Thoughtland

PK column in The National: It’s not enough to take Glasgow ... the SNP must now be ambitious and transform it

By Pat Kane. First published on APRIL 29TH, 2017

GLASGOW belongs to who? Well, let’s see. Opinion polls for the June Westminster General Election show the SNP taking something of a hit across Scotland. But the rumour mill on May’s local council elections says that it’s going to be a landslide in Glasgow for the Nationalists, tipping 50 per cent of the overall vote.

The Yes City looks like it’s finally about to have its Yes “City Government”, as the party’s shadow council leader Susan Aitken likes to phrase it. She continues, “I will make Glasgow a rival to Barcelona, Copenhagen and Berlin”. These are bold claims, and one can already have fun with them by highlighting the quirkiness of these places.

Will the “city government” be removing busts and statues of old imperial masters, or putting an overall ceiling on hotel rooms to curb disruptive levels of tourism, as Barcelona’s radical mayor Ada Colau has done?

PK column in The National: Theresa May should realise there is more than one way to be a strong leader

By Pat Kane. First published on APRIL 22ND, 2017

‘STRONG and stable leadership... strong and stable leadership...” Theresa May used the term 14 times during her first General Election stump speech, and incessantly throughout the day. We’ve received the message, Prime Minister.

Or, more exactly, we’ve received the message of her master strategist Lynton Crosby, and he didn’t get to where he is today by underestimating the need to drive a campaign line home, like a nail through the head of the distracted citizenry.

PK column in The National: Scottish land must not be the plaything of the rich

By Pat Kane. First published on APRIL 15th, 2017

‘THEY are a plaything – like a yacht or a Riviera villa”. Thus speaks a London lobbyist when asked about the status of Highland properties for his clients, while staying at Blair Atholl for hunting and shooting.

The quote comes from a brilliant set of articles by Cathy Newman in the new National Geographic magazine. The pieces make a very well-informed tour d’horizon of land politics and ownership in modern Scotland. Do they also make your blood boil? Do they make you want to flatten the accelerator of land reform legislation to the floor? Almost entirely.

PK column in The National: Connecting with the power of identity

By Pat Kane. First published on APRIL 8TH, 2017

IT’S a slippery word, identity. We’re exploring it tonight in a talk at the Lyceum Theatre, as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. Our immediate topics are online identity, and your biological identity (Caryl Churchill’s stark play about cloning, A Number, is on after our discussion). But my prep has just sent the hornets whirling around my head.

When did this essentially philosophical term become part of our daily chatter? Google’s Ngram Viewer can chart the historical popularity of single words, using their massive corpus of scanned online books. It shows “identity” rising considerably through the 1960s, but taking a near vertical leap from the late 80s and early 90s, before beginning to tail off about 10 years ago.

PK column in The National: What price democracy? It's a real trilemma

By Pat Kane. First published on APRIL 1ST, 2017

SO, signed letters are arriving at the desks of political leaders, borne in briefcases gripped by sombre officials. It’s as if email was too trivial a medium for the dissolution (or assertion) of state relations.

This is, of course, a bit hilarious. It’s the flows of digital information, and all the economic and institutional applecarts they’ve turned over, that are partly the root cause of this momentous exchange of vellum. But it’s also a reminder.