1. UK General Elections are never about one single subject, even when politicians try to define them as such. Ted Heath’s ‘Who governs Britain?’ election of February 1974 became about…
1. British conservatism has been one of the most successful political philosophies and political parties the world has ever known. As we speak, it is engaged in the latter stages…
A number of events happened in the last week that brought home the passing of time and what really matters in life â and how we understand it (or not)….
There was major interest and debate last week about a UK Government paper on Scotland â the McCrone report â which was written 45 years ago. The McCrone report was…
The sixties never really went away. We have had the baby boomers and their endless nostalgia about themselves and their youth. There followed the soft disappointment for many of the…
Twenty years ago, Scotland began the devolution era when the Scotland Act 1998, which established the framework for the Scottish Parliament, achieved royal assent on 19 November 1998 â the…
Alex Salmond is one of the towering figures of postwar Scottish politics â a politician who dramatically changed the country and his party’s fortunes, taking it into office in 2007,…
Three decades ago democracy was the future and carrying all before it. The Soviet bloc was collapsing, the South African apartheid regime was crumbling â and all across South America…
A spectre is haunting the modern world: fascism. All around the world people are talking about and identifying fascists. Newspaper headlines abound in the US such as: ‘Is Donald Trump…
I sat through the entirety of the Scottish Government’s budget announcement last month. Every word. Every figure. Every carefully rehearsed pause for emphasis. And when it was over, I felt…