Populism

Why the Reform Bandwagon is coming to Scotland – and what can be done to stop it? Sunday National, 25 May 2025 Gerry Hassan Nigel Farage and Reform are on the march across England, Wales and Scotland. What was once seen as purely an English (as well as Welsh) phenomenon is now making clear inroads in Scotland. In the past few weeks Reform have risen to 21% in Westminster voting intentions in Scotland and 20% in one Scottish Parliament poll in regional list voting intentions. This would make them the main opposition party to the SNP and dramatically alter

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Welcome to the Age of Disruption: Time for a New Radicalism Sunday National, 23 February 2025 Gerry Hassan The world is living through unparalleled times. The post-war international order created by and for the USA is being unilaterally ripped up and trashed by the USA. In so doing it is establishing a new world order which looks less like the 1930s and the spectre of fascism and more like pre-1914 and the age of rival great power rivalries and competing imperialisms. The failure of the mainstream Across Europe, North and South America, Israel and elsewhere the march of right-wing populists

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Trump and Trumpism: How did we get here and what are the lessons for all of us? Sunday National, 26 January 2025 Gerry Hassan There has only been one international political story this week - the return of Donald Trump as US President. Beyond the bombastic inauguration and plethora of executive orders is the story of how we got to this sorry state. Long term factors about the founding and nature of America combined with a more immediate set of reasons relevant to the UK and West provide insights about what the Trump phenomenon means for politics and leadership and

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Get Ready for the Age of Disruption Coming to Scotland! Sunday National, December 29th 2024 Gerry Hassan Politics everywhere across the West is shaped by failure, exhaustion and unpopularity in the mainstream - and increasingly by anger and rage amongst voters. Both Scotland and the UK are no exception. Labour’s election victory with 34% of the vote was the smallest in history for a party winning an overall parliamentary majority. Since then it has been downhill all the way with a government showing a lack of sure-footedness and political acumen on issue after issue, and with no sense of how

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How to defeat fascism and the far-right in Britain and elsewhere Gerry Hassan Sunday National, 27 October 2024 Twenty-five years ago, at the height of Blair, Bill Clinton and “The Third Way”, many felt that the future direction and progress of the world was safe and secure. Widespread optimism and belief in globalisation and economic freedom leading to political liberty ran from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times and Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker to cliché-filled PowerPoints by public agencies such as Scottish Enterprise. This was a mixture of projection, groupthink and propaganda. Fast forward to the present

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The politics of populism in Scotland and the challenge of Alex Salmond and George Galloway Gerry Hassan Sunday National, April 11th 2021 Once upon a time politics were simpler. Parties stood unambiguously on the left and right; politics was about class and the economy, and there was no such thing as “identity politics”. This is of course make-believe as politics was never so completely clear cut. But in recent decades this has become even more messy and unpredictable, with existing parties open to new challenges across the developed world. Today one of the big stories of politics is the rise

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The Worldwide War over Truth and Free Speech Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, December 2nd 2020 The battle for truth is all around us. Fake news. Fake media. The argument over free speech and freedom to say what we like and think, alongside controversies over ‘cancel culture’ and ‘safe spaces’. Meanwhile an American President who has lost an election still, one month after polling day, refuses to accept the result. He has called the contest ‘rigged’ and ‘stolen’ – a denialism that 77% of Trump voters agree with according to a Monmouth University survey. This is the world all around us.

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The Politics of Hate and why it has to be defeated – from the US to Scotland Gerry Hassan Sunday National, November 1st 2020 We live in divisive, contentious times where the noise and claims and counter-claims in public life seem to never stop. Many people yearn for this age of rage and hatred to stop, and for a return to supposedly calmer, more enlightened times. This can be seen in part of the logic of support for Democrat Joe Biden against Donald Trump in next week’s US Presidential election. However, there will be no return to a so-called ‘normal’

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Why the power of loss and not imagining the future aids populists and demagogues Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, February 5th 2020 The UK – and with it Scotland – have left the European Union after 47 years. In human terms, this is a substantial length of time - the equivalent of a lifelong adult marriage or relationship, but in that comparison the British political classes and large swathe of public opinion never fully committed themselves to the European project, making the eventual divorce unsurprising. This is a watershed moment for all of us – the 31^st of January 2020 being

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Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban: This is not an Age of Fascism Yet Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, October 31st 2018 A spectre is haunting the modern world: fascism. All around the world people are talking about and identifying fascists. Newspaper headlines abound in the US such as ‘Is Donald Trump a fascist?’, ‘How fascist is Donald Trump?’ and even more emphatically, ‘Donald Trump is actually a fascist’: all from mainstream liberal papers. The threat of fascism is now a worldwide phenomenon. We have just seen in the Brazil the victory of ‘strongman’ Jair Bolsonaro; the Hungarian authoritarianism of Viktor Orban; the rise

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