Journalist, author, broadcaster
In his book, the Making of the Crofting Community, the Scottish historian James Hunter quotes a small farmer in the Highlands as saying they “hate us in London but ignore us in Edinburgh.” Standing on the windswept pier at Stornoway, the main town on the isle of Lewis, both metropoles feel like a world away. The twice-daily […]
Among the many inscriptions on the Canongate wall at Holyrood, it is a terse Scottish proverb that sums up the reality of political life in the Scottish Parliament better than any bon mots from Hugh MacDiarmid or Norman MacCaig: ‘To promise is ae thing, to keep it is anither.’ Despite the enthusiasm that greeted its […]
Having voted LibDem in the recent UK election, this comment piece for the excellent Holyrood magazine betrays an anger with Clegg and his ‘new politics’ that I think plenty of left-of-centre voters felt in the immediate aftermath of the coalition agreement, and many still feel today. “This is the start of the new politics I […]