Views from an Island

  Why the Scottish Green Party won’t solve the climate change challenge My objections to the Green Party are not because of their ideals, many of which I share, but because of their methods and the means by which they think the planet can be saved. It is my belief that in terms of our hopes of genuinely tackling climate change they are part of the problem and not part of the solution. In trying to promote societal change in a democracy it is necessary to take as many people as possible along with you. Ideally a majority of the population. That is the way in which lasting change is best brought about. Humanity faces two immense and imminent threats, global warming and more generalised environmental degradation. Both issues have been hugely publicised over the last decade and more and yet the Greens remain a tiny party. Alba was much criticised in the recent election for standing candidates only on the list. It was said that they were cheating and ‘gaming’ the system. If that is tr

I have been asked to republish this piece. It was first published in July 2017. Things have changed since then but I believe that it is still largely relevant. Why we need a Constitution When I voted Yes in the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 I was voting not so much for myself as for my children, not so much for my children (well established now) as for my grandchildren, not so much for the Scotland that we are, as for the Scotland we could become.   My vote had little to do with GERS and the current price of oil. It had a lot to do with the failing UK political and economic system that Scotland is still thirled to, built as it now is: a house of cards on foundations of sand. An economy that immediately after WW2 still produced the world’s largest share of manufactured goods, transported across the globe in the world’s largest merchant navy. An economy that thanks to generations of engineering expertise and ingenuity still produced world leading machinery and goods of all

  Why I joined Alba If there is one thing that a long career in building houses, man and boy, has taught me it is that you can’t achieve much on your own. In contrast a team of like-minded people working for a common purpose can achieve a great deal. It was therefore obvious to me that on leaving SNP I should join another party because I am determined to keep my shoulder to the political wheel, not least because the urgency and necessity of Scottish Independence is greater now than ever. The Greens, although I want to save the planet as much as the next person, perhaps more, were never an option. They are far too hair shirted for me and incline much more towards the stick than the carrot. It seems to me that they would cheerfully throw thousands out of work and take us back to their version of a kind of over-regulated authoritarian stone age. Worse than that is the constant oversimplification of the practicalities and the problems of reducing our carbon footprint to the required le

  Why I resigned from SNP So many friends have asked me this question that I felt I ought to write a response because the answer isn’t simple and certainly can’t be reduced to a soundbite or a single sentence. Up until the 2014 referendum there had always seemed to me to be a nobility of purpose and an integrity about SNP which has always been as much a political movement as it is a party. Of course, it wasn’t perfect, of course we made mistakes, but they were honest mistakes. There were, for instance, aspects of the White Paper, Scotland’s Future, that we got wrong. The much derided failure to accurately predict future oil prices which plummeted in the immediate aftermath of the referendum was one example. But in picking the mid-range estimate of expert oil forecasters there was still an integrity in the method. This integrity characterised our approach towards Scottish politics after the re-convening of the Scottish Parliament. Our aspirations of assuming government in Scotland