Left voices, unfiltered, unedited, Ungagged.
Since the high point of 2014, the political landscape in Scotland has taken a fucking battering. We started as a grassroots, left-leaning movement for a better country, but a decade later we’re looking at a fragmented mess where some folk are more interested in reactionary “culture wars” than actually fixing the politucally created poverty our […]
I’ve sat in draughty community halls from Easterhouse to Maryhill for thirty years, and I’ve seen some shit in my time. I’ve seen the “vanguard” cults try to hijack local strikes and the middle-class “missionaries” come into our schemes to lecture us on solidarity before jumping into a taxi back to their Bearsden bungalows and […]
Let’s be straight with each other—the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a bad actor. For decades, they’ve trailed around like the self-appointed high priests of the working class, but if you look at the wreckage they’ve left behind, especially here in Scotland, it’s clear their only real loyalty is to the survival of their own […]
Tressell’s masterpiece doesn’t need any high-tech polish; it’s a grit-under-the-fingernails account of how the working man is conned into his own poverty. If you want to understand why the “tech-bros” and the boardroom liquidators find it so easy to pull the wool over our eyes today, you have to go back to the source. The […]
Indybag: The Myth of Left Unity: Why Toxic Gatekeepers are the Disease, Not the Cure The chatter is everywhere, even now, as the new “Your Party” conference dominates the headlines. For decades, every time the left has been smashed by the establishment, the same tired delusion resurfaces: “If only we could all just unite!” We’re […]
By our Political Correspondent The Scottish Yes Parties have issued blistering warnings that Labour’s increasingly harsh rhetoric on immigration, refugees, and asylum is doing nothing but fuelling a dangerous lurch to the right in Westminster, directly benefiting the far-right agenda of Nigel Farage. The SNP, Scottish Greens and SSP have reiterated that instead of tackling […]
By Jock Mulligan How can the rigorous moral architecture of the ancient Celts relate to today’s politics? Well, we can learn from folk history; much of it is a blueprint for a disciplined, ethical politics of its time- and let me suggest, the Left, especially in places like Scotland and Ireland, where the ghosts of […]
Kathy O’Connor on Mamdani’s victory. It is an occupational hazard for anyone interested in American politics to become overwhelmed by rhetoric. The national conversation is so often conducted in italics and capital letters—TREASON, LOW-IQ, DEEP STATE—that the essential banality of governance, the stuff that determines whether your rent goes up or your subway runs on […]
By Gael. A Beacon in the Storm: Why a Fair Scottish Republic is a Shield Against the Rising Tide The air in these islands is thick with a disquieting hum, a low, guttural growl that speaks of fear, division, and a retreat into the suffocating embrace of a narrow, exclusionary nationalism. We hear it from […]
By Jock Mulligan Allow me to introduce old Bricriu Nemthenga, or Bricriu Poison-Tongue. He’s a character from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology, particularly famous in the tale of Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu’s Feast). He was a wealthy hospitaller, a man of means who was expected to provide hospitality, but his true nature was one of […]