The Scottish Household Survey has just been published. This data provides the most detailed account of the demographic make-up of Scotland’s communities, and how it has changed over time. It also provides information on people’s views and beliefs on a number of issues, from climate change to religious belonging. Here, we will focus on what the […]
Analysis
“The Johnson/Cummings/Gove team represents a political approach with which older Scots were more familiar in the 1980s. It is crude, ruthless and risk-taking. It is probably rather worse than Thatcher”
Isobel Lindsay: After the Internal Market battle, we need to face the new reality
There is a constitutional curiosity in the UK Government’s Internal Market Bill which professor Michael Keatings, Centre for Constitutional Change director, has identified, and is worth reflecting on. Until now the UK Government operated a system of powers which was fundamentally different from that of the EU. Some powers are reserved and some are devolved, but […]
Britain’s new unitary state
Some good news – kind of. The Royal Bank of Scotland’s latest Purchasing Managers’ Index report suggests things are starting to get built and sold again. A PMI rate above 50 suggests activity is expanding rather than contracting, and Scotland’s August PMI was 55.8, ahead of Northern Ireland and Wales but behind all English regions. […]
Scotland’s looming financial storm
“There is a degree of courage that the Scots, and in particular Nicola Sturgeon, must show if they want the transition to independence and entering the EU, to be realistic. And that includes the currency. “It is not possible and it is not credible for the ‘independentists’, for the SNP, to advocate independence without advocating […]
Currency questions can’t be wished away
The “sex, gender and covid-19 project” launches this morning, which describes itself as “the world’s most comprehensive dashboard for covid-19 data broken down by sex and gender”. The dashboard allows you to look at the specifics of different countries and compare across countries, and across time. It makes for some interesting reading. Of the 173 countries in […]
Between infected and affected: the impact of covid-19 on women
How do we stop the resurgence of covid-19 in Scotland? Everyone is agreed that it is resurgent, and that we need to stop it, so let’s try to focus on the ‘how’. Common Weal today publishes a new report by head of policy & research Craig Dalzell which looks at exactly that. It proposes a change in […]
‘Warning lights’: Does Scotland need a new covid-19 elimination strategy?
Two stories today illuminate the absurdity of modern-day capitalism, where inequality is so profound that the economy appears broken in two, orbiting in completely different realities from one another. On the one hand, food bank usage in Scotland has more than doubled since the pandemic, up 108 per cent on the year previously according to […]
When the Ayn Rand dystopia becomes real
Brexit’s back. Of course, it never went away. But for three years it dominated UK political debate, before the decisive December 2019 General Election finally set Britain on a definitive course for leaving. The pandemic then knocked it out of the headlines. We are three-quarters of the way through a transition year until the UK […]
The stakes are raised in Brexit poker
“Already by the start of September, students are arriving at Scottish campuses for the most extraordinary academic year in living memory.”