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…