Politics has always been deeply personal for Sandra Webster. A single mother-of-three who cares for two autistic sons, one with chronic renal failure and another with cerebral palsy, she cut her teeth in the long-running community-led campaign to save the children’s ward at the Royal Alexandria Hospital in Paisley. Just before the campaign started in…
As a young schoolkid in primary three, David McClemont was given a homework exercise where he had to show he could use various words in a sentence. “One of the words was ‘witch’ and so I wrote ‘Maggie Thatcher is a witch’,” he recalls. “My teacher must have been quite left-wing, because I don’t remember…
Jim Bollan is proud of the number of times he has been hauled before the watchdog for councillors’ conduct. Most recently, the veteran socialist councillor was brought before the Standards Commission to answer 37 allegations brought by the CEO of West Dunbartonshire Council after he made public details of a hushed-up internal probe into corruption…
Six months into the pandemic, as the public health crisis and its gross mishandling in London hardened public opinion in support of Scottish independence, Shetland made a rare appearance in UK headlines. The islands’ local authority had just voted to formally explore options for achieving “financial and political self-determination”, a move seized upon by unionist…
Benn Rapson’s face is instantly recognisable to many Glasgow students. Just over a year ago, he was elected as president of the students’ union at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland’s third-largest university, with around three-quarters of the 1,123 votes – a testament to his frenetic campaigning over his five years of involvement in the student…
