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          A thistle flowerr

          Is it time tae think again about Flower of Scotland?

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          Glasgow Loves EU campaigners brave wind and rain to keep a light on for Scotland

          blue background, A younf woman holding a large black sign that says VOTE ! in white letters

          Scottish elections: young people more likely to vote if they started at 16 – new study

          Healthcare word seen in a scrabble

          “Leave no one behind” – the Health Foundation’s report into health inequalities in Scotland 2023.

          Sign saying NHS Greater Galsgow & Clyde in front of a hospital building

          Concern over patients waiting in corridors for free beds at Glasgow Superhospital

          A row of tall houses on the left, with parked cars in front on the side of the street

          Saving Scotland’s tenements

          Ben Nevis. Forground has green shrubbery, then background a mountain with two tops. Blue sky with a few streaky clouds

          Exploring the Highest Mountain in the British Isles: A Guide to Ben Nevis

          Image via Steller Systems, a potential candidate.

          Cancelling future frigates could be final nail in the coffin for the UK

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          Scottish elections: young people more likely to vote if they started at 16 – new study

          A scene of people demonstrating, holding Scotland flags. One man wears a tartan cap and holds a blue flag with both the Scottish cross and the EU stars on it.

          Is Alister Jack sane?

          Image Malcom Laverty

          The Brown plan

          The climate change impacts of Russia’s war with Ukraine

          Britain wastes £1bn on drones to monitor English Channel

          The Autumn Statement – time to take a closer look

          Photo Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

          Christmas cheer for Tesco if grim reading for the political classes

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          Russia as a low-tech nation

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          Saving Scotland’s tenements

          A large red researcgh vessel in the sea with ice sheets all around it on the water.

          Rosyth shipyard attracts UK Government contract to maintain fleet of scientific research vessels

          large posts saying 'Glasgow Airport Business Park' on the left and right of a road leading away from the main road in the front. . On that road leading away building with walls almost entirely existing of windows.

          Why doing business in Scotland may be better for your corporate wellbeing

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          The Ullapool Giving Tree

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          Photo Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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            “Leave no one behind” – the Health Foundation’s report into health inequalities in Scotland 2023.

            Sign saying NHS Greater Galsgow & Clyde in front of a hospital building

            Concern over patients waiting in corridors for free beds at Glasgow Superhospital

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            Glasgow hospitals halt non-urgent operations due to pressure

            Two more unions reject Scottish Government NHS pay offer

            GMB union reject Scottish Government pay offer to NHS staff

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            How careful should we be when choosing a scientific term?

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              Fire threats in the Scottish countryside

              Wood stove at the foot of the bed in the Danish Blue room at Pig Hill Inn, Cold Spring, New York. Printed with permission and confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.

              When smoke gets in your eyes

              Opening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP27 in Egypt. Photo courtesy of the UNFCCC

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              Partitioning Britain, partitioning the self

              Dr Marianne McLeod Gilchrist explains why imposing borders should not come before efforts to improve the equality of human beings.

              Dr M M GilchristbyDr M M Gilchrist
              21-08-2022 12:11
              in Opinion
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              The Guardian recently looked at the lingering impact of Partition on the Indian subcontinent, however, I was accused in their general comments of being “borderline offensive” for saying that partitioning Britain would damage lives, families and identities. “People have family and friends all over the world and are capable of loving them no less”, I was told by one poster.

              So what? I have more in common culturally with friends in France and Italy than with most people I know in the UK. To me, that is an argument for abolishing nation-states, for taking down borders, not for exhuming them from the tomb to gerrymander a political agenda.

              ‘Loving people no less’ is irrelevant sentimentality; rights are more important. Imposing borders means members of the same family, even the same household, can be discriminated against or privileged, based on an accident of birthplace or parentage, not what they think or how they vote. Yes, I would be eligible for a Scottish passport ; but how would I be able to look my excluded family and friends, people who are no less anti-Brexit, in the eyes? We have already seen this in families divided by Irish passport eligibility. Borders hurt real people, their relationships and even their job prospects if not all household members have Freedom of Movement rights. The divisions are tangible, and the resentments are real.

              Where is home?

              I have spent my life between Scotland and Yorkshire, two places with similar sized populations. My father was from Bute, my mother from Hull. ‘England’ seemed to mean somewhere far to the south, somewhere affluent and sunny, that did not stink of fishmeal. However, my late paternal grandfather and father had been in the SNP, and I grew up with a lot of its assumptions; the sense that my failure to ‘belong’ in Hull was because I was ‘really Scottish’ – not my intellectual/cultural interests, or then-undiagnosed autism.

              So, I went to university in St Andrews and lived in Fife, then Glasgow, for 25 of the following 29 years. I participated in the 1997 Devolution campaign – but came to regret it. The failure to roll it out based on equality for all of the UK turned the devolved governments into latter-day ‘rotten boroughs’ and created a democratic deficit in the English regions, which partly fuelled the ‘protest’ element in the Brexit vote.

