Year: 2014
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SSP Alliance #2 – an update
In one blow, the SNP have skilfully smashed the SSP intervention – while remaining the party of unity. This is very, very clever stuff. Strictly speaking, I’d be in favour of such an intervention, for certain reasons. It presents a pro-independence cabal of outstanding candidates – many of whom did extraordinary work in Yes Scotland?…
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SSP Alliance?
The Scottish Socialist Party have explicitly endorsed a pro-independence alliance in order to silence the Labour Party in Scotland. It’s not a bad idea. “Red Tories out” is a good message for those being bitten by the Conservative Party, and ignored by HM’s official Opposition. Colin Fox, national co-spokesperson of the Scottish Socialist Party writes:…
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Getting pro-independence candidates elected in 2016
We’ve seen some remarkable polling in the past couple of days. As the referendum fallout continues, the British Labour Party’s Scotland branch disintegrates, divides and is (presently) leaderless. As they reunite, it’s clear that there’s an opportunity to deliver as many pro-independence candidates to Holyrood in 2016 as possible. To do so, requires a bit…
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Common Weal Leith thoughts
The referendum empowered Scotland’s civic debate in a way that has never been seen. Even if you were one of the few who didn’t turn out, it was remarkably difficult to not be at least partially engaged by it.
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A draft letter to Leithers
People of Leith: be proud. You registered to vote in droves, you engaged, debated, argued the future, faced down scaremongering, fear and already-unravelling lies to return a Yes result across Leith and Leith Walk polling districts. It wasn’t enough. The people of Scotland said No: 55% to 45%. So, let’s take a look at what’s…
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SSP political activism 101
Firstly, we’ve been inundated with requests to join the Scottish Socialist Party – we have no great big party machine, or the cash to outsource enormous mailshots, it’s just a handful of people stuffing envelopes in a wee office – so we hope you’ll forgive us for any delays in delivering welcome packs. Let us…
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Not Just Eck
It’s weird just how supporters of the No campaign like to tie the cause of Scottish self-determination exclusively to Alex Salmond. Well, that’s flat-out wrong and a little bit sad. It’s a huge, diverse movement, and if Eck were to disappear off the face of the earth, it would continue unabated. At some point, head…
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YENL 12th April
An excellent morning and early afternoon on the campaign trail. Lots of work done, lots of conversations, lots more volunteers and crucially, lots more people engaged and moved towards Yes. I love days like today, may we have many, many more of them in the coming months.
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Off to Flanders for the weekend
Well, that was an interesting weekend… Second-to-last Friday, I get home. Bit tired, needing to wring myself out before a weekend’s campaigning. Check Facebook and Twitter. The ever alert Connor Beaton (@zcbeaton) highlighted this tweet from Natalie McGarry – a recent SNP parliamentary candidate and activist within Women for Independence (give ’em a couple of…
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On writing implements
I’m trying to recreate the writing implements of my youth. I’m browsing stationary stores, looking for pads of just the right kind of squared paper in which I learned the quadratic formula, proved the sine rule, came up with a rudimentary proof of Pythagoras, wrote simple algorithms to find perfect numbers, came to a crash…