A bit of escapism is sometimes needed in these grim times, so Scotland’s men’s football team making it to a major championship for the first time since 1998 is not an unhealthy tonic. In 1998 there was no Scottish Parliament, Google had just been founded, and the DVD was sold for the first time – […]
Ben Wray
Some Source Direct subscribers may have a vague memory of a huge chicken following David Cameron around the UK during the 2010 General Election. The chicken had a Daily Mirror badge on, and was meant to indicate that Cameron was too chicken to answer tough questions. Fast forward a decade, and the Mirror Chicken has […]
Flew the coop
When we talk about regional inequality, we usually talk about the chasm between London & the South-East and the rest of the UK, including Scotland. On that scale, Britain is one of the most regionally unequal country’s in Europe. But regional inequalities matter within Scotland too, have been growing for a long time, and are being […]
Inverclyde, and why we should worry about Scotland’s regional inequality
All hail our innovative Big Pharma overlords, riding to the rescue to save the world from the scourge of covid-19 with their vaccine developed at record-breaking speed! Well, not quite. First of all, Pfizer and BioNtech’s vaccine will be going to the wealthy nations first, and those poor folk in the global south may get […]
Celebrate science, not Big Pharma
With the US Presidential election all over except for the lawsuits, the hot-takes and the tantrums, let’s look ahead to Scotland’s big election in six months time. What can we expect from Holyrood 2021? A new poll gives us a sense of the emerging political contours. Almost half of Scots (49 per cent) believe that […]
Six months until the Scottish elections: What’s the state of play?
How does indyref 2039 sound to you? Or indyref 2054? Scottish Secretary Alister Jack has sought to harden the UK Government’s position on opposing the right to decide on independence. Asked by the BBC if he was ruling out an indyref regardless of the Scottish Parliament election result, Jack said: “It’s no for a generation”. […]
“It’s no for a generation”
Sometimes you’ve got to pinch yourself. If someone had said 10 years ago that they were writing a political satire about Donald Trump fighting to stay in the White House after his first term in office by shouting about how the election is “a fraud on the American people” and demanding all vote counting must […]
Don’t give in to the politics of cultural despair
The US election result looks like being a nail-biter, and there is little value in speculating, so we will come back to that in tomorrow morning’s Source Direct. If the pandemic had not intervened, the UN Climate Summit would be just about to get underway in Glasgow. As it is, COP26 has been pushed back […]
With COP26 one year away, why are we letting a serious crisis go to waste?
Which part of Scotland is the most anti-Trump? Answer: East Dunbartonshire. According to a Politico poll, 85.3 per cent of people in East Dunbartonshire would vote for Joe Biden in the US election today if they could, the most anti-Trump and pro-Biden constituency not just in Scotland but in the whole of the UK. Scotland […]
US Election Day: Will “the chaos” stop?
As Scotland enters its new tiered system of restrictions today, England is getting prepared to dump it. Boris Johnson’s Saturday announcement of a four-week national lockdown, only for England, came about six weeks after his SAGE advisors had argued for a two-week circuit-breaker lockdown and he offered up the tiered system. What a mess. The […]