Glasgow: A Tale of Two Cities Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 15th 2010 Glasgow has for long been a city of paradoxes - a place of pride alongside one of disconnection, a culture of supposed radicalism and at the same time conservatism, and of disputation and rebellion alongside acquiescence to authority. One prominent UK politician who has first hand experience of this is Vincent Cable, who stood for Labour in Glasgow Hillhead at the 1970 election and was a city councillor from 1971-74 in what turned out to be the last days of the Corporation. Cable’s recent memoir, ‘Free Radical’

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Putting the Debate over Labour 'Cuts' into History Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, January 14^th 2010 The mainstream media coverage of the future of public spending has become entirely focused on the need for future spending cuts with the only issue left in doubt that of timing, the degree of brutal language used and the areas which are supposedly meant to be exempt: the latter thus combining hardness and special pleading! Nick Clegg, Lib Dem leader, got into a small amount of bother transgressing the boundaries of this new consensus when he talked of the need for ‘savage public spending cuts’.

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What Makes Us Happy: The Thoughts of  José  Mujica Gerry Hassan January 11th 2010 Here is a beautiful and apposite quote I came across from the recent acceptance speech of the President Elect of Uruguay, José  Mujica: There is no fixed list of things that make us happy. Some think the ideal world is full of shopping centres. I’ve nothing against this vision, but I simply say that it isn’t the only one. I say we can imagine a country where people repair things instead of throwing them away, where they choose a small car instead of a

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Putting Labour ‘Treachery’ Into Historic Context Gerry Hassan January 7^th 2010 It has been another riveting day in the short and ill-fated history of the Brown leadership. I have just appeared on ‘Good Morning Scotland’ with James Cusick of the ‘Sunday Herald’, where I attempted and failed to put the whole thing in some historic context (1). Yes it is true as Cusick says that mood, momentum and the political weather matters. Of course they do; they define a lot of what makes politics and how events turn out. But so do rules, culture and history, as these often shape

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Dragging The Health Service from Victorian to Modern Times! Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 7th 2010 The NHS has always been seen by the public and politicians as something special, off-limits to consideration of future cuts by the Conservatives and Labour, and influenced by the personal experience people have of the health service when they need it. The reality has always been more complicated than the egalitarian rhetoric which has shrouded the NHS since its formation. At that time Nye Bevan had to weave and navigate to bring the NHS into being with BMA support. Two of these compromises

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Living in a World of Make Believe: The Myth Makers of the Globalising Age Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, January 6^th 2010 Thirty years ago in another economic and political age the Glasgow University Media Group analysed the biases of current TV news in a series of seminal reports beginning with ‘Bad News’ (1). They made the case that across a range of issues: economic, industrial and political, news which professed itself to be ‘impartial’ was instead imbued with a deeply selective and partial view of the world. Since then a much more powerful, partisan and explicitly ideological account of the

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The End of a Year, the Beginning of the End of an Era Gerry Hassan December 31^st 2009 It's not just the end of a year and of the decade. I suspect 2008-9 will go down as the end of an era: a pivotal transition point – similar to 1973 – our demarche from a thirty year span of neo-liberalism to the start of ...  all we can say at the moment is that a contest has begun. The last year had many dimensions. Globally there was the G20 summit in London in April which saw Gordon Brown take centre

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The Continued Trouble with Talking about Class Gerry Hassan December 30^th 2009 Laurie Taylor’s ‘Thinking Allowed’ today on Radio Four took as its subject for discussion the issue of class (1). With the format of a panel discussion and audience, Taylor framed the debate around the question of whatever happened to the working class, social class and social mobility? The panellists were Lynsey Hanley, author of ‘Estates’, Richard Reeves, of Demos, Danny Dorling, of Sheffield University, and Dick Hobbs, of the LSE. Some people don’t like Laurie Taylor, seeing him as the inspiration for the 1970s ‘The History

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Don’t Mess with the Missionary Man: Brown, Moral Compasses and the Road to Britishness Gerry Hassan December 22^nd 2009 in Tony Wright and Andrew Gamble (eds), Political Quarterly Special Issue on Britishness, Blackwell 2009 ‘…we long for that most elusive quality in our leaders–the quality of authenticity, of being who you say you are, of possessing a truthfulness that goes beyond words.’ Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (1) Introduction Once upon a time one way people used to judge politicians was by the words they used: in books, pamphlets, articles and speeches. Politicians cared passionately about the

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The Auld Enemies: Scottish Nationalism and Scottish Labour Gerry Hassan December 21st 2009 in Gerry Hassan (ed.), The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power, Edinburgh University Press 2009 Some might wonder why he as a perfervid Scot was not also a perfervid Nationalist. The reason was that the nationalism which he saw expressed in Scotland at present was not real nationalism: it was petty and parochial, and, he was sorry to say it, had signs of a kind of latent hatred. It had a sort of chip-on-the-shoulder hatred that could create very considerable trouble if it

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