Sunday’s Spanish regional elections in the Basque Autonomous Community and Galicia did not produce a surprise in terms of the victors, but it did show that the trend of rising support for pro-independence parties in Europe has not been slowed by the pandemic. In the BAC, EH Bildu, the left-wing pro-independence coalition, won nearly 28 […]
“Scotland has effectively reached the end of its ‘devolution journey’. Once Scotland was promised that it would have ‘the most powerful devolved government in the world’ but it seems that the limits of that high tide has been reached and those powers are now retreating by the day.”
On Source Direct yesterday morning we asked what the Scottish Finance Secretary Kate Forbes would do differently from the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s mini-budget on Wednesday. The answer soon followed. Forbes announced a tax cut to property buying and selling (LBTT), very similar in substance to the Chancellor’s cut to the English version of the same tax (Stamp […]
“Sunak is arming the British state with a new language and ethos of economics and civic responsibility – fusing the state, the citizenry, and the ‘private’ economy.”
Despite the Court of Appeal ruling a year ago that the UK government’s actions in selling arms to Saudi Arabia were “unlawful”, they are now set to resume sales. “They have prioritised billions of pounds in arms sales over human lives as evidence mounts of blatant violations of international humanitarian law by the Saudi-led coalition.” […]
The hedge-fund Chancellor knows how to grab the front-pages. £10 per head for a meal out, but only in August, and only on Monday-Wednesday, is novel. The Rishi-burger is indicative of the kind of gimmicky, short-term, consumption-heavy and corporate-subsidy laden approach of the Chancellor’s announcement. As The Guardian’s economics commentator Aditya Chakrabortty pointed out, it’s […]
“Let’s raise a toast to all those new homeworkers who have kept our country going since lockdown started, let’s reward them by making it a legal right to do what they have been doing throughout this crisis.”
The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival is currently taking place online, and yesterday I watched ‘Riptide’, a film produced and directed by Tim Barrow, one of our Source Direct subscribers. It is a story about Jacob, living in Edinburgh and suffering from schizophrenia. He falls in love with another schizophrenic person, and what follows is a […]
“If there is a solution to the problems of arts funding, it will involve more than a handout from Boris Johnson, or the wisdom of Creative Scotland.”
“I say directly to the Scottish Parliament and especially to the SNP MSPs, we haven’t forgotten your promises of 2016. We haven’t forgotten that you identified the rising cost of rent as a problem and then fobbed it off every step of the way. We haven’t forgotten and we are angry.”
All you despots out there – beware! The UK Government is coming for you. In its new post-Brexit sanctions regime, the UK is taking action against those behind the most “notorious” human rights abuses in the world, with the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 named as one of those acts of brutality to […]
“Will these polling results resemble the eventual makeup of Holyrood in 2021? Mibbes aye, mibbes naw. Will continuous and verifiable majority support for independence lead to a second referendum on the national question? Could be – but nobody’s quite sure how.”
“Never before have the foundations of public support for the Union looked so weak,” polling expert John Curtice has declared. His basis for this assessment is the latest poll by PanelBase showing 54 per cent in favour of Scottish independence, with 46 per cent against, which added to other previous polls over the past six […]