The Scottish Independence Podcast

For the 69th episode of The Scottish Independence Podcast it's back to the parliament, with Joan McAlpine MSP as the guest.

Being a member of the Scottish Parliament is however only one of Joan's activities as amongst other things she is also a journalist at The Daily Record, has written various books, blogs at Go Lassie Go, and was a speechwriter for Alex Salmond.

We talked about the recent SNP conference and her speech there - are there parallels to be drawn between the bedroom tax and the poll tax?

We talked about the media in general and her specific newspaper, and their effect on the campaign. Joan thinks certain things need to be placed in context.

We also got onto the reasons why Joan supports independence for Scotland, and there's much more in there besides.

Hope you enjoy…

LINKS
http://joanmcalpine.typepad.com/joan_mcalpine/
https://twitter.com/JoanMcAlpine
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/mgreenwell
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/category/the-scottish-independence-podcast/

The 68th episode of The Scottish Independence Podcast comes from a recent yes event in Motherwell with thank to Independence Live, who are making a great job of filming these events).

Scotland is full of Independence events at the moment, and the Yes campaign is reaching many many communities around Scotland.

Obviously however, it is not possible for everyone to go to every meeting, and it is not possible for some to go to any meetings, so I think it is important to spread the ones that are recorded around as much as possible.

In that spirit, mixed in with the interviews in the normal podcasts and For A' That series, I hope to be bringing you more podcasts of events around Scotland too.

At this particular event, the speakers were firstly Robin McAlpine, in fine angry form. He was followed by Cat Boyd and finally Jim Sillars had the chance to explain his ideas without George Galloway repeating the same sentence at him ad infinitum.

Hope you enjoy…

LINKS
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/mgreenwell
https://twitter.com/kittycatboyd
https://twitter.com/NaeFear
https://twitter.com/ReidFoundation

A few months ago, after I'd interviewed a couple of MSPs (John Finnie and Jean Urquhart), I asked them and their assistants if they would be able to put me in touch with Margo MacDonald or her assistant, and then maybe we could set something up.

I got the contact for her assistant and it seemed she was willing to come on and give the show a try, but I should ask again a bit later on when she had more time.

Unfortunately, we never got round to it before she passed away.

However, what I've done here is to put together some audio of her speeches and various appearances throughout her career.

They go from the fun, funny and flippant to the extremely serious end of the spectrum. Some of them are TV or radio interviews, some of them are her interventions in the Scottish Parliament and there are some other interesting snippets in there too.

Regular listeners will know that the guest on the show chooses the tune. That not being possible, I did some digging around and it seems she liked country music, so I put some of that in too.

Hope you enjoy…

For the 42nd episode of the For A’ That podcast Andrew and I were joined for the first time by Vonny Moyes who is the Arts Editor for The Skinny magazine and also wrote a marvellous article over at National Collective recently. Our returning guest this time was Gary Dunion, who, amongst a number of other things is the Communications Director for the Scottish Greens.

The first thing we discussed was the passing of Margo MacDonald, and how the parliament may well be a much poorer place without her. We were lucky to have a number of different perspectives on this. Gary in particular had been working with her recently and had an interesting story to tell.

From an interesting story to a frankly bizarre one. We're used to better together prophecies of financial doom or some such other thing, but George Robertson took it on himself to make a prediction of actual apocalyptic doom should Scotland go independent, with the Forces of Darkness being unleashed (artists rendition above).

This forced us to bring our own big guns out and so we got to it. In fact we unleashed our dogs of war, with grave consequences for Andrew.

Vonny had some interesting comments on the importance of language in the whole debate, and we also put our heads together to try and predict where the next scare story could possibly go - have they run out or have they used them all up too fast?

There's much more besides in the latest episode, and I haven't even mentioned Douglas Adams in the introduction either.

Hope you enjoy (and if you feel up to helping us along with our running costs you can pop us a donation too.)

LINKS
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/
http://lallandspeatworrier.blogspot.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/vonny_bravo
https://twitter.com/garydunion
https://twitter.com/PeatWorrier
https://twitter.com/mgreenwell
http://nationalcollective.com/2014/04/04/vonny-moyes-might-wee-stupid/

For the 66th episode of the Scottish Independence Podcast I spoke with Alistair Davidson.

Alistair runs a small think tank called the Centre for Technology and Society and will be writing the digital rights part of the Reid Foundation's Common Weal project.

