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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What do we do with lives and dreams after shopping? Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 19th 2012 Another tottering titan fell this week with HMV going into administration. It is the latest in a long line of retail closures: Jessops, Blockbusters, Comet, JJB Sports. This is part of a powerful challenge to the high street, to Britain’s sense of itself and its town centres, and in the case of HMV, the music industry, coming after the closure of Virgin, Zavvi and Tower Records. These stories are usually imbued with a golden sense of nostalgia, people fondly remembering their youth and

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Talking about the Elephant in the Room: The British State Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 12th 2012 ‘The Great Debate’ is away to begin. More than a year and a half of sound and fury and already tanks and troops are being mobilised and on maneouvres on both sides. There is one massive elephant in the room which nearly always goes unstated and unacknowledged, namely, the reality of the British state. For different reasons, both pro-independence and anti-independence supporters refuse to engage with the complexities and challenges of this. Pro-independence supporters do this continuously. Irvine Welsh in a piece this

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A New Scottish Democracy: A Small Nation with Big Ideas Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 5th 2013 The Scottish experience like most places is filled with myths and delusions about who we are and what it says about us. Unlike other places, Scotland also seems to have a deep-seated conservatism, lack of curiosity in others, and a profound insularity which sees Scotland as exceptional and unique. This spreads across the political spectrum, from complacent social democrats to safety-first nationalists and unionists who never acknowledge that in the last two decades 24 new nation states have emerged from the end of

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