Alyn Smith

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Latest articles from Alyn Smith

Alyn Smith: Why we must ca' canny in our push for indyref2

I have devoted, perforce, the last couple of years to trying to stop Brexit. Scotland’s view is clear, we voted to remain within the European family and that has been my instruction. But as we approach the exit day more and more attention is going to the other potential answer to the Brexit shambles if, despite all our efforts, we cannot turn it around for the whole of the UK.

Alyn Smith: Why MPs must halt this Brexit catastrophe

So yet again Mrs May marched us up to the top of the hill only to come to the summit empty-handed, and unsurprisingly go away again without any progress. We’re beyond the wire now folks. Brexit can still be stopped, but all routes to that are via an extension not of the transition period but of the Article 50 negotiating period itself.

Be warned: if the cyber extremists win then all of Scotland loses

The first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge one exists. I’m concerned about how politics and current affairs are discussed and debated online - worldwide and across the UK if it comes to it - but I think we need to do a few things differently in Scotland. The technological changes we’re currently going through in terms of how people access and process information about the world around us is unprecedented, similar only to the development of radio and TV mass media but much more powerful even than them.

Brexit's toxic legacy of hate imperils our hard-won freedoms

I'VE been thinking lately on how people across Europe felt in the early 1930s as they watched events around them and in faraway places with unfamiliar names. Of course, they were unaware of the future so could not imagine the horrors ahead. But would they have done anything differently? Or would most folk just have done what they did, put it all out of their minds and get on with their lives as best they could? Replace Pastor Niemöller’s “First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out, for I was not a socialist …” with Syrians, or refugees, or sick, poor or disabled, or immigrant, and you get my idea. Solidarity is all encompassing or it doesn't exist.

An independent Scotland at Europe's top table

EUROPEAN stuff can be complicated and it is easy to get wrong, especially when there are a few folk actively seeking to misinform with a blizzard of half truths, errors, alternative facts and outright lies.