But for that one word, “almost”, David Martin talks a lot of sense and says things that need to be said. In particular, the point about there being no going back on Brexit. This has always been true and one of the things that even those advocating revoking the Article 50 implementation generally failed to acknowledge. The moment the Brexit juggernaut started rolling the place the UK had been disappeared. There could be no going back because there was nowhere to go back to.

Logic would dictate that long and probing consideration should be given to a course of action which not only had profound and wide-ranging implications but which was also irrevocable. Both in terms of planning for Brexit and in terms of voting in the referendum. But that was not the case. As we now know, there had been absolutely no planning for Brexit. The politicians who campaigned…

‘The leading thinker and most visible public advocate of modern monetary theory – the freshest and most important idea about economics in decades – delivers a radically different, bold, new understanding for how to build a just and prosperous society.

Any ambitious proposal – ranging from fixing crumbling infrastructure to Medicare for all or preventing the coming climate apocalypse – inevitably sparks questions: how can we afford it? How can we pay for it? Stephanie Kelton points out how misguided those questions really are by using the bold ideas of modern monetary theory (MMT), a fundamentally different approach to using our resources to maximize our potential as a society.

We’ve been thinking about government spending in the wrong ways, Kelton argues, on both sides of the political aisle. Everything that both liberal/progressives and conservatives believe about deficits and the role of money and government spending in the economy is wrong…

If the First Minister has said she does not want to hold an “unofficial referendum” as a winning vote for the independence side would not be recognised internationally and therefore not achieve independence then the only possible conclusion is that the First Minister has given up on what her predecessor “the beautiful dream”.

This is necessarily so as the First Minister has long insisted that a referendum can only be “official” if it is sanctioned by the British state. And we know that the British state will never sanction such a referendum so long as there is the possibility that their ‘precious’ Union might be put in jeopardy.

Of course, we can hardly expect that Nicola Sturgeon might come right out and admit that she has effectively abandoned hope of restoring Scotland’s independence. But neither can we anticipate that she might explain how, if she purports to still be seeking…

I agree with everything Craig Dalzell says in his interview with The National, with two very important exceptions. The first regards his views on campaigning for a referendum on independence, rather than campaigning for independence itself. The second concerns his insistence that we should be campaigning for independence.

We always had two battles to fight over the past five years. Obviously, we had the fight to restore Scotland’s rightful constitutional status. But before we could hope to properly engage in that battle we had first to affirm, secure and defend our right of self-determination. This was always where our opponents were going to attack. Because the British political elite continues to think as an imperial power.

To preserve the integrity of the homeland, the imperialist mindset is to always fight wars on someone else’s territory. That is why empires expand. Their borders…

Story idea: David Nicol

In a disturbing piece on Channel 4 News last night, we heard:

Untreated sewage is being released into rivers across England and Wales – perfectly legally – and campaigners are calling it a ‘dirty little secret’. This programme has now obtained exclusive figures showing how often and for how long it’s happening. Water companies are allowed to release a mixture of rainwater and sewage through special overflow pipes during spells of heavy rain – but we’ve discovered that during 2018 – there were 140,000 spills, lasting a total of 900,000 hours.

https://www.channel4.com/news/900000-hours-of-human-sewage-and-rainwater-flow-into-uk-rivers-every-year-revealed

The disaster of water privatisation in England:

According to theEnvironment Agencyreported on the BBC UK website last July:

[In England] there were 56 serious pollution incidents last year [2018], rising from 52 in 2017,the agency’s annual report said. Only…