Last week I was interviewed by the Voice of Russia radio station about my views on the referendum debate. I fear it descended into a rammy worthy of the Jeremy Kyle Show. To be fair, the London-based reporter began the interview by saying he didn’t know anything about the Scottish referendum but his Damascene conversion to having an interest had come with the intervention from one Gordon Brown. Why is it, I wondered, that when Westminster-based Scots politicians make a rare appearance on a Scottish platform, talking uniquely about a Scottish issue, as has been the case with both Douglas Alexander recently and now Gordon Brown, attention suddenly shifts from the south and there is much talk of the independence debate stepping up a notch? “Well, he is the former Prime Minister,”...

Three comedians walk into a bar in an independent Scotland and everybody laughs. It’s no joke, but if we are to believe the pro-independence camp, humour, like everything else post-referendum, will run rich, like milk and honey. But for now, Scotland, it seems, has had a sense of humour by-pass. And that’s a shame because what is risible about this dour, petty and dreary face-off is that as the all-mighty weight of the Unionists’ argument fell like a great mallet from on high last week – with regard to currency, pensions and foreign affairs – the attention of some of those at the extreme end of ‘Yes’ was negatively focused on metaphorically putting the punch into a comedian’s line. Comic, Susan Calman, did no more than turn what many in Scotland see as a confusing...

When Margaret Thatcher said in an interview in 1987 that there was no such thing as society, she was pilloried by the left for her indifference to the plight of the vulnerable, the sick and the ordinary man and woman in the street. Her words were, her critics believed, stark evidence of her heartless pursuit of a selfish style of monetarism that had scant regard for the lives of those that were left devastated in the wake of her economic policies. Denigrating the idea of society as an outdated concept in a modern age of selfinterest got to the heart of the heat and anger felt by those who had been so ruthlessly left behind but who had clung, regardless, to the belief that we were part of something bigger, something more cohesive. Otherwise, what was the point of the fight? Scotland had,...

Someone described last week to me thus – ‘as brutal a one’ as she could ever remember. It was indeed a hard week that touched the soul and pricked the conscience and saw the old left-right divides polarise into those that care – and those that don’t. Maybe that’s too simplistic an analysis of the raft of changes to the welfare system appropriately introduced on 1 April. Yet, while both camps are undeniably united by the loose belief that our safety net requires repair, that one important fact keeps getting ignored in the febrile debate that sees one side depicted as peddlers of right-wing myths, painting a picture of the welfare state as an out-of-control institution responsible for an idle nation of feckless scroungers, and the other, as a group of muesli eating,...

The visceral hatred between Scottish Labour and the SNP is an ugly manifestation of the politics of envy and a loathing that comes from seeing yourself reflected in the ambition of others and wondering, ‘what if?’ Asked to explain this bizarre dynamic from parties with broadly similar leanings to the left to visitors from down south and I find myself struggling for words or to provide a proper explanation. If it was a straight divide between politics of the left or right or of good versus evil then it would all be so much more straightforward but it isn’t. It is about two parties locked in a wrestling match rooted in an acrimonious history that each thinks they have the moral high ground on but few can actually remember the cause. It is tribal in its most fundamental sense, except...