The Cameron Roadshow Reaches Marginal Scotland Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, May 15th 2009 The week the British political system creaked and cracked under the strain and embarrassment of the self-serving financial actions of politicians across the political spectrum saw David Cameron take his constituency roadshow to the county town of Arbroath. ‘Cameron Direct’ http://www.conservatives.com/Get_involved/Cameron_Direct.aspx is a Blair-like initiative which sees the Conservative leader tour the country – or the marginal seats of it – offering voters the chance to see him up close if not as he puts it ‘in their living room’. Continue Reading The Cameron Roadshow Reaches Marginal Scotland

They Say That Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Broken Britain or Not? Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, May 7th 2009 Review of Mark Perryman (ed.), Breaking Up Britain, Lawrence and Wishart 2009 The contrast [over the last 25 years] has been between a determined (if stricken) agent of history and a mere sleep-walker. In 1977 the Cold War political palsy still prevailed, a profound inertia favouring all the tropes of states, parties and intellectuals I have described. By 2000 most instinctive allegiance to ‘establishments’ had drained away, leaving hollow routines and vacant symbols behind. A combination of official servility

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The Legacy of Thatcherism North of the Border Thirty Years On Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, May 5th 2009 This is the woman that closed down our shipyards and steel mills, believed that unemployment is a price worth paying, and then told us that she knew best. If that wasn't bad enough, she used Scotland as a guinea pig for the poll tax. The Tories abandoned families and offered no support to people in desperate circumstances. Margaret Curran, Labour MSP for Glasgow Baillieston (1) ‘Margaret Thatcher did more good than harm in Scotland’. This was the motion for a packed

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What is Changin’ Scotland? Changin’ Scotland has been a regular event at The Ceilidh Place since 2002. Run twice a year – every March and November – each weekend is put together and hosted by Gerry Hassan and Jean Urquhart – and covers a range of discussions and happenings on politics, culture, music and film, with the intention of having a good time. Weekends cover the entire universe of political and cultural thought, artistic endeavour, community activism, philosophical investigations, international campaigning and imagining new possibilities. Sometimes we just like to have a bit of fun! The story continues into what

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A few reflections and found memories from the weekends …. Some of the best moments …. The nervousness of the first one. Hiring a minivan to take people up from Glasgow to Ullapool for it. The experience of seeing Croft No. 5 that first weekend – on the Saturday. An intoxicating mixture of traditional, jazz and dance music in a Ceilidh Place packed with young people enjoying themselves: a harbinger for future weekends and our country! The Wendy Alexander/Fiona Hyslop discussion on Labour-SNP lack of understanding. This was originally going to be Wendy and Jim Sillars after their legendary

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Changin’ Scotland No.  14  November 6-8th 2009 Action packed and diverse as ever! James Robertson on the Scots language, A. L. Kennedy and Stuart Kelly on stories and the future, Gerry Hassan, Jim and Margaret Cuthbert and Stephen Maxwell with Iain Macwhirter on the politics of the SNP post-crash. Andy Wightman on landownership from Princes Street to Rockall, Dennis Canavan on his political life, Wiliam Walker on Scots and the nuclear question, Christopher Whatley on the meaning of 1707 and why it matters today, and Antje Bednare on her research speaking to Scottish Tories. Plus and how do we

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Two Bullies, a Lie and War: Blair, Campbell and ‘In the Loop’ Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, April 21st 2009 It is a season of films about Britain, tapping a sense for nostalgia and who we are as the UK economy, our government and banks reel from crisis to crisis. Thus, we have ‘The Boat that Rocked’, Richard Curtis’s limp slapstick about an Austin Powers like swinging sixties where life was one long party, and ‘The Damned United’, on Brian Clough, mercurial football manager, and showing us what men and the North were like in the 1970s rebelling against the stuffiness

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The Cause of Liberty and the Left Gerry Hassan Chartist Journal, April 14th 2009 The health of democracy and liberty in Britain has become a growing concern in the last three decades due to the bitter experience of Thatcherism and then New Labour alongside the extension of the state, the rise of a risk-averse, safety-first culture, and anxieties and fears over terrorism and crime. Large parts of the left have always thought historically that they owned the term ‘democracy’ and either could afford to ignore it or do what they want with it. In the late 1980s this meant that

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Zygmunt Bauman on this essay: Combining 'the practical wisdom of an insider/actor with the detached/critical perspective of an outsider/thinker - an ability rarely nowadays encountered either among the practitioners or visioners of the polis.' The Politics of Liberty in the Age of ‘Liquid Democracy’ Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, March 27th 2009 It wasn’t, I realised after all, that the world had run out of ideas. It was simply that the world had forgotten how good ideas were created in the first place. Gordon Torr, Managing Creative People (1) The world has been turned upside down. Assumptions long held

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Changin’ Scotland No.  13  March 20-22nd 2009 Phillip Blond on the Conservatives and ‘Red Toryism’, David Torrance on Thatcherism and the Scots, Graeme Turner on economics and finance after the crash, Douglas Robertson on what happened to council housing, David Purdy and Pat Devine on what happened to Britain, Martin Cloonan on the Scots music scene, Janet Paisley on the Scots and stories and Alex Bell on civilisation and water.

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