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 ...

Scottish Conservatives must not run in the European elections if they dare extend our EU membership

MARCH 29TH 2019 will be a momentous day. I'm not yet sure why but there are at least two reasons I can think of.

The first is that we leave the European ...

What ye sow, so ye shall reap – MPs must moderate their own language and behaviour

TIME FLIES when you're having a referendum or two. It's hard for me to imagine it was over five years ago that my former boss Nigel Farage was heckled and locked in a pub I ...

Should Sturgeon face a vote of no confidence?

IT SMACKS of Yes Minister when the response to a scandal breaking is to order a full and far reaching internal inquiry into an embarrassing matter.  I don't remember the BBC’s brilliant series ever taking ...