• RISE: Scotland’s Left Alliance

    One year on from the historic Scottish independence referendum politics here are utterly changed. The long dominant Labour Party, which opted to campaign against independence — alongside the Conservatives, loathed by the big majority of Scots voters, and the now virtually demolished Liberal Democrats in the Better Together alliance — reaped the whirlwind at the […]

  • Scotland’s Democratic Revolution Challenges Both Austerity and the UK State

    The May 7th UK general election, which saw the Conservatives win a slim majority, witnessed a democratic revolution of unprecedented scale in Scotland.  England backed continued austerity, neo-liberal economics and £12 billion welfare spending cuts; the Scots overwhelmingly rejected that approach. In the UK parliament Scotland is represented by 59 MPs, of whom, before May, […]

  • Are Scotland’s Post-Referendum Politics Set to Challenge Austerity Britain?

    First a bit of context on how we got here. Scotland was united with England to form Great Britain by the 1707 Treaty of Union, which was signed by a political elite with no democratic mandate who were largely bribed into agreement or, as Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns put it, “bought and sold for […]