Rory Scothorne

When​ the radical youth of Paris ripped up the paving stones for ammunition in 1968, they found a utopian slogan for it: ‘Under the pavement, the beach.’ ‘But this is inaccurate,’ Ralph Miliband reflected eight years later. ‘Under the pavement, there are the sewers.’ The Labour Party spent four and a half years looking for a beach under the street. Now...

From​ the vantage point of England, the short period since 2015 has seemed to contain decades’ worth of political upheaval. Scotland’s equivalent political time-crunch occurred in the preceding five years. The SNP leveraged its surprise 2011 majority in the Scottish Parliament (it had been in minority government since 2007) into an independence referendum in 2014 that...

‘The subtlest​ of insults to Scotland is, it seems, to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and...

Two years ago​ a woman from Dewsbury called Claire Skipper, suffering from toothache, went into her garden shed, clamped the offending tooth in a pair of pliers, and pulled. Her tooth broke. There had been no vacancies at her local NHS practice and she couldn’t afford private care or the journey to the nearest emergency clinic in Bradford. A week later, in ‘indescribable’...

In the​ early years of the Scottish Parliament, Armando Iannucci performed a TV sketch in which he ascended to heaven and discovered the extraordinary things Scottish audiences had missed out on due to having ‘our own programmes’. He goggled at the first ever broadcast interview with an alien and a programme revealing the secrets of alchemy, both shunted from Scottish screens by...