be achieved if market forces are excluded from the public sector. Continue reading
As Labour the Tories and the Liberals line up to put the boot into the SNP remember it’s your local economy they are consigning to history.
Harry, Zara Kate and ‘Wills’ are just as much parasites on the public as the bankers vilified for the public excess that is just the norm behind the closed-doors of bloated finance. Hyper capitalism bankrupts us all…
It’s great to keep an international perspective with this the latest of our Hopes & Visions series which runs through January. See also Justin Kenrick here on a breakthrough for Continue reading
What scope is there for unity and collaboration between greens, nationalists, democrats and regionalists? This is the terrain explored by Philip Hosking of the Cornish Republican: Following some comments left Continue reading
In homage (and ‘linkage‘) to the irrepresible Variant, and as Scotland apparently aims to base its economy on Pandas (‘Panda Bonanza’) and RBS boss Stephen Hester pockets £9 milllion (‘Tough talk on Continue reading
“…a study of ‘moral hazard’ not as risk but as organising principle, was that non-transparency united the ‘overextended’ financiers, the regulation-flouters, the outright crooks, and (most intriguingly), the upholders of laws which were impossible to enforce. If elites are built on synergy, this lot were glued together by malfunction.”
The attempted assassination of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was a terrible and cowardly act of homegrown American terrorism which is rightly sending shockwaves throughout the civilised world. It brings to mind the high-profile assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jnr, Malcolm X and many others who opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
By KEVIN WILLIAMSON All over the world fans are mourning the death of Scottish singer-song writer Gerry Rafferty and I’d like to add a few words of appreciation and thanks. Continue reading
REPORT: KEVIN WILLIAMSON The recent emergence of The Edinburgh Party has made the established political parties sit up and take notice. Thus far The Edinburgh Party has steered clear of Continue reading
