Why Calman isn’t the Answer: Breaking the Elite Consensus of Scotland Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, November 20th 2009 At the fag end of a Parliament beset by scandal and crisis with a discredited political class and unpopular Labour Government, we are about to witness a flurry of constitutional proposals for Scotland. The Queen’s Speech saw the UK Government declare it would be ‘taking forward’ proposals over the Calman Commission with a White Paper published in the next few weeks. At the same time, the Scottish Government, which boycotted Calman, will next week publish a White Paper putting more detail to

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The Continued Struggle for Scotland’s Soul: Politics after Glasgow North East Gerry Hassan The Guardian Comment, November 13th 2009 The Glasgow North East campaign never really got started in the way some by-elections catch fire or one candidate creates a bandwagon. And yet, this result will send ripples through the political classes. It is revealing that Labour held on with relative ease – achieving a 1.89% swing to Labour from the SNP - in one of the most battered and deprived constituencies in Scotland and the UK, while the Scottish Nationalists failed to make any headway despite the popularity

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The Wider Tragedy and Very Partial Case for Gordon Brown Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, November 12th 2009 Gordon Brown is a troubled man so the prevailing wisdom goes. He does not have his demons to seek from his flawed personality to the ghost of Tony Blair that wont quite leave the stage. He is widely seen in the media as an unattractive mixture of indecision, control freakery and paranoia. In a matter of years he has been transformed from being ‘the Iron Chancellor’ who was feared by the Tories he dismissed with consummate ease such as Michael Howard and

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Churchill’s Continual Shadow Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, November 4th 2009 Churchill is everywhere – claimed by Nick Griffin and the BNP, praised by historian Andrew Roberts, and the subject of two recent biographies on his war years by the American writer Carlo d’Este and Max Hastings (1). As the Second World War nostalgia industry gets into gear – passing the 70^th anniversary of the European branch of the war (the Chinese-Japanese war starting earlier) – the build up goes on towards the marking of the Battle of Britain and ‘our finest hour’ next summer. ‘Into the Storm’ was a timely

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Stephen, What Difference Does It Make? The World of Twittergate Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, November 4th 2009 The big issue facing the planet these last few days has not been Tony Blair trying to become Euro President, the on-off Afghan elections, or MP expenses. That’s so old thinking and square! The only issue in town has been Stephen Fry throwing a hissy fit on Twitter and taking umbrage at being called by a fellow Twitter ‘boring’ to which Fry announced his ‘retirement’ from the site. Fry has 945,295 followers on the site, and has been ranked the third most influential

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No More Heroes Anymore? Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, October 31st 2009 Britain is not a happy land. It is a place filled with disgruntlement, anger and resentment. This is about more than anxieties caused by recession. Instead, people have a sense that greedy bankers, politicians, BBC bosses and many others are just looking after themselves and that something profound has changed. That the civic code governing society has fundamentally altered. This is tinged with an air of who do we believe in anymore? Thirty years ago the Stranglers sang ‘No More Heroes’ and it has come to pass. Who,

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Reimagining ‘the English Question(s)’: English Voices, Spaces and Institution Building Gerry Hassan Public Policy Research, Volume 16 Number 2 Introduction It is a decade since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly and just over thirty years since the Scots and Welsh first voted on devolution in the ill-fated 1979 referendums. While the Scots and Welsh, along with the Northern Irish have each voted twice on their constitutional status or devolution, one part of the UK – namely England - has not voted once. Some commentators and observers now talk about the emergence of ‘the English

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After Nick Griffin and Question Time Gerry Hassan October 23rd 2009 The evening after the day after. It still feels that something has shifted. That we have passed through some as yet unidentifiable watershed. One which affects our politics, the media, the nature of their relationship, and how our political system lives, breathes and operates. Like a large part of the British population I tuned into BBC One’s ‘Question Time’, but unlike most I watch it most Thursdays. I listened to the post-programme discussions, read the papers, and scanned the blogs. It felt like this was part of a

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The Referendum Question, ‘the Scottish Dimension’ and the Future of Britain Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, October 22nd 2009 Talk of independence referendums are in the air; the question, the number of questions, who calls it and most recently the number of referendums. In the last few days, Jo Eric Murkens, a former Researcher at the academic Constitution Unit has revisited the argument of their book, ‘Scottish Independence’ of a few years ago which made the case that Scotland needed to have not just one, but two votes on independence. This argument states that the first vote would be ‘in principle’

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The Next Wave of Scottish Nationalism and the Campaign for Self-Government Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, October 19^th 2009 Scottish politics seem to be at a key moment, attracting interest from across the UK and internationally, even winning the accolade of an editorial from the famously Londoncentric ‘Guardian’ and columns from Jackie Ashley and Martin Kettle. The SNP, according to ‘The Guardian’, is a party which is ‘a far cry from the era of Winnie Ewing and Margo MacDonald’ and ‘today’s SNP is now a professional political party of a recognisably modern kind’ (1). If the party’s metamorphosis has

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