              It took me decades to be at ease in my own skin and comfortable as a whole person – unfortunately, this came at a time when nationalism began to rise again. I came to realise that the only place I ‘belonged’ was in academia, particularly old European university towns. That is my ‘country’. The location matters less than shared interests and education. My ‘people’ are those with whom I can discuss the things that I love: history, art, literature. 

              Both/and, not either/or

              I have seen arguments online that ‘Britain’ is an eighteenth-century fiction; that being ‘British’ is a fiction. But Ynys Prydein, the Island of Britain, long predates ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’. It also ignores the existence of thousands, if not millions of families and lives like mine.

              We are not ‘fictional’: we exist.  We are not separate species: we interbreed; we move back and forth. Half my family is not ‘alien’ or ‘other’ from the rest, not more or less deserving. I am European first, British second. Why should I be broken into halves of a person?

              Nationalists claim we are ‘too different’ to share a political voice, but there are many different Englands, as big as or bigger than Scotland. Nor is Scotland homogenous: the Central Belt and its concerns were profoundly alien to my father and  me after years in north-east Fife. I knew people on the Left in Glasgow who would demonstrate for Gaza or Greece at the drop of a hat, but not England ‘because everyone votes Tory’. I told them that the place I grew up in had not done so in living memory. A Marxist ‘No’ campaigner, who worked at a foodbank, told me he was equally concerned about foodbank users in Cardiff and Liverpool. That seemed to have bypassed a  many people I knew who sang ‘Solidarity for Ever’ – but did not extend it beyond Carlisle and Berwick.

              Photo: Adam Wilson on Unsplash
              Europe

              Scotland’s road to Europe

              byGraham Avery
              9 July 2021

              A postcode lottery should not inflate the value of a vote

              ‘Civic nationalism’ is a thin veneer: scratch the surface and the old ethno-nationalist ugliness emerges. For example, ‘Yes’ campaigners on Byres Road in Glasgow in 2014 told me I did not ‘deserve’ a vote because I ‘wasn’t born there’. I was Scottish enough to be eligible for a Carnegie Scholarship, however.  To them, I was not ‘Scottish enough’ because I had said I did not want a border through my family, life and selfhood. My recently widowed father lived in Hull. It was hard enough to support him at a distance without further bureaucratic barriers.

              A ‘Yes’-voting, wealthy, originally southern English neighbour in Glasgow asked, ‘Why don’t you move him back up, then?’ As I lived in a one-bedroom, rented, third-floor flat, that was hardly practical; nor was taking a disabled 80-year-old away from the medical professionals who knew him, from his friends and his late wife’s family in a town where he had lived for most of the past 50 years.

              Deploying Brexit as grounds for separatism relies on the idea that the ‘nation’ label is more important than human beings – even though we voted as individuals, not as blocs or  constituencies. 1.6 million Remain votes in Scotland are deemed more precious and inviolable than 13 million in England alone. If the latter were classed as a state, they would be in the top ten of the EU in population size: they outnumber the entire human population of the rest of the UK combined. I lived in Glasgow when I voted Remain in 2016; I moved back to Hull in 2017 when my father was terminally ill: does that make me worth less? I would have voted the same way wherever I live because I am European first, culturally, intellectually and imaginatively. I have participated in anti-Brexit marches in London; most marchers came from England. They are not worth less than Remainers in Scotland.

              Equality of humans, not of administrative units

              Partitioning  Great Britain is about privileging the ‘nation’ label on some administrative units above the equality of human beings. Claiming that ‘Scotland’ should be treated as equal to the whole of ‘England’ (rather than to ‘Yorkshire’) is to say that one vote in Scotland should be worth ten or eleven in England. It is the ‘Rotten Borough’ scenario that continues to plague unequal devolution.

              It is also a problem between states of disparate size in the EU. Making one vote in a small state worth dozens in a larger one flies in the face of human equality. Post-Revolutionary France broke up its old, unequal ‘nations’ into more equal départements. As a European federalist this should be the goal of European unity – including Britain.

              We need to see more pan-European parties with pan-European campaigns. Equality of human beings – of one person, one vote having the same value wherever you live – should be the basis of unity, not equality of administrative units labelled ‘nations’.


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              Dr M M Gilchrist

              Dr M M Gilchrist

              Marianne is a historian, art historian and academic administrator, who grew up in Hull and studied at St Andrews. She was Doors Open Days/European Heritage Days co-ordinator for Scotland for three years and worked as a research assistant at the University of Glasgow. She is particularly interested in the use and abuse of history in the arts. She has written and lectured on subjects ranging from the Third Crusade to French Revolutionary portraiture.

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