British politics

The Problem with Britain and Why It Can’t Be Tidily Put Back Together Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, August 14th 2016 Britain throughout its history has had a reputation for stability and security. This after all was one of the main clarion calls in the indyref and, more recently, the Brexit vote, but this has always been a bit of a myth and is now increasingly fictitious. In the European referendum and its aftermath, much of the discussion that occurred repeatedly - supposedly about the country, its challenges and future - wasn’t actually about the UK, but instead about England. This

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The Labour Party: that pillar of the British constitution doesn’t have a right to exist Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, July 25th 2016 Politics requires a credible opposition that holds government to account. One that offers the prospect of an alternative government – but now, and for the foreseeable future, Scotland and the UK is without one. This is due to the state of Labour. The last year has been one of the most disastrous in the party’s history. A second election defeat, Scotland lost - and then Brexit. And after last year’s defeat the party curled up even more in

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A Very British Coup: The rise of Theresa May could see the end of the UK Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, July 17th 2006 Theresa May became the UK Prime Minister this week – elected on a mandate of 199 Tory MPs in what amounted to a very British coup. She is only Britain’s second ever woman Prime Minister, following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher. But in other respects she follows Gordon Brown as the twelfth PM in the last 100 years who has entered Downing Street without a popular mandate. Jeremy Corbyn is clinging on as Labour leader –

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After Cameron, Boris and Corbyn: What will Tomorrow’s Leaders Look Like? Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, July 14th 2016 Leadership in the modern world is cited as the answer to nearly every issue, problem or area of life – from business, to turning round failing organisations, to the success of football clubs. In the last month, political leadership has been all over the news. There has been David Cameron’s rather hasty resignation; the coronation of Theresa May as Prime Minister; and Boris Johnson’s positioning for power, withdrawal from the Tory leadership contest, and then subsequent appointment as Foreign Secretary in May’s

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This is the Age of Groupthink Britain and it is increasingly been found out Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, July 10th 2016 When has British politics ever been in such a state of flux? The Tories, UKIP and English and Welsh Greens in leadership contests; the Labour Party in a series of convulsions from top to bottom; Brexit; and now thirteen years after the UK went to war in Iraq finally comes the publication of Chilcot. The Tories do know how to utilise a crisis. It is one of the reasons that they are one of the most successful electoral

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The anger about the Iraq Disaster isn’t just about Iraq and Blair Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, July 7th 2016 It is hard to envisage now but once upon a time Tony Blair was an eager to please, likeable, pragmatic politician. In 1997 he caught the mood of the times and led Labour to an election victory of historic proportions, and inflicted the worst ever defeat on the Conservatives, which they took more than a decade to recover from. At that year’s Labour conference Alastair Campbell, Blair’s Head of Communications, leaked a private poll which revealed that Blair had a 93%

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Is this the beginning of the end of Britain? Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, July 3rd 2016 It may not be the beginning of the end of the UK quite yet. But it is the end of British politics - and Britain, as we know it. The British state faces its biggest geo-political set of challenges in generations. Blair and Iraq, Anthony Eden and Suez pale compared to this in terms of damage to the UK’s reputation, and only Neville Chamberlain and Munich, and Lord North’s loss of the American colonies, are in any way in the same league.

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Whatever happens, Britain has already left the building Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, June 22nd 2016 The UK has already left Europe. It never really joined in any real sense. National debates like this reveals much about the psyche of a country, and how it sees its collective hopes and fears. For one, it illuminates a lot about the ghosts of the past that haunt a country. In the Scottish indyref, for example, a great deal of this focused on the perceived legacy of Thatcherism and deindustrialisation. In this European debate, the ghosts seemingly ever-present are those of the spectre of

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This campaign is a future warning from a British Trumpland Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, June 19th 2016 The Euro campaign has been without any joy or love, and has reached depths unseen for decades in British politics – reducing complex subjects to the gutter. This last week has been a humbling one. The tragic death of Labour MP Jo Cox, the UKIP poster ‘Breaking Point’ on the threat of mass immigration coming to the UK, and the disgraceful antics of Leave.EU (the UKIP dominated Leave campaign) linking the Orlando massacre to Muslim immigration. It has been a long low road

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Are We Better Than This? The Tragic Killing of Jo Cox Gerry Hassan Bella Caledonia, June 17th 2016 This is an attack on all of us. The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox is an assault on parliamentary democracy but disgracefully not as much a shock as it should be. Part of British politics have sunk that low. This is an age of anti-party politics - of anger at the political classes and of populist indignation and cynicism. Across Europe, there has been the rise of racist, xenophobic and anti-immigration parties, and even the re-emergence of neo-Nazis as electoral forces

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