What should we expect from Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Spending Review today? Not austerity – at least not yet, at least not for most. The hedge fund chancellor was keen to emphasise that point with Andrew Marr on Sunday, that there “will not be austerity” now, but at some point borrowing will “have to be grappled […]
UK Politics
What unites Thatcher’s man in Scotland Sir Malcolm Rifkind and left-wing, anti-Tory firebrand Labour MSP Neil Findlay? They’re both agreed – it’s time for a federal solution to the Scottish question. In an interview yesterday, Rifkind, who was Scottish Secretary from 1986 to 1990 and was in charge of the notorious introduction of the Poll […]
Federalism is a trap we should not be lured in to
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
“Powerful forces are converging around a new stability. But just as with Biden’s eventual, narrow victory in the US, achieving it is harder than willing it.”
Analysis: Biden’s ‘Transatlantic Return’ – and what it means for us
“At the Conservative party conference, the new economic model is being consolidated: cycles of boom for a corporate elite without investment or growth in living standards, followed by catastrophic bust with the working population paying for the fallout.”
Analysis: 2008 Forever – Sunak confirms our new economic model
As the UK’s Internal Market Bill officially passed the House of Commons last night, some hours later we got a glimpse of those vying to be United States President, in the first TV debate between US President Donald Trump and Democrat challenger Joe Biden. What connects these two events specifically is a post Brexit UK-US […]
“The special relationship” after the US election
“At the centre of this web of crank economics, jumbled alliance-mongering, and meaningless exhortations to the ‘international community’, there is nothing. There is no working ‘independence in Europe’ prospectus.”
David Jamieson: Outcry over Tory brinkmanship covers malaise of ‘independence in Europe’
With the Programme for Government due tomorrow in Scotland, it’s a good time to take a look at the state of politics. A poll over the weekend showed Labour are now neck and neck with the Tories, with the Conservatives managing to squander a 26 point lead in the space of five months. When Johnson […]
The Programme for Government in political context
“Clearly, a mood of desperation has gripped party managers north and south. A project to save the Scottish Tories from another distant second place in the 2021 Scottish election has swung into action.”
Analysis: Can Ross/Davidson break the Scottish Tories’ ‘nationalism of diminishing returns’?
We live in strange times where little is surprising, but George Galloway seeking to form a national coalition government with the Tories and Labour in the Scottish Parliament is still strange, and slightly surprising. I remember watching Galloway happily stand on platforms with independence supporters, including the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, to rail against the […]