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Featured Articles

Explore a featured selection of my writing work from the Guardian, Herald, Variant, De Smog and Bella Caledonia below.

Bella Caledonia •

The Madness of the MAGA Misogynoir and Menagerie

The story about the Dead Bear Cub dumped in Central Park by Donald Trump’s new running mate, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, just seemed like another weird story from the weirdest election you’ve ever seen. But things are unravelling further and its worth joining the dots between the racism, misogyny and misogynoir on display and the MAGA republicans relationship to nature and wildlife.

The latest story about RFK Jnr’s past comes from his daughter Kick Kennedy. She recalls the time her dad cut off a whal...
Bella Caledonia •

Propaganda Models

The attacks on the National newspaper by the BBC Scotland’s Business and Economy Editor were unprecedented (‘BBC responds after The National branded ‘propaganda’ by journalist‘). You can’t imagine him (or anyone else) from the BBC publicly attacking another newspaper. The National is beyond the pale in mainstream Scotland. It is excluded from press conferences and routinely attacked. This is not the role of the public broadcaster which is supposed to at least walk through a pretence of impartial...
Bella Caledonia •

The Summer of Hate

WE can make two observations at the same time, first that Scotland is not immune to racism and bigotry, and second that this is a particularly English phenomenon of ethnonationalism we’re witnessing erupt into violence. In fact, an inability to give voice to English identity is paradoxically, one of the drivers of this crisis. As many commentators have noted England is frequently subsumed within ‘Britain’ and ‘Britishness’. To talk about and analyse English politics and culture is not to describ...
Bella Caledonia •

Off the Map

This week, news broke that sometime in the next four years, the planet is going to breach the 1.5 C rise in global temperature that we have long been told is the tipping point to avoid. The breaching of the 1.5C threshold, which scientists have warned could have dire consequences, should be only temporary, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), but it takes us into new territory. We are off the map.

In general, the response has been disinterest. It’s not that nobody cares, bu
Bella Caledonia •

May Daze of a Holy Nation

Conservative losses at the local elections across England seem to be damaging if not terminal. Their attempt at voter suppression seems to have failed and big gains for Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems have been made. But as we know from the last thirty years, if the political task is reduced to ‘Getting rid of the Tories’ it risks letting in a least-worse option. Ed Davey and Keir Starmer offer a pale imitation of the Conservatives. The bar is so low they have positioned themselves too be in
Bella Caledonia •

Our Way of Life

As the coronation looms you can see your democratic rights being stripped away – as the basic right to peaceful protest is removed.

But there’s another aspect of this that’s worth noticing as a convergence of ‘threats’ are recognised by the British State. One is specifically climate activism – here watch Just Stop Oil protestors being arrested – another is those of us arguing for self-determination. In an article that closely followed this one ‘Britain and the new National Conservatism’ – Neil
Bella Caledonia •

Britain and the new National Conservatism

The orgy of propaganda we’re experiencing hopes to inculcate you with a sense of reflexive impotence and a (backwards) vision of Britain as a single unitary and ancient nation. While the Monarchy v Republican public debate can seem like a performative act, a sort of Punch and Judy of anger and debasement, the Coronation should be seen in the context of a wider emergent political movement.

‘National Conservatism’ (NatCon) is a mixture of authoritarianism, nostalgia and an insistence that immigra
Bella Caledonia •

An Act of Unity

The surround-sound of deference is becoming deafening. The tat, merch and souvenirs are becoming ubiquitous and the drum-roll of propaganda is getting louder. Just as the memory of the Queen’s endless funeral fades – the next Royal pantomime arrives.

A week after the Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill told a podcast that “Britons ‘need to accept’ they’re poorer” – Charles (estimated personal wealth £1.8 billion) is going to get in a Gold Coach and ride through London before being anoin
Bella Caledonia •

Tin Pot Tories in Glasgow

The images doing the rounds of the Prime Minister’s car leaving No10 surrounded by a squad of policemen running beside the vehicle had strong North Korean vibes. It looked like a Tin Pot dictatorship.

Today’s fiasco as the Conservatives gathered in a tiny hall in Glasgow and tried to select a handful of journalists from their most pliant media outlets (take note readers the six invited journalists were from The Daily Telegraph, The Scottish Daily Mail, The Scottish Sun, The Times, The Press and
Bella Caledonia •

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

It’s tempting to think that the feeling of collapse, inertia and hopelessness is confined to proponents of self-determination, but it’s a far wider malaise. Have a thought too for Elon Musk and Humza Yousaf both who are experiencing their own versions of “rapid unscheduled disassembly” and needing to employ some hasty deflective euphemisms.

Yousaf has inherited not just a party divided as never before witnessed under devolution but also a series of policy initiatives under relentless assault. T
Bella Caledonia •

The History of the Sausage Roll in Constitutional Politics

Those who have watched the Veganuary-inspired meltdown of Piers Morgan into a meaty testosterone-filled rage, or observed England’s finest yeomanry protesting at Gregg’s, may be ignorant to the longer-standing importance of hot pastry goods to Britain.

Sausage Roll Rage may seem like a new phenomena, but its origins are indeed ancient. Brexit, for so long associated with chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated beef, ractopamine pork, chicken litter as animal feed including the birds’ faeces (curre
DeSmog UK •

Revealed: US Oil Billionaire Charles Koch Funds UK Anti-Environment Spiked Network

For years, people have speculated about who is behind a shadowy group of well-connected ‘free speech advocates’ spreading far-right ideologies and climate science denial.

