Federalism

Donald Dewar and the Lost Story of Devolution Gerry Hassan Bella Caledonia, October 8th 2020 A significant and poignant moment in Scotland’s recent history comes up this weekend on Sunday, with the 20^th anniversary of the tragic death of the first ever First Minister Donald Dewar at the age of 63. Donald Dewar was a profoundly decent person, imbued with an older sense of public mission and morality, who often seemed out of kilter with the times - drawing from a deep reservoir of how the middle and professional classes used to behave. His death robbed the Scottish Parliament of

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What has Labour got to say as the British establishment collapses? Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 22nd 2019 The Labour Party meets for its annual conference at Brighton this weekend, confident about its future prospects. The reality is that the state of Labour is not good. The party are polling between 21% and 28% in the polls - with the two pollsters who called 2017 most accurately putting it on 21% and 24%, and in one they are third place behind the Lib Dems. This puts Labour on course to lose a massive six million votes from 2017 to the

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The ‘F’ word rears its head again: Federalism and Labour Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, March 13th 2019 One political principle unites not just the Labour Party from Jeremy Corbyn to Tom Watson but also the Conservative Party - from Theresa May to the most ultra-Brexiteers in the Jacob Rees-Mogg faction. That principle is a belief in parliamentary sovereignty: which for all its elevated sound actually means the right of governments to do what they like and not be bound by things like the rule of law, human rights or what previous administrations have done. It is of course a

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