Iain Macwhirter
Archive for
Basildon Revisited. How Ukip is remaking UK in Thatcher’s image.
“The suburbs are being painted red” tweeted Labour’s John McTernan at the height of post poll spin frenzy on Friday. He meant that Labour was holding off Ukip and the Tories in the metropolis – gaining Hammersmith and Fulham and various other stops on the suburban tube routes. Mind you Ukip had taken the precaution … Continue reading
Osborne to kill Scottish bank notes. Shock.
READ IAIN IN THE HERALD AND SUNDAY HERALD. t was back to the good cop/bad cop routine last week in the referendum campaign First, Chancellor George Osborne put the boot in, saying he’d starve an independent Scotland of currency by making any Scottish pound illegal tender in England. Then smiling David Cameron arrived in … Continue reading
Why Salmond is right to be worried about Ukip
There has been a deal of unwarranted complacency among the Scottish chattering classes about the threat posed by Nigel Farage, who received a predictably hostile welcome from radical independence demonstrators in Edinburgh recently. There is a comforting delusion that Ukip is a uniquely English political phenomenon. We don’t hate immigrants up here and we … Continue reading
Road to Referendum – Poundland. Extract from new edition.
READ IAIN IN THE HERALD AND SUNDAY HERALD. On February 13, 2014, many Scots were wondering whether they could be bothered buying Valentine cards again this year, when news broke that Chancellor George Osborne had arrived in Edinburgh on a flying visit.What he said had a profound and enduring impact on the complex relationship … Continue reading
Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The real race to the bottom.
READ IAIN IN THE HERALD AND SUNDAY HERALD…… The referendum campaign is caught in a dense thicket of irrelevance. How many big businesses might leave if Scotland votes Yes? Would Scotland be allowed to use the pound? How long would it take for Scotland to join/rejoin the European Union? How much is North Sea … Continue reading
The Sunday Herald says Yes to independence. The May Manifesto
EDITORIAL FROM SUNDAY HERALD 4/5/14 ON September 18, Scotland must decide whether to remain within the United Kingdom or become an independent country. No-one should find the decision easy. There is nothing simple, clean, or clinical about ending a union that has endured for better than three centuries. Nevertheless, having considered the arguments, the … Continue reading
All nationalisms are not the same.
There has been a subtext to much of the coverage of the independence debate over the last three months as the London media has started to take a closer interest in what is going on in Scotland. It has brought to the fore a latent tendency in much metropolitan commentary on Scotland to see the … Continue reading
Was Cameron a fascist for supporting the Maidan?
Last week, YouGov recorded its highest Yes vote yet, at 42% after don’t knows were excluded. No has a comfortable lead at 58%. But more worrying for Better Together, YouGov confirmed that many Scots still don’t believe the Chancellor’s claim that” if Scotland walks away from the UK it walks away from the pound”. … Continue reading
Scotland changed for the better whatever September brings.
Road to Referendum isn’t a Yes campaign tour, and I’m not a member of the Scottish National Party. The idea is to have open and hopefully open-minded discussions about the state of the nation and how to approach this momentous decision – which affects all of us in this windy little corner of Europe. The … Continue reading
Iain Macwhirter 