I’M not one for quoting long dead, beardy men but the logic of ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was irrefutable when he said: “No man steps into the same river twice."
THE outlook from the flat where I grew up in the Gorbals was pretty grey. From the living room, we could see a single tree standing forlornly, surrounded by concrete paving. My pals and I spent many hours digging out the slivers of earth wedged between the paving stones, looking for worms driven up by the rain.
THE outlook from the flat where I grew up in the Gorbals was pretty grey. From the living room, we could see a single tree standing forlornly, surrounded by concrete paving. My pals and I spent many hours digging out the slivers of earth wedged between the paving stones, looking for worms driven up by the rain.
GOODNESS. When I stopped writing for The National to have a break, I’d no idea that a near apocalypse was upon us. As I write this, a staggering 25,075,600 people have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and 736,372 people have died from it across the globe. Thousands of people in Scotland are reeling from grief. We are all rocked by the collective trauma of it all. The world has turned on its axis and now many of us are staring down an economic tsunami. And with autumn almost upon us, the pandemic may be far from over.
WRITING in yesterday’s Sunday National, Nicola Sturgeon made the point that the actions of the UK Government have made independence “all but inevitable”. I wouldn’t go that far, because who knows what the future holds in store. For the UK establishment the loss of Scotland would be a crushing defeat, an international humiliation on a scale unprecedented in British history.
A HISTORIAN once observed that there are periods when time seems to stand still – when years can roll slowly by without any great upheavals. There are other times, however, when events accelerate at lightning speed and decades are compressed into what feels like months or even weeks.
THE story of Women for Independence really begins, not with the formal launch of the movement, but with the Scottish Parliament election of May 5, 2011. On that day, the rules of devolution were torn to shreds.
DUH … that was my response to hearing a Radio 4 report last week about the Westminster Government announcing a wholesale review of the provision of food to patients in hospitals in England. They’ve enlisted yet another celebrity chef, Prue Leith, to sort out the perpetual crisis in hospital catering there, the most recent being a listeria outbreak.
I’VE never been an uncritical fan of the European Union, as regular readers of this column may know. Its structures need reform from top to bottom and the best that can be said for the current political leadership is that it has lagged far behind the UK over the past decades when it comes to attacking workers’ rights, privatising public assets, widening inequality and giving big business a free hand to pile up mountainous profits at the expense of people and the environment.
AS Nicola Sturgeon said at the weekend, last week was a watershed in the struggle for Scotland’s future. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, as the saying goes, but Lord Ashcroft’s bombshell poll was just the start of what felt like a transformational sequence of events. More important even than the poll lead for independence was the revelation that there is now a majority for a referendum within two years.
