Saltire in the sky – Edinburgh on the eve of a historic election
Photo – Rob Bruce The row of turreted tents for the international press pack that has appeared on the green sward outside Holyrood looks a little like the set for…
Empty Holiday Homes Blight A Highland Beauty Spot – It’s an Election Issue
A dozen white-painted cottages strung along the seafront harbour in the hamlet of Diabaig look out on a postcard-perfect West Highland vista – but there are few inhabitants to enjoy…
As Doors Reopen in Glasgow’s City Centre, Will an Ambitious Plan for the Area be Realised?
“I have walked down both Las Ramblas in the sunshine and Sauchiehall Street in the rain – and I prefer the latter” I read this quote in an article –…
Child “Imagineers” Should Be Consulted Over George Square Redesign, Experts Say – first published in the National, April 2021
The Rings fountain in Boston – pic Rob Bruce The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which was recently incorporated into Scots law gives children a right to…
Reopening after a tough year, the Gandolfi’s Seumas MacInnes looks forward to exciting times for Glasgow’s CIty Centre – first published in the National, April 2021
Seumas MacInnes who has run the Cafe Gandolfi at the heart of Glasgow’s Merchant City for 40 years is getting ready to reopen the iconic restaurant on April 26…
Sans Culottes in Locked-Down France – November 2020
I am WFF right now – Working From France. Coming over here for the last chunk of 2020 was a personal Brexit protest. Working and living here has always been…
Was Tourism Management in the Highlands This Summer a “Shit Show”?
The loch was – we wild swimmers don’t use the ‘C’ word – so let’s call it invigorating. I got out of the water to change on the pebbly shore…
Susan Kemp’s Documentary Examining Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ Premiers Online
Film Draws Parallels with Carrie Gracie’s Fight for Equal Pay July 8, 2020 A full-length documentary “In the Light: You have to look squint at history sometimes to see the…
Politics on the hill, an Edinburgh View
This essay, about Edinburgh after the Brexit vote, has had more than 10,000 readers. A video is available at Phantom Power.
A personal memoir of US election night, 2016
That November night in 2016 when Trump was elected – a recollection.
Go on yersel, England. Scotland is sticking with the lady in red – response to the Brexit vote
It was all wrong on the day of the poll, like a scene from Shakespeare, unseasonal thunderstorms, flooding, owls hooting in the afternoon. ‘Is that a dagger that I see…
“England, Don’t Let Us Down!” – an essay from Berlin on the eve of the Brexit vote.
This week in East Berlin wherever I went, I seemed to hear the sound of bagpipes. First, a man in a Glengarry playing the pibroch in the famous street Unter…
The historic ‘Yes’ vote that changed Scotland – 1707
In the run up to the historic vote intense debate raged among “Great & Small, Rich & Poor, Old &Young, Men & Woman”. It was ‘the common discourse and universal…
Why I believe in Britain – on the eve of Scotland’s independence vote in 2014
From Prospect magazine website, September 11, 2014. One of Scotland’s best-known plays is Peter Pan. At the dramatic moment when the fairy Tinkerbell, traditionally played by a spotlight which flickers and then seems to go out, is close to death. Peter Pan turns to the audience and says she can only be saved if the audience demonstrates that they do believe in fairies by clapping their hands, which generally results in thunderous applause from adults and children alike.
Recalling the devolution vote of 1979.
The current winner-takes-all referendum campaign for Scottish independence is reminiscent of the febrile politics of the late 1970s, when a minority Labour government called Scotland ’s first constitutional referendum on…