The Scotland of Sixty Years Ago and What It Says About Us Today Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, June 2nd 2012 The impending Diamond Jubilee unsurprisingly evokes questions about the current mood of Scotland and Britain. There are constant references to the past world of 1952, the Scotland and Britain of 60 years ago, but facts and figures do not fully convey what it was like to live back then. Perhaps going back to the archives of ‘The Scotsman’ for the month of May 1952 might help. On first impressions, so much has changed. The paper of 60 years is

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The New Flat Earthers: Barbarism Begins at Home Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, May 26th 2012 Once upon a time the world was filled with earnest left-wing revolutionaries confident that they were the future. They inhabited places like the Sorbonne, Berkeley and LSE campuses and thought they spoke for all humanity leading to a whole generation being caricatured as ‘Private Eye’ character ‘Dave Spart’, ‘television sit-com Citizen Smith’ and the propensity for endless ideological schisms seen in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’. All these stereotypes are now many decades old but they still carry some currency because they hit a

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State of InterIndependence: A Vision for Scottish Self-Determination Gerry Hassan May 24th 2012 Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in the future And time future contained in the past. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1936) This week the Scottish independence debate reaches new levels with the launch of the ‘Yes Scotland’ pro-independence campaign, the emergence of the shape of the pro-union campaign, and the spectre of Tony Blair hovering threateningly over Scottish politics. Scottish independence has long been viewed by the British political classes as eccentric and unworldly. The Economist’s ‘Bagehot’ column made a revealing

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How to make and understand the Case for the Union Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, May 19th 2012 This week has seen important developments in the pro-union campaign. First, we are not meant to call it that; the organisers have indicated that the word ‘union’ won’t play any part in the title of the campaign. Second, they have revealed that they will have lots of money, resources, and celebrities. There have also been reflective pieces by Colin Kidd and Bill Jamieson in this paper which have added to public deliberations, the former in particular making a nuanced historical argument for

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The Limits of Modernisation: Blair, Cameron and Salmond Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, May 12th 2012 ‘Modernisation’ is one of the defining words of our time, along with ‘legacy’ and ‘journey’. It is a word used by Tony Blair, David Cameron and Alex Salmond. It is an in-word for those who feel they shape and define the age, change and the world. It has had an interesting trajectory; it was once bright, shiny, confident, swaggering with confidence, impatient with opposition, and believing the future was theirs for shaping. It became associated with Tony Blair and New Labour; modernisation was about

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Throwing the Three ‘Rs’ Away: Rupert Murdoch, the Referendum and Rangers FC Gerry Hassan May 8th 2012 It has been a dramatic few months in Scottish politics and one which reveals something about our nation and its public life. We have a problem with how we do politics, public conversation and understand power. There is an inability, or more accurately, unwillingness across large swathes of Scottish society, from our political classes and institutional forces to even many of the radical and alternative voices, to confront some of the difficult issues we have to. This pattern has been evident

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The Story the Media Should Have Told You About Glasgow Gerry Hassan May 7th 2012 The story of the recent Scottish elections was clear and unambiguous: voters are returning home to Labour and the SNP honeymoon is over. All of this is magnified in the Glasgow result: Labour holding or as most of the media interpreted it ‘gaining’ back the city it had briefly lost. All of this ‘analysis’ was done with no breakdown of the Scottish local election party share of the vote; no doubt we will have to wait until David Denver’s research several months down the

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The Problems of Living with Capital-ism Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, May 5th 2012 London is ‘the world city’ of these isles, a place which attracts and pulls talents from across the UK and the world: on a par with New York, Paris and Tokyo. Yet the London love-in of our political classes, media and business elites is fast pushing things to breaking point. We have had to endure Boris v. Ken as if it were a national contest, and this week the militarisation of the London Olympics and Heathrow chaos have dominated the airwaves. As UK politics and society

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The Glasgow Effect (and the Strange State of Scottish Democracy) Gerry Hassan May 5th 2012 This is a seismic weekend for politics and democracy. There is the French Presidential election and the Greek parliamentary election; therefore we need to put the UK and Scottish local elections in a bit of humble context. Saying that these were fascinating and complicated elections: Labour’s decent polling, the kicking of the Lib Dems and the narrow triumph of Boris over Ken. In Scotland the first mainstream media reaction has been to emphasise Labour’s performance, question the Nationalist momentum, and talk up the battle

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The Beginnings of an Alternative Scotland Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, April 28th 2012 What a week it has been - Murdoch, Trump, Rangers FC and of course the economy going into double dip recession. It is all-reminiscent of that last period of acute crisis, a failing, nervous political class and economic instability: the 1970s amplified by Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent current TV series on the decade. Scottish debate on the economy has for many years been shaped by two contradictory strands. The first has been the power of conventional economics, concerns over our relative economic growth rate compared to the

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