“The UK has rejected thousands of asylum claims from LGBT people who’ve come from countries where consensual same-sex acts are against the law. Having their identity forensically challenged and ultimately disbelieved adds unbearable psychological strain on those who may already have been marginalised and faced the threat of violence or death in their home countries just because of who they are.”
Opinion
“The centre is broken. Its aggressive, controlling hands squeezed harder and harder until the things being controlled couldn’t take it any more and began to crack. The price is paid by others.”
Robin McAlpine: The centre is broken – control did the the breaking
“Some – generally those who entered 2016 with rather fixed ideas about political reality, and never got over the trauma of those ideas’ defenestration – may look back and struggle to believe that any of it happened at all. Others – the many, many others who have suffered loss, pain and persecution at the hands of the administration – will have no trouble bitterly remembering that it did.”
Sean Bell: After four years of Trump, what have we learned?
“We live in the age of the political witch-hunt. A destructive, wild-eyed paranoia is widespread, not just on the social media fringes, but in professional political life.”
David Jamieson: The SNP stokes the Russia witch-hunt at the peril of independence
“The renewables failure is purely a result of horrendously bad policy decisions and the cause of the failure is an obsession with inward investment. Inward investment is what is destroying our industrial base.”
Robin McAlpine: The renewable jobs failure is the disaster of our era, and inward investment is the problem
“I speak with volunteers in our community who feel overworked, undervalued and frankly, dejected. One said recently, ‘we all rushed to help, we came together at grassroots and now they are trying to ‘systemise’ community spirit. Don’t they trust us?'”
Angela Watt: Community volunteers want to help – so why are their voices being lost?
Marian Pallister, chair of Pax Christi Scotland, says the 50th ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is an important milestone for the global anti-nukes movement, but they have not yet reached the summit. I think that being a hill walker helps. When you climb a Munro – those Scottish hills over […]
Marian Pallister: Nuclear weapons prohibition is a step closer – but we have to keep going to reach the summit
“The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations of the real world agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothesis. If they agree, confidence in the hypothesis increases; otherwise, it decreases.” It is time for the independence movement to get to grips with the scientific method. Something does not become […]
Robin Mcalpine: Sterlingisation is a terrible idea and a massive liability
Bob Gillespie, Global Justice Now activist in Glasgow, finds that the UK is looking increasingly isolated in the world, which makes a bad trade deal with the United States even more likely. The increasing likelihood of a “No Deal” Brexit will mean that the UK has only a deal with Japan to show off in […]
Bob Gillespie: There’s many reasons to worry about a UK-US trade deal
Glasgow based activist John Rogers says Universal Basic Income is the alternative to the damaging Universal Credit system that we need. If we are going to plan changes to how we live together, we need to come up with a lot of ideas about how to make that work. Here is one – Universal Basic […]