Campaigners have condemned controversial new legislation designed to shut down protests outside the Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh, warning new police powers will have a “chilling effect” on the right to protest. The timing of this new legislation – just months before COP26 arrives in Scotland – is significant.
21 May 2021 — Craig Murray
Dave Llewellyn sat next to me in the public gallery of the Salmond trial as we witnessed the defence witnesses – largely female – who shredded the prosecution case. A few weeks ago, seven detectives of the Serious Crime Squad raided Dave’s home at 5am, handcuffed him and questioned him over conspiracy to murder – in relation to a public Facebook post. Dave has now been charged with a lesser but still imprisonable offence.
21 April 2021 — GMWatch
“We don’t want this toxic weedkiller sprayed in our community” – Guerrilla Gardeners
In Midlothian, Scotland, residents who are concerned about the use of toxic weedkiller in their community have come together to adopt public land and stop council workers spraying it, according to a report in Midlothian View.
5 April 2021 — Craig Murray
[To be clear, I’m neither a supporter or opponent of Scottish independence, my concern here is the role of the British security state via MI5 and the state and corporate media, in smearing and villifying supporters of Scottish independence. WB]
On 24 March, two of the SNP MP’s most closely aligned to Nicola Sturgeon, Stewart MacDonald and Alyn Smith, asked for a meeting with the British internal security service MI5 to discuss cooperation against Russia. MI5 is the agency charged with countering perceived internal threats to the UK state; Scottish nationalists, environmentalists and anti-nuclear campaigners are among MI5’s major targets. Until a few years ago, the vast majority of Scottish Independence supporters would have regarded MI5 as a particularly egregious manifestation of their traditional enemy, the British state. Yet here was the SNP officially – MacDonald and Smith are the party’s Westminster defence and foreign affairs spokesmen – calling for cooperation with MI5.
23 October 2020 — Off Guardian
Dr Bruce Scott
(Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
In March, it was just a three-week lockdown, to flatten the curve so as not to overwhelm the NHS. The narrative has quickly evolved. It has progressed from what seemed a reasonable idea of keeping NHS bed space free based on the completely false Neil Fergusson prediction that hospitals would be overwhelmed by patients suffering from COVID19.
31 March 2020 — Craig Murray
The day after I publish my article accusing the corporate media of being an active part of the conspiracy against Alex Salmond, and of giving disgracefully selective, slanted and biased coverage of the evidence of his trial, the Daily Record has decided to investigate my home and personal finances. Is not life full of little coincidences?
30 March 2020 — Craig Murray
A 22 person team from Police Scotland worked for over a year identifying and interviewing almost 400 hoped-for complainants and witnesses against Alex Salmond. This resulted in nil charges and nil witnesses. Nil. The accusations in court were all fabricated and presented on a government platter to the police by a two prong process. The first prong was the civil service witch hunt presided over by Leslie Evans and already condemned by Scotland’s highest civil court as “unlawful, unfair and tainted by apparent bias”. The second prong was the internal SNP process orchestrated by a group at the very top in SNP HQ and the First Minister’s Private Office. A key figure in the latter was directly accused in court by Alex Salmond himself of having encouraged a significant number of the accusers to fabricate incidents.
As the First World War drew to a close, John Maclean – the ‘accuser of capitalism’ – was seen as the most dangerous man in the country – but he was released from jail to a hero’s welcome.
Image: John Maclean, from the cover of Pluto Press’s book “John Maclean, Hero of Red Clydeside”
24 June 2016 — The Wolf Report: Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor
Logical question, not that anything at all has been accomplished, but still…..the votes are in and Britain, temporarily, has voted to exit the European Union. Temporarily…not temporarily the exit stuff; but temporarily the “Britain” part, because Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain. So it’s England and Wales, or soon will be. Cameron and Osborne and Johnson and Corbyn and Farage will have accomplished what the Scots couldn’t, or didn’t want to, the dissolution of their union with England.
17 September 2015 — MRZine
RISE: Scotland’s Left Alliance By Ken Ferguson
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 UK general election in May.
25 August 2015 — Media Lens
The BBC’s Nick Robinson has made a career out of telling the public what leading politicians say and do; sometimes even what they ‘think’. This stenography plays a key role in ‘the mainstream media’, given that a vital part of statecraft is to keep the public suitably cowed and fearful of threats from which governments must protect us. The ‘free press’ requires compliant journalists willing to disseminate elite-friendly messages about global ‘peace’, ‘security’ and ‘prosperity’, uphold Western ideology that ‘we are the good guys’, and not question power deeply, if at all.
17 September 2014 — Global Research
Scottish voters will go to the polls on September 18th to decide whether Scotland should become an independent country. As video blogger Ian R. Crane colorfully puts the issues and possibilities: Continue reading
15 September 2014 — Media Lens
Established power hates uncertainty, especially any threat to its grip on the political, economic and financial levers that control society. And so it is with elite fears that the United Kingdom, formed by the 1707 Acts of Union, could be on the verge of unraveling.
16 July 2014 — WSWS
Former Labour Party MP George Galloway has held a series of meetings throughout Scotland calling for a “No” vote in the Scottish independence referendum scheduled for September 18.
25 June 2014 — OurNHS
Scotland’s shift away from a commercialised NHS to one based once more on solidarity is proving highly popular with the public.
Since devolution, the NHS in Scotland has taken a very different path to that of NHS England. It has embraced co-operation rather than competition. Continue reading
29 April 2014 — Sustainable Pulse
UK environment secretary Owen Paterson’s has failed to represent Scotland after admitting breaching an agreement to make Scotland’s opposition to genetically modified (GM) crops clear to European ministers.
8 February 2014 — WSWS
British Prime Minister David Cameron is threatening to invoke the Parliament Act, to force a bill on the UK holding a referendum on European Union (EU) membership (UK) onto the statute books.
6 February 2014 — WSWS
An unprecedented police and legal clampdown is underway in Scotland. Primarily directed against young people, an escalation of stop and search measures has been unearthed by a recent report from Edinburgh University. According to the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, the rate with which particularly youth are stopped in working class areas of Scotland is far in excess of comparable figures for London and New York.
2 December 2013 — Greanville Post
What most struck me last week about Boris Johnson’s speech canonising Margaret Thatcher and thereby, paving the way for his own beatification, was how deeply and intimately familiar it all sounded. Let me explain. I was born in Doncaster in 1955 and from 1960, raised and educated on the Isle of Lewis, the son of a Scottish (doctor) father and English (nurse) mother. Continue reading
7 November 2013 — Wounds of Class
[This is an interesting and evocative essay which in some respects, parallels my own life. Fisher is also the author of the book, ‘Capitalist Realism:Is there no alternative?‘. WB]
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I have just come back to London from the North West of England, from my hometown, Barrow-in-Furness. My father died a few months ago, at the start of the summer, a week after I returned from Japan, where I had lived on and off for the previous three years. Now, my mum is on her own. Because of this I have decided to stay in the UK. Not entirely because of my mum’s situation, but also because I felt guilty about being abroad, that I should be back home, back here, doing something. Nor was it really a decision in the full, free sense. Luckily, a job came up at the last minute in the school I return to work in during the summer and I took it.
The New Dark Age 