“The wildcard in this situation is Trump himself. Will he, as he sometimes threatens, continue to be a force in right-wing politics in the US?”
United States
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
“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?
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?
There was a remarkable contrast this morning in two stories standing side by side on the BBC homepage. On the left, US President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows saying “we’re not going to control the pandemic”. On the right, one positive covid-19 case sparking the testing of all 4.7 million people in the […]
The pandemic and global politics: accelerating the train crash
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
It’s difficult to not have at least one eye on US politics at the moment. As the Presidential election nears and Trump apparently makes a miraculous recovery from covid-19, the campaign appears to have returned to the same fire and brimstone politics before the President got infected. There is a spat about when or if […]
Trump’s big mistake? Blowing up a stimulus deal
‘A fish rots from its head’ is an old Chinese proverb that I like. When any system begins to fail, look to the top to figure out why. The international system is not headed by Boris Johnson, he is merely an opportunist looking to take advantage of new trends to protect his interests. No, if […]
Rule-breaking is the new normal in the era of US unilateralism
Imagine Jeff Bezos cloned 7.5 times. That would be the equivalent of the financial wealth of everyone in Scotland (including everything; pensions, properties, etc). Maybe even less, as the Scottish financial wealth calculation (£1.097 trillion) was in 2018 – after the pandemic crisis it has probably shrunk quite a bit. Bezos doesn’t have that problem. […]
What are we going to do about the Jeff Bezos problem?
The most remarkable thing about US President Donald Trump is not the amount of enemies he accrues. Nasty attacks on opponents is his way of doing politics. The remarkable thing is that he’s willing to throw all his friends under the bus at a moment’s notice; he has no loyalty to anyone. “I’m not a big […]