Iain Macwhirter

This is my last column for the Herald after around 2.5 million words.   THE WORLD HAS TURNED AND I MUST TURN WITH IT In late 1999, when I returned from London to help launch the Sunday Herald, everyone told me I was mad. “It’ll no’ last six months” was the accepted wisdom in media … Continue reading →

I said it during partygate and I’ll say it again. The Tories were mad to ditch Boris Johnson because his replacement would be more right wing and even more incompetent.  But not even I thought it could be this bad. Tory MPS were suckered by social media and Dominic Cummings into ditching the only leader who, … Continue reading →

Italy’s first female prime minister, Georgia Meloni, caused outrage on polling day by posing suggestively with a pair of melons.  Italian feminists didn’t like her bawdy humour, even though Ms Meloni would surely qualify for Hillary Clinton’s list of “gutsy women”.  At any rate, you couldn’t imagine Benito Mussolini, the alleged ancestor of Meloni’s Brothers of … Continue reading →

The run up to the 2024 general election, if calamity Truss makes it that long, is going to be dominated by one question: can Keir Starmer win an absolute majority or will it have to do a deal with Nicola Sturgeon? The SNP currently commands 48 seats and is the third force in UK politics. … Continue reading →

 “It’s a declaration of Class War”.  Guardian commentators have been struggling to encapsulate the iniquity of Liz Truss’s tax-cutting dash for growth. Having spent the past three years claiming that Boris Johnson was spawn of the devil, scribes are having to ransack the register of righteous indignation to characterise someone who is genuinely on … Continue reading →

Referendums had a bad name after the Second World War. We tend to regard them as the most democratic way to resolve constitutional issues.  Back then they were seen as the tool of dictators.  Putin’s plan to hold plebiscites in the occupied territories of Ukraine is about to demonstrate just why. Adolf Hitler was an avid … Continue reading →

I have a sneaking admiration for Liz Truss. Not for her economic policies – they make little sense – but for her cojones. She has taken on the tax and spend consensus and turned it upside down. All those hysterics on Twitter who claimed that Boris Johnson was “the most right wing prime minister in … Continue reading →

Monarchy is an absurd anachronism. But so is nationalism. ————————— “The monarchy is not rational”, opined The Guardian editorial in a statement of bleedin’ the obvious. Like much of the media it  has been issuing stifled groans and guffaws for the last ten days at what many of its writers and its readers regarded as tantamount … Continue reading →

“Liberalism and its Discontents” by Francis Fukuyama. Profile Books £16.99 The American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, has made a career out of being wrong. He famously announced “The End of History” in a seminal work 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. History has been getting its own back on him for the last … Continue reading →

The late SNP MSP, Margo Macdonald, was a long time champion of the rights of sex workers – “working women” as she called them. She campaigned for tolerance zones and defended sex workers against heavy handed policing, such as the attempt to close down Edinburgh’s saunas. There has been no one in the SNP willing … Continue reading →

There are few politicians in modern history who have been subjected to such relentless scrutiny as Alex Salmond.  He has been under almost continual investigation, one way or another,  for 30 years, since he became leader of the Scottish National Party. A politician who has rocked the establishment, both in the UK and Scotland, the … Continue reading →

When the Scottish Police, the Catholic Church, the Law Society of Scotland get together to condemn the Scottish government’s Hate Crime Bill for endangering freedom of speech, you’d think that ministers might be tempted to listen. I can’t off-hand think of any issue that has united policemen, lawyers and churchmen in quite this way before … Continue reading →

At the start of 2019, few but the politically committed used the term “woke”. If they’d heard it at all, most people would’ve assumed it had something to do with insomnia. “Woke” only entered the Oxford English dictionary last year as meaning: “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice”. Like it’s parent “politically correct”, woke … Continue reading →

During an anti-Trump march in London in June an angry young woman confronted an elderly-looking Brexit supporter, repeatedly calling him “Nazi scum!”. She then laughed hysterically as the man was pelted with milkshakes. The video of Soibhan Prigent went viral and became one of the abiding images of 2019. It was a sad case, not … Continue reading →

The SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has landed in Dublin seeking political asylum, along with her deputy, John Swinney, and the party’s constitutional affairs minister, Mike Russell. Their hasty departure follows the conviction of 13 Scottish “separatists” who helped organise the illegal 2022 independence referendum. Prominent nationalist politicians including the Scottish Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf, the … Continue reading →

MOST people reading this column will surely agree that people who wish to change their gender should have the freedom to do so. We’ve come a long way since the days when people with non-heterosexual lifestyles were discriminated against or vilified. Live and let live.If some people who were born as men wish to live their … Continue reading →

WHEN the obituary of neoliberal capitalism is written – as I’m confident it will be within the next decade or so – Royal Bank of Scotland will merit a chapter all on its own. Up to its neck in sub-prime mortgage lending in the US, it was a major figure in the 2007 financial crash, … Continue reading →

BLISS it was to be alive in those early days of devolution – except that it wasn’t. The rebirth of Scotland’s democracy after 300 years in spring, 1999 proved to be a painful affair, and plunged Scotland into a period of post-natal depression, which ended the careers, and the lives, of some of the architects … Continue reading →

British business is its own worst enemy. The latest 10 per cent increase in top executive pay to an average of £5.5 million is another insult to the working population. These people seem to be under the L’Oreal delusion that “they’re worth it” – but few of their employees or economists agree. Executive pay in … Continue reading →

IT was never entirely clear whether Alex Salmond’s apparent infatuation with Her Majesty the Queen was genuine or merely theatrical. The former First Minister and Mrs Windsor certainly seemed to get on suspiciously well, perhaps because of a shared love of horses.  But did he really believe that she was “Queen of Scots” – a … Continue reading →

MALCOLM Tucker might have called it a “clusterf***mageddon”. Everyone said that last week’s treacherous political infighting was was like Shakespearean tragedy, but it resembled more The Thick Of It – the show producer Armando Iannucci says he can’t bring back because politics is now beyond satire. It’s just not funny any more. The parade of … Continue reading →

IMAGINE the scene: the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, clinking glasses with the Queen, riding in the gold coach down Whitehall, knocking back pints with the Prime Minister in a typical English pub. Outrageous. Unthinkable. The very idea. Putin is a deeply authoritarian figure who has threatened the security of neighbouring countries like Ukraine, exploited tensions … Continue reading →

“Another exceptionally lucid and thoughtful guide to Scotland’s ever shifting political scene will be of great interest whatever the reader’s political affiliation” Justin Reynolds, Scottish Fabians.   “Tsunami: Scotland’s Democratic Revolution” Out now.  Get it here:  http://www.cargopublishing.com/books/tsunami-scotlands-democratic-revolution-e-book-onl   Tsunami: Scotland’s Democratic Revolution is the third in Iain Macwhirter’s series of books attempting to map Scotland’s … Continue reading →

  Mountaineering books tend to follow a fairly predictable pattern. Expedition through exotic locations; long arduous haul up snowy slopes; a near death experience at high altitude; rounded off with some metaphysical reflections. Scottish mountaineer Sandy Allan’s account of his epic climb on the Mazeno ridge of Nanga Parbat (8,126 mtrs), observes the conventions. But … Continue reading →