The group emerged from a libel trial and bankruptcy of the ‘Living Marxism’ magazine in 2000, has roots in the Trotskyist left, and is now the factory behind a production line of far-right polemic that has infiltrated mainstream media and politics. It currently has its public home on Spiked — a website dedicated to belligerent
DeSmog UK •

Analysis — The Climate Change Act 10 Years On: A Decade of Denialism in Retreat

The UK's landmark Climate Change Act passed into law 10 years ago with near-unanimous support, setting a legally-binding target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050. It was the the first of its kind in the world, and many others would soon follow suit.

But not everyone was celebrating the anniversary.

Rupert Darwall and the Spectator, now a regular home to a tranche of oddballs and denialists, were particularly fervent in their upset.

Last month, Da
Bella Caledonia •

Some Problems with Sleep in the Park

This year, once again, we’re going to “solve homelessness forever” according to the social enterprise Social Bite.

The problem is of course that we were going to solve it forever last year as well.

The model of a mass sleep out promises “4 cities, one night, 12,000 people under the stars”.

What’s not to like?

The project has a tremendous amount of goodwill, and it’s difficult to question its mixture of ambition, innovation and drive for social justice. I wouldn’t doubt anyone’s integrity or
Bella Caledonia •

Soros, Scruton and the Hyperobject

Conspiracies are part of a long tradition of paranoia in American politics from Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, to chemtrails, corn circles and Area 51. Timothy Morton called conspiracy the perfect example of a hyperobject – a word that describes those features of our existence too vast to comprehend completely. This notion seeps into much of our everyday incomprehension and is fertile ground for the political madness we are seeing the USA succumb to.
HeraldScotland •

Why audience manipulation on BBC Question Time is an assault on truth and journalism

IN a year of momentous fakery – from a Brexit campaign built on lies and half-truths to Nigel Farage’s race-hate immigration poster and Donald Trump’s post-truth US Presidential election victory – this week saw new levels of distortion in the British media.

The latest twist came when it emerged that the audience producer – a job-title with more than a whiff of Orwell about it – for the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, Question Time, had been sharing posts by far-right groups and had in
Variant •

On the Night Shift | Mike Small | Variant 21

On the Night Shift:

From Lynndie England to Copper Green

Mike Small



Liberty for Sale, 25 August 2004

"I have just come home from work and think back over my workday. I mix with refugees from evil and tyrrany from all over the world, including those who fled apartheid. I drink my coffee with Muslims and Mandarins, Pakistanis and Indians, all breathing the fresh air of freedom. You have the nerve to depict our beloved Lady, Miss Liberty as a cheap, cigarette smoking slut, dragging an I
Variant •

Solway's Silver Bullet | Mike Small | Variant 17

Mike Small

Solway's Silver Bullet



"Unborn children of the region are being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA."1

Ross B. Mirkarimi



A new kind of nuclear war is being waged. It's already being fought in Scotland and the combatants are you and me. Our attackers are the Ministry of Defence, a force which has already poisoned its own soldiers and threatened the health of the civilian populations of the former Yugoslavia, Kuwait and Iraq.

Why is this happening?
HeraldScotland •

Time to abolish the Queen of the Kleptocracy

IN a week where Britain seemed to be collapsing under the weight of its own venal chaos, one event among the rest stood out. The revelation that millions of pounds of “the Queen’s private money” is invested in offshore funds in Caribbean tax havens should have caused more outrage than it did. Instead, in the wake of the implosion of Cabinet government it’s almost been forgotten by the end of the week.

What is it about Britain that seems so hopelessly deferential in the face of such outrageous b
Bella Caledonia •

Scotland and the New North

As the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Banking Authority (EBA) move from London to Amsterdam and Paris, and Labour vote to leave the Customs Union – as the full scale of the Brexit calamity unfolds, new alliances and connections are to be made. Scotland is looking  north.

Over the past few days Edinburgh has been host to the Arctic Circle “the largest international gathering on Arctic issues”. As Finland’s Samuli Virtanen put it: “Even though the UK is leaving the EU, we hope y
Bella Caledonia •

Distorting the News on Economic Murder

Last week the BMJ (British Medical Journal) published a report compiled by researchers from Oxford, Cambridge and University College London suggesting as many as 120,000 people had died as a result of Tory austerity policies in the last seven years.

Why did the BBC not cover the research showing that the impacts of austerity had caused 120,000 deaths?

It seems it was on the advice of the Science Media Centre, a key part of the LM Network, the group we last saw acting against the ban on smackin
Bella Caledonia •

These (Offshore) Islands

The latest post from the unintentionally hilarious These Islands project, is, well, unintentionally hilarious. Packed with the great and the good, the project is an attempt to look less nutty than Scotland in Union and other slightly bonkers Nationalist offshoots. Their latest blog from Michael Jary (Senior Partner at OC&C Strategy Consultants) called ‘Britain’s Standing on the World Stage’ continues where the last left off. Jary strides the world stage, and as he does he notices how people REAL
The Guardian •

It’s not just Scotland’s schools. The whole PFI racket is crumbling | Mike Small

The Acronym Soup can get confusing. PPP, PFI, NPD – they are all hurled about, but there will certainly be no alphabet learning for more than 7,000 pupils across Edinburgh locked out of school since the Easter break as building safety standards are assessed and repairs undertaken. The schools were built under the controversial private finance initiative – PFI – by the Labour/Liberal Democrat administration at Holyrood, and there’s now even talk that some of them may need to be knocked down and r
The Guardian •

With Labour in disarray, the SNP is the de facto opposition of the UK parliament | Mike Small

As the New Labour undead descend on the carcass of the party with their regressive desire for a spasm to the right, the challenges facing the victorious SNP MPs, who won a campaign from the left, are becoming clearer.

Last week, the media and political elite were in a froth about the “illegitimacy” of the SNP’s role and influence in Westminster. Now, as David Mundell, the sole Scottish Conservative MP, is appointed secretary of state for Scotland, the loneliness of his position is pretty stark.