Tommy Ball has been involved in progressive politics for over a decade. From Scottish National Party activist to Executive Committee member of the Scottish Socialist Party, he has pounded the streets and tenements of Glasgow and beyond delivering leaflets, speaking at pro-Independence events, and standing – generally unsuccessfully – for election in the Socialist interest. His writing has been featured in newspapers such as The National and periodicals like the Scottish Socialist Voice.
Educated at Portsmouth, which is not called the Sorbonne of the South Coast, he is an uncompromising Socialist. His main interest is in foreign affairs, and he has travelled widely in the former Eastern Bloc, including many of the post-Soviet republics and all of the former Yugoslav republics, where he hopes he has learned much about the right and wrong ways to do Socialism and the wrong way to do independence.
He does not understand why a border on a small island is a bad thing when it means Britain holding onto Scotland, but a good thing when it means Britain holding onto northern Ireland.
He has lived in Ireland, Scotland and England, is a biologist by training and a chemist to trade. He tweets at T_Socialist and blogs – angrily and infrequently – at www.tommyballgovan.blogspot.com.
Portrait drawn by Raiph from a photo by Grace Sanchez Philip Kane is an award-winning writer, storyteller and artist whose books include The Wildwood King(Capall Bann, 1997) and The Hicklebaum Papers (Mezzanine Press, 2010), as well as his most recent poetry collection, Unauthorised Person (Cultured Llama, 2012). A new collection of poems, The Decipherment of […]
Doesn’t matter what your opinion on the legislation is, but the British government are once again openly subverting Scottish democracy. It’s entirely linked to them stripping us of our self-determination, as they are doing with judicial backing. This is tyranny, make no mistake. It isn’t, thank god, the type that involves violent repression, but now […]
Amber Poppitt is an aspiring screenwriter and occasional blogger who often finds herself musing over the rise of the internet’s global influence, the execution of stories within popular culture, the differing forms of prejudice manifesting within contemporary society, one’s internal psychological landscape and living as a transgender woman in a world still trying to grasp […]