We spoke about the use of social media in the campaign so far but I suppose the juicier parts of the interview were those explaining what Snowden really means, as although Glenn Greenwald defended himself brilliantly in that famous interview, we didn't actually get any nearer to what was going on.

We also discussed how an Independent Scotland could make itself safer in terms of digital security and also how it could do better for itself in the digital industry.

Hope you enjoy…

LINKS
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/
http://mohkohn.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/moh_kohn
https://twitter.com/mgreenwell
http://reidfoundation.org/
http://allofusfirst.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-moGtQFvsVU

"I believe there's a space in Europe, it's an empty space, and it's shaped like Scotland."

For the 65th episode of the Scottish Independence Podcast I spoke with George Gunn and if you want another juicy quote from it try the following...

"The real labour party doesn't exist. That's a kind of Anti-Brigadoon that we could live without."

George is a poet and playwright who, amongst other things, has also produced for BBC radio, writes over at Bella Caledonia and has been a deep sea fisherman and a north sea oil worker.

We talked about his new play 3000 Trees, which will be on at the festival this summer, and its relevance to the indy debate. There's some pretty worrying material in there.

Secondly we talked about worrying material, notably the nuclear stuff being dumped all around Scotland, but particularly near his neck of the woods.

We got on to the festival itself and the Scottish cultural scene and some of the problems therein and finally we talked about why George supports Independence for Scotland and some of what he would hope to see happen in the new independent country.

Hope You Enjoy

LINKS
http://3000trees.com/
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/mgreenwell

For the 64th episode of the Scottish Independence Podcast I spoke with Baron Wallace of Tankerness and I could not have hoped for a more distinguised guest.

As his wikipedia page says about him...

...a British politician, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords and the Advocate General for Scotland. He was formerly Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, Member of Parliament (MP) for Orkney and Shetland, Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Orkney and the first Deputy First Minister of Scotland in the Scottish Executive.

I managed to catch Jim briefly on the first night of his new speaking tour.

Hope you enjoy...

LINKS
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/mgreenwell

For the 63rd episode of the Scottish Independence Podcast I spoke with James Foley and Pete Ramand. James and Pete are the co-founders of the Radical Independence Campaign and authors of the new book Yes: The Radical Case for Independence. They've also been organising The Independence Lectures, along with Pluto Press.

We talked about their new book, the reasons for Independence contained therein and what we should be looking to do after a Yes vote.

We also talked about what the Radical Independence Campaign have got coming up, particularly in terms of voting registration.

One of my cats seemed to want to get in on the act at the beginning of the show too.

Hope you enjoy.

LINKS
http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/category/the-scottish-independence-podcast/
http://radicalindependence.org/
http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745334752
http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/03/16/the-independence-lectures/
https://twitter.com/PeteRamand
https://twitter.com/mgreenwell

The 62nd episode of the Scottish Independence Podcast is the first in a series of lectures on Scottish Independence organised by the Radical Independence group.

It is reproduced here with thanks to Pete Ramand and James Foley.

I'm not going to say too much about it, other than that if the others in the series are of this quality, a victory in the independence referendum should be on its way.

Just listen...

Hope you enjoy.

The 61st episode of the Scottish Independence Podcast comes from a speech made at the Radical Independence Conference by Professor Ailsa McKay, who recently passed away.

Ailsa was recommended to me on three separate occasions as someone who I should try to get onto the show. I tried to get in touch but was obviously unaware of her illness.

Nevertheless, the aforementioned speech she made was available and I decided to put it out as an MP3 so that it might reach some people who didn't see it there.

It's certainly worth it.

Some of the work she did in her life is described on her Wikipedia page.

"McKay was Reader in Gender and Economics until her 2011 appointment as Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University. She also served as Vice Dean of the Glasgow School for Business and Society until 2013. She specialized in gender inequalities and the economics of the welfare state, and served as a consultant to the Scottish Parliament, the Irish Government, Her Majesty's Treasury, and the United Nations Development Programme. Since 2006, she held the visiting chair in gender studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, and was invited as an expert witness to give evidence during the budget process to the Scottish Parliament and the Parliament of Canada. She was a leading authority on gender budget analysis in the United Kingdom. She was also a business commentator for The Herald newspaper. In 2012 she was appointed by the Scottish Government as a member of the Expert Working Group on Welfare and Constitutional Reform."

Hope you enjoy.