Scotland United: The Need to Find Common Ground against the Free Market Vandals Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, June 30th 2012 One of the fundamentals that we often forget in our ongoing Scottish constitutional debate is how Britain and in particular England understands or more accurately doesn’t understand us anymore. This was brought home to me in this week’s ‘Spectator’ debate, ‘It’s time to let Scotland go’, held in London. Three people, Margo Macdonald, Kelvin MacKenzie and myself were asked to speak for the proposition, and three against, Malcolm Rifkind and Rory Stewart, both Tory MPs, and Iain Martin, with

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What has happened to Scottish Labour and how can it shape its future? Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, June 23rd 2012 Scottish politics were once seemingly filled with certainty - we were Labour, socialist, collectivist, and didn’t like those nasty Tories. Reality was actually always different but there was a Labour vision of Scotland which many of us grew up with, knew its positive aspects, and which made us feel ennobled and liberated. That vision lifted hundreds of thousands of Scots out of poverty, widened opportunities and brightened countless lives via education, health, housing and numerous other public services. This

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The Perils of Content Free Campaign Scotland Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, June 16th 2012 The times they are a changing all over the world from Greece and Spain to the USA and China. There is unrest, voices of protest rising and authorities reacting with confusion as they cling to the wreckage of failed economic orthodoxy. At the same time the battle of Scotland unfolds; one which isn’t life or death or black and white thankfully. But to some it seems that way. The official independence campaign saw John Swinney this week declare his support for a ‘highly integrated UK financial

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Britain and the Problem of Living in the Past Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, June 9th 2012 As Jubilee celebrations die down in the short period of calm before the Olympics, questions arise about what all this means, what Britain and Britishness is, and what the future might be for both. The familiar account states that Britain does pageantry well, putting on a show, the big occasion, seamlessly combining old and new, tradition and modernisation. But is this an adequate explanation? The British like anyone enjoy a party and having a good time but what we seem to have been

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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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