Independence

26th March 2021

Unhappy the Land in Need of ‘Heroic’ Men
by
David Archibald

THIS IS NOT AN ALLEGORY -A charismatic male political leader who gathers his support around his powerful personality, is revealed as a dodgy bully, who uses his power to prey sexually on women, is taken to court -nay takes the whole nation to court himself -twice!- is publicly disgraced, but sets himself up in a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in Russian media, sets up his own new political party, full of sycophantic followers ... and ... WE MAKE NO EXCUSES FOR REPUBLISHING THIS REVIEW FROM SEVERAL YEARS AGO (from New Left Project 2012) - will we never learn ? It's enough to make us recommend never voting for a man to lead your country ...
9th November 2020

Spitfire Britain and the Zombie Union by Scott Hames

Can the kingdom still be united if there’s no unionism in the union? And was ‘Unionism’ simply the most charming and esoteric of checks and balances on the ‘union’? It may all seem abstruse now, but Scott Hames sees us hurtling through an absurdly persistent pragmaticism towards a constitutional car crash.
27th February 2020

Parallel State: Lines of sight beyond the territory
by Simon Poulter

Until one month ago, British people were among the few lucky individuals on this planet that could count themselves to not only one, but even two citizenships. Facing a deterioration of the positive powers that are granted to UK-citizens, it begs the question of who has really benefitted from taking away these ‘bonus rights’. Would it be possible to reinstate this safety-net by connecting mobile and transitory points of resistance to connect to a new form of citizen-power? Meet the emerging Parallel State. Simon Poulter gives a recap of the day on which the ambitions of the Parallel State were drawn out and reviews the territory it was inescapably born into.
4th December 2019

Take the High Road: Scott Hames’ Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution by Colin Kidd

Colin Kidd muses on relations (if any) between the near unanimity of the literary world and the actually existing historical world in his review of Scott Hames’s new book The Literary Politics […]