It took a long time for me to start taking a proper interest in the now- looming prospect of Scottish independence. This was partly due to my vaguely assuming that just because there aren’t likely to be border raids between Cumbria and Dumfries and Galloway or a Berlin Wall-style division of Berwick-upon-Tweed it wouldn’t actually [...]
This piece is part diary, part analysis, about the Edinburgh Climate Camp, and I’ve *tried* to write it in a way that’s of interest to people with no knowledge of the camp as well as people who went along. If you want to know why we went to Edinburgh, give my pre-camp post a glance. [...]
In a week’s time, about 1000 people from across the country are going to set up a protest camp in or near Edinburgh. Targetting the Royal Bank of Scotland, it’ll probably be the first big protest against a major bank that the UK has seen in this crisis. In 2008, RBS wasn’t just the biggest [...]
Scotland, sex and decency. The combination of the three has long been known to generate weird and authoritarian outcomes. The scottish law against “Outraging Public Decency” appears to potentially criminalise anything that people might find a bit icky, and not long ago was used to convict somebody for having sex with his bicycle in the [...]
Tomorrow Alex Salmond is due to present a White Paper to the Scottish Parliament, setting out plans for a referendum on Scotland’s constitutional position. Independence isn’t going to be the only possibility it suggests, (there’s also going to be an option for what Nick Robinson refers to as ‘independence-lite’ – giving the Scottish Executive powers [...]
