In 2011, months after the SNP formed its historic majority government in Holyrood, Alex Salmond declared that Scotland was to become ‘the Saudi Arabia of renewables’. 

The development of the green economy, so the former First Minister argued, would not only offer skilled employment but underpin the foundations of a future, independent state. 

A decade and a half later, this promise is yet to materialise. Following the ScotWind auction of 2022, Scotland’s seabed was leased to a selection of large fossil fuel companies, state-owned energy firms and asset managers.

The SNP having junked its commitment to establish a national energy company, Ireland's government today owns more Scottish offshore wind than the Scottish Government does.  

Meanwhile, of the 1,000 jobs that the UK Government’s much-lauded GB Energy promised to bring to Aberdeen, just 13 have materialised.

To discuss the opportunities and challenges of Scotland's offshore economy, Coll McCail is joined by Laurie Macfarlane and Dave Moxham. 

Laurie is a co-director of Future Economy Scotland, a non-partisan think tank that aims to create a new economy that is democratic, sustainable and just. 

Dave is the Deputy General Secretery of the Scottish Trade Union Congress, which represents 550,000 workers through 40 affiliated unions.

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• Future Economy Scotland: Who Owns ScotWind?
• STUC report on Scotland’s low carbon and renewable energy economy

As Buildings across Glasgow crumble, gentrification strips the city's working-class neighbourhoods of their core identities. In Scotland's largest city, the legacy of the Thatcher years looms large.

For instance, in 2021, if you lived in Pollokshields West, life expectancy was 83 years, while in nearby Greater Govan it was 65 – a gap of 18 years for a mere 3 miles. It's a bleak picture.

However, Glasgow's residents refuse to accept the status quo. Workers, tenants, and commuters from Drumchapel to Dalmarnock have taken action over rising rents, damp flats, soaring bus fares, and collapsing services.

Now with rent controls won in the Scottish Parliament and the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) moving forward with bus franchising, could ‘The Dear Green Place’ be just around the corner?

To answer this question, Rory Hamilton is joined by Paul Shaw of Get Glasgow Moving and Stella Rooney of Living Rent Glasgow.

Join Living Rent. Support Better Buses for Strathclyde.

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Scottish politics is paralysed. The SNP govern in suspended animation while dangling the prospect of independence before their supporters’ noses. Scottish Labour is in tow to Starmerism, and the Scottish Greens remain tainted by the Bute House Agreement. In this context, Support for Reform UK grows by the month.

Ahead of a sold-out rally in Glasgow, Rory Hamilton is joined by Zarah Sultana, Member of Parliament for Coventry South and Co-Founder of Your Party, to discuss whether a new left-wing political party can offer Scots an alternative — and what it might look like.

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Earlier this year, the 18th June edition of the Daily Record carried the headline “Justice Ministers’ war on yobs: Thugs up in smoke”. The words referred to an intervention from SNP MSP Angela Constence, who had promised to crack down on football fans following the Old Firm League Cup Final in December 2024. The Record’s prejudice, however, speaks to a more general effort to demonise Scottish football fans from this country’s political and media class. At its most serious, this demonisation has resulted in awful legislation like the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act. At its most ludicrous, it has resulted in the mainstream media alleging that fans are carrying and smuggling pyrotechnics into games inside French baguettes. While they’re targeted by the establishment, football fans are simultaneously priced out of games as the cost of tickets has soared. In Scotland, fans are getting organised to fight for better. In the latest episode of Nest of Fearties, Coll McCail is joined by Derek Watson and Paul Quigley to discuss the politics of Scottish football. Support Skotia on Patreon.

At the time of recording, at least 248 journalists have now been killed in Gaza, more than in any other conflict in modern times. Yet many in the mainstream media still can’t bring themselves to condemn the killing of their Palestinian colleagues. 

From the BBC to CNN, from The New York Times to The Guardian, in their reporting of Israel’s genocide over the last 23 months, outlet after outlet framed their coverage to minimise the severity of the crime. 

As John Pilger once said, “there is something called censorship by omission. You don’t really discuss what you leave out but it’s left out.”

