Scotland isn’t really this Divided Nation. The Importance of Detail, Dissent and Deeds Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, January 3rd 2016 One of the recurring stories of Scotland in the referendum and after has been to say that politics and debate have become bitterly polarised and divided. This sense of a divided Scotland links into history: that once upon a time we couldn’t surmount our own differences: Highland/Lowland, West/East, Glasgow/Edinburgh, Protestant/Catholic. This had a feeling of powerlessness – pathologising differences to the extent they became disabling. These were identities found everywhere in the developed world but in Scotland we were

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2016: The Year of the UK as a Disunited Kingdom in an Unstable World Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, December 27th 2015 ‘The future ain’t what it used to be’ - said American baseball player Yogi Berra. This year saw unpredictability, shocks and upsets. There was the election of a majority Conservative Government which no polls predicted. There was the tartan tsunami which saw the SNP sweep nearly all before it. There was the rise and victory of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, while across the world a whole range of populists, from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to Marine

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MY FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2015 December 24th 2015 NEW BOOKS: SCOTLAND Project Fear: How an Unlikely Alliance left a Kingdom United but a Country Divided, Joe Pike, Biteback A brilliant access all areas account of the chaos of the ‘Better Together’ campaign in the indyref. To think there was an even more Armageddon-ish‘Project Fear’! Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society, Jeffrey Meek, Palgrave Macmillan At long last a serious study of Scottish gay culture (focusing just on gay men) and in particular the period between Wolfenden (1957) and decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England

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Let’s Talk about Tax if we don’t want to be Safety First Scotland Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, December 20th 2015 This was a significant week for the Scottish Government and Scottish politics. John Swinney presented his first ever budget since Scotland had been given limited income tax powers which allowed variety up or down by up to 10p. That he choose not to do so is significant. Swinney’s ninth budget came against the backdrop of a decade of real terms cuts by the Tories which we are only half way through. Against this backdrop and a Scottish election next year

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The Day that Scotland Changed Gerry Hassan Prospect, December 18th 2015 May 7^th 2015 stands out as the day Scotland changed. The House of Cards that was Labour dominance collapsed: a domino effect which witnessed 40 out of 41 Labour seats being won by the SNP. Scotland has seamlessly switched from a nation of Labour supremacy to one of SNP ascendancy, and no one is quite sure why and what it means. The standard explanation is that Labour tied itself to the Tories in the independence referendum, but that is one small part. Much more pronounced is the decline of

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MY FAVOURITE MUSIC OF THE YEAR: 2015 December 16th 2015 NEW ALBUMS 1 C Duncan, Architect One man’s vision – part classical, ambient, other worldly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvbJS3YVae0 2 Kamasi Washington, The Epic Jazz is rarely like this: mixing big band, soul & funk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCIAMO3Al1A 3 Floating Points, Elaenia Stunning harmonies, spaces and silence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfYP7uTZX8Y 4 Tame Impala, Currents Real departure for guitar sound into dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFptt7Cargc 5 D’Angelo, Black Messiah Rarely has political funk/R&Bsounded so good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2r5yqjlVrI (more…)

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Donald Trump’s appeal tells us that something is wrong with America and the West Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, December 13th 2015 Only a generation ago, just after the Berlin Wall fell, liberal democratic opinion across the West was confident about the future. This was the era of the long boom across the West, the Clinton era of ‘Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow’ in the US, and the Blair’s ‘Dreams Can Only Get Better’ in the UK. All of this hubris and hype was brought down to earth by the banker’s crash of 2008, but this was only the start of

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The Wider Syria Debate: Challenging Britain’s ‘Empire of the Mind’ Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, December 6th 2015 Britain is off to war again. The parliamentary debate did not live up to the billing. Cameron and Corbyn underperformed. Hilary Benn stole the show and headlines. Great rhetorical moment this was not. This wasn’t of the quality of 1939 and the outbreak of World War Two, 1940 and the resignation of Chamberlain as PM, Suez and Anthony Eden comparing the Egyptian leader Nasser to Hitler and Mussolini, or even more recently, the Falklands war, when at the outset Margaret Thatcher’s political

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The Tories are shrinking the state while Labour go back to the 1980s Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, November 29th 2015 These are tumultuous times. Chaos in Syria. Complex and shifting alliances. The Turks shooting down a Russian plane. There is disarray in the Labour Party on Syria and Trident. And all in the week of George Osborne’s Autumn Statement on public spending. The Tories appear dominant in British politics only six months after they won their surprising majority: based on 24.3% of electors and a narrow parliamentary majority of 12 seats. Osborne cleverly positioned himself retreating from his own unpopular

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The SNP need to get back to governing – and being bold and honest with us Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, November 22nd 2015 Nicola Sturgeon this week marked her first year as First Minister. The SNP is hugely popular, Labour flatlining, the Tories marginalised and the Lib Dems irrelevant. The SNP-Labour relationship now seems a reverse of the 1980s. Then Labour sat for most of the decade on 50% in the polls with the SNP on 20% or less. Labour then was Scotland’s party; that mantle has now fallen to the SNP. No one is quite sure how we

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