by tim_bell | Mar 30, 2021 | Latest News
Not content with reaping the ill-gotten gains of the iniquitous first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting arrangements for Westminster (if they were iniquitous when Labour was the beneficiary, they are still iniquitous), Alex Salmond is now gaming the voting arrangements for...
by tim_bell | Mar 9, 2021 | Latest News
I don’t think I’m complacent, but I do think there’s almost no danger of IndyRef2 and Scottish separation from rUK for the forseeable. The SNP may have a majority at Holyrood after May, but there are big doubts about that and at any rate it is...
by tim_bell | Feb 22, 2021 | Latest News
Date: 23 February, 1996. Scene: Glasgow Filmhouse. Action: premiere of Trainspotting. Effects: the birth of a cultural and box office fireball. Reactions were mixed: Trainspotting has a shallow, joyless ring… it embraces a new soulless addiction to...
by tim_bell | Jan 27, 2021 | Latest News
Here’s a letter I sent to The Scotsman but it wasn’t published. There’s a bit of a rush to set out the pitch for the Holyrood elections.There is an academic piece saying that the EU is under no obligation to accept into membership any...
by tim_bell | Jan 6, 2021 | Latest News
Well, it’s not every day you get a letter published in The Guardian The very idea that a win on a day, like a cup final or a medieval battle at Bannockburn, resolves complex issues needs to be full-on refuted. Secondly, the very idea that creating more borders...
by tim_bell | Jan 2, 2021 | Latest News
It is quite possible that the SNP will be the biggest party in Holyrood after the May elections, and no doubt they will have in their manifesto that that will give them a mandate to call another referendum. Boris Johnson is their best recruiting sergeant, but the SNP...
by tim_bell | Dec 27, 2020 | Latest News
Living Leith – well indeed, I was interviewed recently by a very nice couple of young ladies about my take on Leith. It was almost to the week the 40th anniversary of my arrival here, so I suppose I had a bit to say. After we had finished, off air, one of them...
by tim_bell | Dec 13, 2020 | Latest News
That’s me only in Leith forty years (exactly, this weekend), and the Edinburgh Council invites me to do an online presentation of what made Leith so damn special in 1920 that they voted 6:1 against amalgamation. Believe me the hard bit was leaving out good...
by tim_bell | Nov 21, 2020 | Latest News
Well done indeed to Douglas Stuart and winning the Booker Prize with Shuggie Bain. I haven’t read it yet, but I will. From what I gather, the setting is very similar to the setting in Trainspotting: crap housing scheme, poverty, and the arrival of heroin. In...
by tim_bell | Oct 31, 2020 | Latest News
It’s very noticeable that nobody – that’s nobody – seriously makes the case for settling the “independence” discussion by means of a referendum. Our voting system is designed to elect named, accountable people for office for a fixed...