In Scotland, this apathy – and often outright hostility – to the suffering of the Palestinian people has been mimicked by the country’s leading opinion writers. Intent on viewing Israel’s crimes through the lens of the culture war, rather than an attack on our common humanity, all too few in Scotland’s mainstream have called a spade a spade – or a war crime a war crime. 

To discuss the Scottish media’s capitulation on Gaza, Coll McCail is joined by David Jamieson, the editor of Conter, and Laura Webster, the editor of The National. 

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Read David’s article: ‘Moral Collapse How The Scottish Commentariat Failed on Gaza’

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Scotland, according to the independent left think tank Common Weal, is one of the most foreign-owned economies in the world.

That’s a staggering fact, but it reveals a fundamental truth: Scotland is being asset-stripped.

Coll McCail is joined by Dr. James Foley and Dr. Craig Dalzell to discuss Scotland’s vanishing economic sovereignty.

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Attend Scotland's Not For Sale in Glasgow on September 27.

As Donald Trump arrives in Scotland, the severity of Israel’s starvation in Gaza has driven even the Daily Express to declare that the genocide must end. 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and First Minister John Swinney have both pledged to raise the question of Palestine in their private meetings with the American President in the coming days.

But whether they can be trusted to do so, having capitulated to Trump’s every ask since he took office again, is another question – and one that this episode of Nest of Fearties will seek to address.

Coll McCail is joined by Isobel Lindsay, Co-Vice Chair of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a veteran Scottish Independence campaigner, and Bill Ramsey, the SNP Trade Union Group convener and sits on the party's National Executive Committee, to trace fresh schisms within Scotland’s governing party over critical questions of foreign policy and ask what hope for Scottish nationalism in next year’s Holyrood elections.

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One year ago this month, Keir Starmer was elected Britian’s Prime Minister with a Westminster majority of more than 150 seats. 

12 months later, Sir Keir’s approval ratings are at their lowest point since his election. A recent Find Out Now poll recorded Labour on just 22% of the vote, 8 points adrift of Reform UK. 

The Starmer Project is bruised, battered and deeply unpopular after a year of disastrous U-turns, constant relaunches, an inability to cut through and an overwhelming failure to deliver on the country’s demand for change.

Coll McCail is joined by Matt Kerr, the Morning Star’s Scotland Correspondent and a Glasgow Labour Cllr, and Chris Stephens, the former SNP MP for Glasgow South West, to discuss a host of issues that in many ways embody the first year of Keir Starmer’s premiership. 

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Bathgate no more, Linwood no more, Grangemouth no more, Larbert no more?

Earlier this month, it was announced that the Alexander Dennis bus manufacturing sites in Larbert and Camelon would close, resulting in 400 immediate job losses and an estimated 1,600 in the wider supply chain. This comes as the nearby Grangemouth oil refinery begins its decommissioning process. 

Meanwhile, John Swinney promises “national renewal” and a long-term plan for “Scotland 2050”. Is this the story of an unjust transition?

To answer this question, Rory Hamilton is joined by Dr Ewan Gibbs – Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow, and author of Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland – and Dr Rosie Hampton, Oil & Gas Campaigns Manager at Friends of the Earth Scotland.

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The ‘ferries fiasco’ has plagued the Scottish Government for nearly 10 years of its 18-year time in power.

In 2022, Nicola Sturgeon refuted claims that the failures at Ferguson Marine, Scotland’s last remaining shipbuilder on the lower Clyde, were the result of the Scottish Government giving out “jobs for the boys”. 

Her comments followed Ferguson’s costly, delayed and error-strewn delivery of two new ferries for the Ayrshire to Arran route. 

Following two periods of administration, during which the contracts for the now-named MV Glen Sannox and MV Glen Rosa ballooned to three times their original size, the shipyard was nationalised and eventually in January 2025, the Glen Sannox finally entered service – seven years behind schedule.

To take a deep dive into Scotland’s ‘ferry fiasco’, Rory Hamitlon is joined by Jeanette Findlay and Brian Reynolds. 

Jeanette Findlay is Professor Emerita at the University of Glasgow, and immediate past President of the University and College Union (UCU) Scotland. Brian Reynolds is the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers’ (RMT) Union Coordinator with CalMac Ferries, the ferry operator for the West Coast routes. 

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