David Cameron: Britain’s worst post-war Prime Minister so far Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, September 25th 2019 David Cameron has been on our airwaves and TV screens a lot in the past week punting his autobiography ‘For the Record’. We last saw and heard from ‘call me Dave’ a while ago as he has been away in his shed writing his memoirs and waiting for an appropriate moment in the political storms when they could be published. It was only three and a half years ago that Cameron was UK Prime Minister, resigning the morning after the Brexit vote, and it

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What has Labour got to say as the British establishment collapses? Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 22nd 2019 The Labour Party meets for its annual conference at Brighton this weekend, confident about its future prospects. The reality is that the state of Labour is not good. The party are polling between 21% and 28% in the polls - with the two pollsters who called 2017 most accurately putting it on 21% and 24%, and in one they are third place behind the Lib Dems. This puts Labour on course to lose a massive six million votes from 2017 to the

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'Downton Abbey' Britain: Living with the Ghosts of an Imagined Past Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, September 18th 2019 ‘Downton Abbey': The Movie opened last weekend in the UK. It came at the end of a tumultuous week with the UK Parliament suspended, the UK government found to have acted unlawfully, and the Prime Minister accused of having misled the Queen. This isn’t how Britain is meant to behave, and certainly not as portrayed in the cinematic version offered in ‘Downton Abbey’ and other period dramas. The popularity of such productions says something about the state of modern day Britain, and

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The Queen’s role in politics is one of the last remnants of feudalism Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 15th 2019 The Queen has been publicly involved in politics in the past few weeks on an unprecedented scale. There has been Boris Johnson’s suspension of the UK Parliament, the nature of his advice to the Queen, the Court of Session judgement calling his actions ‘unlawful’, followed by Johnson saying when asked if he mislead the monarch: ‘absolutely not’. The Queen is the public front of an intricate, complex institution called ‘the Crown’. As any watchers of the Netflix series of the

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The death of British conservatism as we have known it Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, September 11th 2019 British conservatism has been one of the most successful political philosophies and political parties the world has ever known. As we speak it is engaged in the latter stages of its thirty year civil war on Europe, which has convulsed the party, bringing it to a state of near self-destruction, abandoning its traditional tenets and debasing constitutional norms that for most of its history have been its raison d’etre. Whatever happens on Brexit in the next few months and years, much will have

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Boris Johnson and the art of self-deception Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 8th 2019 Boris Johnson has long had a problematic relationship with the truth. When a journalist, he was fired from ‘The Times’ for making up a quote; in the last month as UK Prime Minister he stated that he was in favour of proroguing Parliament when he publicly said he was against it, claimed to be against having an election he was planning and then for holding a contest, and saying that he is negotiating a Brexit deal with the EU, while preparing for a No Deal Brexit.

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Britain is in a mess: Is a different democracy possible? Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, September 4th 2019 Nearly everyone now agrees that British politics isn’t working - and that our political system, politicians and Parliament are in a mess and broken. Even more than this, our economic system and social contract have long ago become frayed, discredited and stopped working for the interests of the vast majority of people. This is the context in which the country is convulsed by Brexit. Everywhere people are talking, thinking and worrying about it. Out on a Saturday night in a local Indian restaurant

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The future of the Scottish Tories after Ruth Davidson Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 1st 2019 One constituency consistently admired Ruth Davidson - the media. As in her eight years of Tory leadership, the same has been true of her resignation; with numerous plaudits, magnified by how the London media misunderstand and misread Scotland. One example was provided by BBC ‘Newsnight’s’ programme on Thursday evening when Ben Chu opened his Ruth Davidson film with the proclamation: ‘She was an election winner with a gold dust appeal to millennials’, which was completely wrong in both its assertions. In her period as

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The Rise and Fall of Ruth Davidson, Brexit and the Future of the Union Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, August 30th 2019 Ruth Davidson has been a very successful politician in one inarguable aspect. As Scottish Tory leader she was continually spoken about, commented upon and discussed in the mainstream media and, often in non-Tory circles, in a positive light. After eight years as Tory leader in Scotland Davidson has decided that she wants to quit, for reasons both personal and political. She is 40 years old, with a new child, Finn, and plans to marry her partner Jen in the

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Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘obsession’ with staying in office and life after Sturgeon Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, August 28th 2019 In the past week Nicola Sturgeon made a couple of important statements about politics and power in Scotland. Speaking with the political comedian Matt Forde at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Sturgeon was revealing in a way she seldom is, and not perhaps in the way she intended to be. Firstly, Sturgeon said she was ‘obsessed’ with keeping the SNP in office and not ending up in an ‘existential crisis’ like Scottish Labour. Secondly, she said that the decline of Labour in Scotland and

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