In Princes Street Gardens
How George Robertson must regret saying in 1995 that ‘Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead.’ Robertson, then the shadow secretary of state for Scotland, was trying to appease sceptical...
View ArticleWhat’s mined is theirs
Earlier this month, Providence Resources announced that an oil field at Barryroe, off the coast of Cork, is expected to yield 280 million barrels. The company’s CEO, Tony O’Reilly Jr, the son of the...
View ArticleRadical Independence
‘This is the day the Scottish left came out of its ghetto,’ Robin McAlpine, the director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, said towards the end of last month’s Radical Independence Conference (RIC) in...
View ArticleIn Belfast
Apparently there were 43 illegal roadblocks in Belfast on Monday night. In a bar with Christmas lights on the ceiling, a hundred yards from a City Hall not flying the Union Jack, most drinkers were...
View ArticleIreland’s Ghost Estates
Last March there was an explosion at a semi-detached house on the Gleann Riada estate in Longford, seventy miles north-west of Dublin. The blast – which blew out the sitting-room window and left a hole...
View ArticleOut of the Sectarian Trenches?
When John McCallister resigned from the Ulster Unionist Party on 14 February he accused the party leader, Mike Nesbitt, of ‘forcing Northern Ireland politics back into the sectarian trenches’. Hours...
View ArticleWho Owns Scotland?
Scottish Land and Estates, which represents landowners in Scotland, recently released a promotional video to tie in with its submission to the Scottish government’s Land Reform Review Group. The...
View ArticleBetter Together?
Michael Gray is a 21-year-old politics student at Glasgow University. On 7 April, an article he wrote appeared on National Collective, a Scottish independence website. The piece used sources already...
View ArticleIn Tirana
The Palace of Culture in Tirana has housed Albania’s national library, opera and ballet companies for almost 50 years. Khrushchev laid the first stone, in May 1959, during what one American newsreel...
View ArticleProject Fear
Nate Silver told the Scotsman last month that there was ‘virtually no chance’ of a Yes vote in next September’s independence referendum: ‘If you look at the polls, it’s pretty definite really where the...
View ArticleIn Perth
The Scottish National Party conference used to flit around Scotland: Dunoon, Oban, Dundee, even Rothesay have hosted it. Nowadays Perth concert hall, a glass-fronted building near what remains of the...
View ArticleSpeed Reading ‘Scotland’s Future’
John F. Kennedy is supposed to have been able to read 2000 words per minute. Alistair Darling must be nearly as quick: the Scottish government published its 670-page White Paper on independence at 10...
View ArticleGalloway’s Roadshow
‘I like heckling, polite heckling,’ George Galloway told me over a cup of tea in an Edinburgh hotel yesterday afternoon. A couple of hours later, the MP for Bradford West prowled onto the stage at the...
View ArticleBosnia under Water
I had coffee with Sudbin, a human rights activist, in northern Bosnia last month. We met at a roadside bar called Sidro (‘anchor’) in the village of Carakovo, and talked about the difficulties facing...
View ArticleSalmond v. Darling
At eight o’clock yesterday evening, Alan Titchmarsh: Love Your Garden aired on ITV in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scottish TV broadcast a two-hour live debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair...
View ArticleOn the Campaign Trail
On Saturday, with only days to go before the independence referendum, thousands of Yes supporters gathered on Buchanan Street in Glasgow, waving Saltires and singing ‘Flower of Scotland’. At around the...
View ArticleIn Glasgow
On Friday evening, hundreds of loyalists congregated in George Square. Some bought union flags from hawkers; most brought their own. Women in red, white and blue wraparound skirts sang ‘you can stuff...
View ArticleIn George Square
‘I came down here to support Tommy,’ the man said when I asked why he’d given over his Sunday to stand in the middle of George Square and listen to a stream of speeches, mainly about the perfidy of...
View ArticleAt the SNP Conference
At 5 p.m. on 18 September 2014 the Scottish National Party had 25,642 members. Last Saturday afternoon Nicola Sturgeon announced that membership was 102,143 and rising. After the referendum, it was...
View ArticleEleventh Night
The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service logged 123 calls between 9 p.m. last Monday and 1 a.m. on Tuesday, of which 42 were related to the annual Eleventh Night bonfires. The fire engines were...
View Article
