What can Eurosceptic Unionists bring to Scottish politics? Causality…

A TEDIOUS DRAMA has been played out in the last week or so.  Nicola Sturgeon once again went into a bar, twirled her hair and tapped her trotters against the bar, then ever so subtly ...

England - not bothered about Scotland?

CONVERSATIONS in the South of England over the festive season have convinced me of a change taking root. It’s a driven by the political re-focussing towards the needs of the North of England as an ...

Come together post-Brexit? We are hardly a knocking shop in Marrakech

SHOWING CONTRITION, or indeed mercy to enemies is a very curious British trait.  It's part of our heritage, from when we were far more powerful, when we could afford to appear magnanimous in victory as ...

Will Labour abandon the Barnett Formula in 2020? Why floaters trump the Lumpen every time

2020 will be a long march to recovery for the Labour Party. It has been destroyed electorally by the last general election though it remains a strong and well funded organisation. It must be aware ...

Twenty-twenty - but is the vision right?

WE END 2019 in better fettle than we entered it: both Europhile revisionism and polytechnic Trotskyism seen off by the voters; a government with a decisive parliamentary majority for the first time in a decade; ...

Johnson wins – so what comes next?

BORIS JOHNSON won his election at the top end of poll expectations. Now he has political discretion, as well as heft in Europe, where the result will be taken, with regret, as confirming the 2016 ...

The logic of voting Conservative has won me over...

THERE IT IS! I have done it! Something I could never have imagined. I have ticked the Conservative and Unionist box in my postal vote! I urge every single Scottish voter, whether Nationalist or Unionist to ...

Knowing one's place belongs to the Britain we are leaving behind

OCCASIONALLY IN THE FOG OF WAR for votes a moment of truth arrives. That deep down many remainers are both pro-migration and anti-foreigner. All too often remainers have extolled the benefits of the economic contribution ...

Unleashing Boris remains an option, but Tory campaign resists the temptation

SO FAR, the election has been a slow bicycle-race. Farage unsaddled himself at the outset and Swinson has fallen off; I return to them below. As to the leaders of the major parties, their looks ...

How the SNP myth works: the tension and reflection of narcissism

FOR A WHILE NOW I have been thinking of how best to describe the SNP and its leadership.  Then this week I happened to stare up at the ceiling of a hotel lobby.

Facing up to the SNP threat means thinking and voting tactically

“IF SCOTLAND votes for Independence I’ll move to England”. I have heard a lot of people saying they’d move to Northumberland and no doubt cause a property boom…

I said this in ...

As ignorant armies clash by night

NOW THAT Brexit-Halloween is past, and the “will there/won’t there be an election” suspense has broken, we find ourselves flung into full-on campaign mode. It feels simultaneously familiar and disturbingly new.

What ...