Following the SNP's unexpected triumph, full or fiscal independence for Scotland are suddenly real possibilities. Salmond has five years to call a referendum, and the result is critical for the whole UK. Both the Conservatives and Labour will fight to protect the Union, but the centre-left has mor
On February 1st, a building owned by Glasgow University was occupied in protest against attempts to model the university on a business, in solidarity with the wider student movement against the rise in tuition fees and privatisation of higher education. Yesterday, the Free Hetherington celebrated
The big story of the Northern Ireland Assembly elections was not the re-instating of the DUP and Sinn Fein, but the dramatic fall-off in turnout. Voter apathy reveals the failures of devolution in such vital areas as education, public service management and the control of paramilitary violence
In the UK, people lose their liberty simply for claiming asylum. On the 60th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, which enshrined the right to seek protection from persecution, it is worth reminding ourselves of how far we have fallen from those aspirations.
A year ago, the Coalition pledged to end the practice of child detention in the UK. Yet the real agenda of the UK Border Agency has not changed. The detention and enforced removal of children remains a key aspect of immigration control. Can the government be pressured into honouring their promise?
Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.
It's been a long journey since 1970, when the SNP gained its first MP in a general election, to the 5th of May, 2011, when the party won an unprecedented majority in the Scottish Parliament. After the historic result, Ryan Gallagher asks his father, a long-term SNP supporter, what does the future
Centre-right parties across Europe are announcing the failure of multiculturalism. We are witnessing a co-ordinated revival of Enoch Powell's idea of the aggressive outsider out to dominate the rest; only now race and immigration are being played out on the terrain of culture and religion
Last Thursday's election revealed the power of the traditional British establishment. The lessons of history show that the left must never underestimate the Tories
