Party conferences are odd things. By their nature they are a gathering of the faithful who fervently believe in what their party stands for.
In 1945 Allied forces advancing from both East and West smashed their way into Germany.
One of the most irritating media trends is the increasing use of hyperbole. An easy example is the climate 'emergency'. In an emergency you don’t eat, you don’t do anything else except deal with the emergency and you might jump out of a window knowing you will probably break your leg. We do not have a climate change emergency.
The Labour party are back in Government in Westminster and with a share of the vote in Scotland up nearly 20 per cent.
Labour’s triumph in the UK General Election is a key moment in our recent political history. What marks it out is not just the scale of the victory but that it brings to office a party which has spent 14 long years in the wilderness.
In Scotland, the LibDems will double to at least 4, probably 5. The Conservatives will fall back and will get 5 at most. The Greens and Reform will get nothing. Labour will get 28, the SNP will get 20.
Labour worships devoutly at the shrine of the NHS but will also spend more on education and defence amongst other things. They have socialist-pleasing measures such as a spite tax on school fees and a stricter regime of taxation for foreign nationals based in the UK.
Governments have a bad habit of taking action which achieves the opposite of what they are, or should be, trying to do. Nowhere is this more true than in the housing market in general and homes for rent in particular.
When I saw John Swinney with his new cabinet on the steps of Bute House, two thoughts sprang to mind.
People and policymakers who concentrate on STEM as the golden future implicitly recognise that we are currently in division two in these fields and believe we should try to force our way into division one. What they do not recognise is that the UK is already remarkably good at certain things but just things other than STEM.
