I WAS tidying old papers when I came to a faded “1979” folder. Remember what a bad year that was, for those who believed in a self-governing Scotland?
IN those months, Scotland astonished itself. Men and women, girls and boys never touched by “politics” seemed to come awake ...
YOU don’t see many British visitors to the “Elgin Marbles” these days ...
THE woman on the High Street said: “She brought out the best in us.” Not everyone thought so. But in faces watching the coffin pass, or passing it in St Giles’, that unexpected pulse of feeling kept beating.
WITH a gush of steam into the winter night, the refugee train drew into a country railway station in North Wales. We were lining the platform, a welcome party with villagers who had spent frantic days cleaning and decorating empty houses.
A WIND blew from the sea, and it blew the roof off the old lodging-house we call the United Kingdom. As the year of 2018 shuddered to its end, the walls were still standing but everyone could see into the building. And what the world saw was decay.
THIS book isn’t a plea for Scottish independence. There have been plenty of those, and there will be plenty more. Neither is it a vision of “what sort of Scotland do we want?” Since the 2014 campaign, that has become reasonably clear; an internationalist country with a social-democratic outlook and a European-style welfare state. The importance of Common Weal’s How To Start a New Country is that it takes the discussion a whole stage further. It assumes that this new country is coming – and lays out the work we have to do to launch it.
