A Spectacular election approaches in Spain

AFTER THE RESTORATION of democracy in 1977, the first thirty years of competitive politics in Spain was a two-horse race. The Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE) under the moderate Felipe Gonzales and the centre-right Popular ...

Climate thoughts for today's schoolchildren

YOU PROBABLY don’t need me to tell you this. You or members of your extended family are the ones who go to school, not me.

There are subjects with a right and ...

Anti-Social Behaviour and how we can combat it

IN PARLIAMENT, my colleagues and I spend a lot of time discussing high profile crimes. However, we rarely discuss anti-social behavior, which can have a major impact on the quality of peoples’ lives; the cohesion ...

Scotland's drug deaths could be cut if we cared enough to intervene

YOU WOULD THINK it was the late 80s again. Yet Scotland, with about 8 per cent of the UK population, accounts for two thirds of deaths related to counterfeit alprazolam. Latest figuresshow that in total ...

Parking up the wrong tree

WELL, WHAT ARE WE to make of the Scottish government’s budget? More importantly, perhaps, is what are we to make of proposals for the “car park tax” – officially known as the Workplace Parking Levy ...

Car Park Tax fiasco shows SNP is past its-sell-by-date

YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL when a government is past its sell-by-date. It appears out of ideas, it starts making elementary mistakes, and it gives gifts to political opponents.

And so it is ...

Self-serving intellectualism ignores the EU's failures

ON 25 JANUARY one hundred European intellectuals released a manifesto, drawn up by the French writer Bernard-Henry Levy, which urges civic resistance against the advance of European populism.

This Briton is slightly ...

Venezuela's tragedy: Workers and Unions betrayed

HUGO CHAVEZ BOASTED, “I stake my future with the working class,” as he set out his plans to transform the Venezuelan economy.

The reality has turned out to be very different. An ...

Venezuela's Tragedy: is it the beginning of the end?

WE ARE NOW hopefully witnessing the death throes of the illegitimate Maduro regime. Latin American countries, the US, Canada, and many other states have declared National Assembly President Juan Guaido (pictured) as the legitimate President. ...

Forget renewables, consider them UNRELIABLES

THE EU HAS INVEIGLED its tentacles into multiple aspects of the domestic and industrial worlds – rarely with beneficial results.  On the macroscale it has proscribed the design of light bulbs and maximum vacuuming power that ...

May lost the vote, Labour lost its integrity

THIS is taken from Labour’s 2017 manifesto on Brexit.  

Labour accepts the referendum result and a Labour government will put the national interest first.

We will prioritise jobs and ...

We must reject a bad ‘deal’ to reboot the EU negotiations

MUCH OF THE COMMENT on the Government’s Withdrawal Agreement has focused on personality and process rather than a full understanding of the detail of the 'deal'.  Then, when there has been consideration of the problems with ...