Ahead of the Holyrood 2021 elections, Colin Fox argues all that is solid just might melt into air With less than a year to go until the Holyrood elections, the opinion polls appear to suggest the result is a foregone conclusion. The SNP is at 52% support, according to a May 2020 YouGov poll and […]
Kenny MacAskill considers the case of Kansas to give a handle on those feeling left behind but not left It’s never wise to forget your electoral base, or worse to treat it with contempt. But it’s all too easily done, and it comes at a high cost. That came to mind reading Thomas Franks’ 2004 […]
Nigel Flanagan tells the tale of the subject of the film and the means by which is was made Sat in a room in Hurricane Films in Liverpool, we had come together to talk about making a film about a union leader and who it could be. Our discussion moved onto the film about Thatcher […]
By celebration and critique, Gregor Gall commemorates the contribution of Neil Davidson Socialists in Scotland lost one of their finest thinkers with the untimely death of Neil Davidson (9 October 1957 – 3 May 2020). Neil was a very rare thing in this modern age of intellectuals being housed in universities. He was not just […]
Midnight Traveller (2020) – Director: Hassan Fazili, Editor: Emelie Mahdahvian Reviewed by Jackie Bergson Increasingly soaring refugee numbers within recent years elicited a tranche of thematic documentaries by filmmakers moved to reveal some of the stories behind them. Midnight Traveller (2020) is a particularly personal, involved account which documents its filmmakers’ need to flee from […]
Murray Armstrong The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820, Pluto Press, 2020, 9780745341330, pp228 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan The Fight for Scottish Democracy is a strictly historical account though it begins with a scene that would not be out of place in a lurid Victorian novel: two women in the dead of […]
Kenny MacAskill Radical Scotland: Uncovering Scotland’s Radical History – from the French Revolutionary era to the 1820 Rising, Biteback, 2020, 9781785905704, pp352 Reviewed by Gordon Leggate This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the 1820 Radical Rising, a perhaps lesser known period in Scottish history. On 1 April, proclamations were posted across many towns […]
Twelve weeks into lockdown, and our through-the-looking-glass ‘new normal’ becomes ever more bizarre. While everyone’s lives seem identical from one week to the next, like some never-ending Groundhog Day, other things appear to change dramatically on a day-to-day basis. UK government policy, for example, carries on being made up ‘on the hoof’. One minute, free […]
Editorial: ‘Strange times, indeed. But maybe not that strange’. As Shakespeare’s dark and dystopian verse seems to be commonly quoted in these strange times, I’m reminded of Macbeth’s statement in Act 1 Scene 3: ‘Nothing is but what is not’. So, we have a populist, right-wing and neo-liberal Tory government engaging in the biggest bout […]
A first-time reader, Mary MacCallum Sullivan, reflects on our general election analysis (SLR 115) I am ‘of the left’, but have never identified as a Labour supporter, or, indeed, as a socialist. I have no doubt that that position is, generally, shared by many. I enjoyed reading the issue – the first time! But it […]