Sunday National

Is Britain Broken? And what should we do in this election and beyond? Gerry Hassan Sunday National, December 8th 2019 The United Kingdom is not a happy place at the moment. This has been a strange, unsatisfying election campaign. People feel ignored and distrustful of politicians. But more than that, they don’t feel that they own what passes for democracy. This has a longer tail than this election. A host of factors have contributed to the current state of Britain. There is the UK’s struggle to find a global role post-Empire. The dependency on the so called ‘special relationship’ with

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The Trouble with the BBC and its view of Britain Gerry Hassan Sunday National, December 1st 2019 The BBC is one of the defining institutions of the UK for both supporters and detractors. Increasingly the BBC is not in a good place. It is not having a good election. This follows on from criticism of its coverage of the 2014 indyref and 2016 Brexit vote. On top of this the BBC finds itself under fire from every political direction - Corbynistas, Scottish independence supporters and right-wing Conservatives. The media landscape the BBC sits in is profoundly changing. This is now

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Class still defines and disfigures Britain and Scotland Gerry Hassan Sunday National, November 24th 2019 Class still matters and defines much of Britain and Scotland. It shapes life chances, educational opportunities, work advancement and careers, health, life expectancy, culture, politics - and who makes and does not make the key decisions in society. Dr. Fiona Hill, the British-born US public servant, spoke this week at the Trump impeachment hearings about being born in Bishop Auckland in the north of England, saying: ‘This country [the US] offered me opportunities I would never have had in England. I grew up poor with

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Jeremy Corbyn, Labour and Scottish Independence Gerry Hassan Sunday National, November 17th 2019 This week Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s trip to Scotland made the headlines - and not for positive reasons. Corbyn’s position in less than 24 hours changed more than once on independence. First, he shifted from his previous position of not having an independence referendum in the ‘early years’ of a Labour Government, indicating that a vote would not take place in ‘the first term’ of an administration. Then when this was seen as the significant shift it was, he rowed back and returned to the first position,

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The Last UK General Election Ever? Or the Last Bar One? Gerry Hassan Sunday National, October 27th 2019 Boris Johnson on Monday makes what is his third attempt to get the votes to call a UK general election – needing 434 votes to win a two-thirds majority under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. This piece was written before the moves by the Lib Dems and SNP to bring about an election on December 9^th via a simple, single line bill. This may have more chance of succeeding later this week. But whether it does or does not it doesn’t invalidate

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Does Boris Johnson’s ‘deal’ pose the end of the Union? Gerry Hassan Sunday National, October 20th 2019 It has been another tumultuous Brexit week. But this is not the end of Brexit, or even the beginning of the end, but just another staging post in this drawn-out process. Fundamental to the Johnson deal is what is proposed for Northern Ireland. In place of the so called ‘backstop’ the province is instead put in a special place in relation to the rest of the UK and EU. It remains legally in the UK customs territory, while practically remaining in the EU

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Deal or No Deal? Brexit Endgame or the End of Britain? Gerry Hassan Sunday National, October 6th 2019 Boris Johnson has finally revealed his Brexit plan with less than one month to his intended exit date from the EU. Constantly presented as a ‘deal’ by insular British political discussion and media who have contributed so much to fueling Brexit, it is in fact nothing of the sort. It is rather an agreement between Boris Johnson, the Northern Irish DUP, the Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) and what remains of the parliamentary Tory Party. Politics does not stop at the

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The crisis of British democracy and Parliament isn’t going away anytime soon Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 29th 2019 The British Parliament returned to work last week – reopened after the historic Supreme Court verdict. Its undertakings were highly charged, contentious and even abusive in language and exchange. Attorney General Geoffrey Cox sneeringly stated ‘this Parliament is dead ’ with ‘has no moral right to exist’, Boris Johnson talked dismissively of a ‘paralysed’ and ‘zombie’ Parliament, while even the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg described it as ‘exhausted and broken’. Beyond the drama and high tension, one emerging question is what is

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The Queen’s role in politics is one of the last remnants of feudalism Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 15th 2019 The Queen has been publicly involved in politics in the past few weeks on an unprecedented scale. There has been Boris Johnson’s suspension of the UK Parliament, the nature of his advice to the Queen, the Court of Session judgement calling his actions ‘unlawful’, followed by Johnson saying when asked if he mislead the monarch: ‘absolutely not’. The Queen is the public front of an intricate, complex institution called ‘the Crown’. As any watchers of the Netflix series of the

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Boris Johnson and the art of self-deception Gerry Hassan Sunday National, September 8th 2019 Boris Johnson has long had a problematic relationship with the truth. When a journalist, he was fired from ‘The Times’ for making up a quote; in the last month as UK Prime Minister he stated that he was in favour of proroguing Parliament when he publicly said he was against it, claimed to be against having an election he was planning and then for holding a contest, and saying that he is negotiating a Brexit deal with the EU, while preparing for a No Deal Brexit.

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