Creating a Space for a Different Scottish Future Gerry Hassan National Collective, March 7th 2013 Thinking, imagining and attempting to create the future, and embracing and encouraging change, comes naturally to human beings. We do these things everyday in numerous ways throughout our lives, subconsciously and unconsciously, usually without reflection or realisation. Recognising that we do is one of the first steps in demystifying these terms, democratising them, and taking them back from the consultancy class and from managerial jargon. When I first saw Say So Scotland’s initiative to develop a Citizens’ Assembly I was initially wary, thinking it was

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The Scots and Power: The Cardinal, John Haldane and Glasgow Rangers FC Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, March 5th 2013 Scotland has a strange relationship with those in power and authority. We tend to buy into the romantic stories that we are a radical, restless nation, who fear no one and question and challenge everything. The truth is very different. To some there is a suspicion of those in power; but across society, the political spectrum, and mainstream media, there has consistently been in Scotland a lack of curiosity about who has power, and a near-complete absence of a

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The Radical Scotland Tradition and Stalinism’s Legacy Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, March 2nd 2013 Next Tuesday a strange but important moment will be celebrated in a number of capitals and places in the world: the 60^th anniversary of the death of Soviet leader and dictator Joseph Stalin. Stalin’s death in 1953 was a cataclysmic event which sent ripples of uncertainty through the then monolithic Soviet bloc. First the Berlin workers came out in protest against Soviet rule, to be followed by the Hungarian and Polish springs of 1956. It resulted in Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech denouncing Stalin’s ‘cult of the

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Dreaming of a Different Scotland: Alt Independence and Alt Unionism Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, February 26th 2013 Social justice is everywhere north of the border. It has always been about, but now it has become more explicit, as the debate on Scotland’s independence referendum hots up, the Westminster Government’s welfare plans show their character and the Tory intent at inhumane social engineering, while the market fundamentalist project of the last three decades proposes at the moment of crisis and doubt, to go into over-drive. The last week has seen Anas Sarwar, Deputy Leader of Scottish Labour give an important

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The Mantras of Professional Scotland are Part of the Problem Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, February 23rd 2013 Social justice is in the air. This week there was Anas Sarwar’s speech on Monday; by the close of the week there was ‘Yes Scotland’s’ mini-summit and its response to the STUC’s ‘A Just Scotland’ document. In-between we have had another litany of grim statistics telling the familiar story: of the inequality, poverty and exclusion in Glasgow and parts of the West of Scotland. And the now well-trodden path of politicians and public sector professionals saying they have learned from the past and

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The world after Saddam, Blair and the Iraq invasion Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, February 16th 2013 February 15^th 2003 was a moment in global history: a rare articulation of political connectedness and consciousness. From London to Glasgow to Ullapool to New York, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, people took to the streets to protest about the Blair-Bush march to war with Saddam Hussein’s brutal Iraqi dictatorship. Bush and Blair were determined on war; Bush to complete the job his father didn’t in the first Gulf War; Blair as a true believer in liberal intervention and enlightened imperialism investing his political

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The Scotland of the Democratic Future: Some Tentative Lessons from Chile Gerry Hassan Della Caledonia, February 14th 2013 It has been a telling week for the contours of the future debate on whether Scotland becomes independent. Both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns contain different tones and messages within them, but what has been revealing has been the over-reach and uncompromising character of the UK Government in dealing with its pesky, upstart northern troublemaker. We shouldn’t expect anything better. The British state has increasingly become the vehicle of a narrow set of economic and political interests, introverted, obsessed with their own

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Changin Scotland FRIDAY MARCH 22^nd-SUNDAY MARCH 24^th  The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool Friday March 22^nd 8.15pm Welcome Gerry Hassan and Jean Urquhart   The Limits of Nationalism: Breaking Up is Hard to Do Alex Massie, writer and commentator, The Spectator (more…)

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Do we want to tell a story of Scotland’s ‘Good Society’? Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, February 9th 2013 ‘We are all social democrats now’, Scots politicians might say – Salmond, Lamont, Rennie, even the occasional Tory seeking redemption. Scotland is a land imbued and shaped by social democracy, but which has spent little time or energy in defining this in terms of its philosophy, values and practice. And increasingly this matters. To Labour, social democracy has always been what it says it does from the local Labour council to Labour in government. To the SNP a catch-all populist party, social

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Lessons from Anzio: Scots do not need to cling to the wreckage of Britain Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, February 2nd 2013 Today is the 70^th anniversary of the final surrender of the last German forces at Stalingrad, the battle which militarily and psychologically dealt an irreversible blow to Hitler’s plans for world domination. Last week I was in Rome on holiday and went to commemorate the 69^th anniversary of the Anglo-American landings at Anzio, just south of the capital, the summation of which occurred a year and a half after Stalingrad. This was the week of Cameron’s big European intervention,

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