Left voices, unfiltered, unedited, Ungagged.
Like most Scottish young people my journey into politics started with a simple question. Should Scotland be an independent nation? When presented with this at age 15, I said well of course it should. Sad irony however, dictated that I’d been born a few months late for voting age and be one of the only […]
When Narendra Modi’s BJP came out of last year’s Indian general election with an even larger parliamentary majority after 5 years of incumbency (despite the economic shambles of demonetisation, failed tax reforms and continuing high unemployment), he looked unconquerable. The opposition was shattered, and he had a full mandate to reshape the country from its […]
Happy Families Can I have Mr Passenger Pigeon please? Sorry, no can doo, nor his kids or missus too. You would like a Great Auk now? Master, Miss? Never, ever, ask for this. And a flightless, big-beaked Dodo? Like the Great Auk, only more so. What about a Thylacine, marsupial with tiger stripes? […]
So 2020 is coming, that seems quite absurd to me. It’s the end of the decade and yet feels more impending than 1999 or 2012 did. Remember the millennium bug? Or the Mayan calendar prediction? Mind how afterwards there was the chat that there was no year 0 so really the end of the world […]
“There had never been another choice. No choice at all. And long before they’d come close to a conclusion, long even before the question had a chance to divide them, the outside world had simply fallen silent.” The storyteller could feel the fine sand underneath her feet and the evening breeze in her hair. The […]
Amsterdam. October 2018 Gert hobbled the short distance from his large mahogany desk to the door of his workshop, the familiar sound […]
This is a story of denial, delusion and illusion: All themes that ran through the 2019 General election campaign. Jo and The Libs The rise, or rather the inflation of Jo Swinson is not the only story in town, but the themes are strong in this one. I’d have been hard pushed to pick Jo […]
Liberals, libertarians and the Left have long sought rational explanations for the loud-and-proud irrationalism of fascism, and its appeal to the masses where (what we think are) our appeals to their rational self-interests as working people or indeed as human beings have failed. For a very long time, the go-to text to explain this has […]
House of Horrors; The Bookies by Colin Burnett The inside ae a bettin shoap is some sight. Yince yur in here yae cannae help but feel civilization as we ken it is comin tae an abrupt end. You’ve goat boays rockin back and forth oan yin ae they leather padded stools in the corner ae […]
The Forgotten A warm July night. Red and white flashes lit up the nearly dark sky, as a deep, pulsating throb filled the gut of each member of the assembled crowd, before crashing into a sequence of shrill and deafening explosions. On the edge of Berlin’s Potzdamer Platz, in the shadow of Brandenburg Gate, three […]