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Profile: Struan Stevenson

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Latest articles from Struan Stevenson

President Joe Biden in the Rose Garden at the White House

Struan Stevenson: The breakup of the UK would damage Scotland, Britain and America

ALL political parties that remain in power for too long suffer the same inevitable fate. They run out of ideas. They become tired and drained of energy, floundering around in a hotbed of incompetence, sleaze and scandal, trying to cling on to power by passing bad legislation. Convinced after years in office of their sole right to rule, they display arrogance and contempt for the parliamentary process. Is all of this familiar? You need look no further than the SNP government at Holyrood. Their 14

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Pope Francis in Mosul last month

Struan Stevenson: How to make the world a better place - ban the political use of religion

DON’T mention politics or religion. This familiar warning was often sounded in pubs and around dinner tables in the days when meeting people socially was still a normal occurrence.

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Tartan Day has become an American favourite

Struan Stevenson: The hidden revolutionary history of Tartan Day

TUESDAY, 6th April, will mark the annual Tartan Day celebrations in America. Sadly, for the second year in a row, the festivities will be muted by the pandemic. Normally, there is a massive parade of pipe bands marching down 6th Avenue in New York, cheered on by thousands of ex-pat Scots.

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Ashgabad

Struan Stevenson: Inside the secret city where not even a car cash is allowed to be reported

PARLIAMENTARY elections will take place in Turkmenistan on March 28 and the outcome is already a foregone conclusion. The Democratic Party will win. Although the constitution allows for multiple political parties, there is no effective opposition to the party of the president in this former Soviet republic.

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Saltire and European Union flags at the Scottish Parliament. Picture: Gordon Terris/The Herald

Struan Stevenson: the best cure for the fool’s gold of nationalism is the ballot box

IT was the failure of the Darien Scheme in the late 1600s that triggered the Act of Union in 1707 and made Scotland a key partner in the United Kingdom, one of the most successful economic unions in history. If Scotland ever votes for independence, it will, ironically, create another Darien-style economic disaster, as we break up a partnership that has seen us share a language, a currency, a flag and a seamless and borderless single market where we’ve done 65% of our trade, for more than 300 y

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BLACK DEATH: A rare contemporary image of mass burial during the Black Death pandemic of 1348-50

Struan Stevenson: From plagues of ancient Greece to today, we are condemned to make same mistakes

GEORG Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher, said: “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” When examining the history of global pandemics his words ring true.

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First Minister Nicola Sturgeon gives evidence to a Scottish Parliament committee examining the handling of harassment allegations against former first minister Alex Salmond on March 3, 2021 in Edinburgh. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images).

Struan Stevenson: Sturgeon swimming against the tide but ultimately doomed

NICOLA Sturgeon is a very big fish swimming in a very small and polluted pond. Let’s face it, we should never have expected her route map out of lockdown to be anything other than different from England’s.

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Goose Green, Falklands. Picture: EPA/Javier Lizon

Struan Stevenson: UK fought a war for the Falklands – now it's been failed by Brexit

ALMOST four decades on from the end of the Falklands War, another serious threat is troubling its 3,400 population. It seems that the British archipelago in the South Atlantic was a missing link in the Brexit negotiations. The Falklands fisheries sector, which accounts for the major part of their revenue, has been hit with crippling EU tariffs.

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Campaigners bury their heads in sand in protest at planned mine near Whitehaven.

Struan Stevenson: Plans for a massive deep coal mine are indefensible – and Johnson knows it

IN A surprising volte face, controversial plans to open Britain’s first deep coal mine in three decades are to be reconsidered by Cumbria County Council. The plans had originally been approved by the council in October and the UK Government’s communities minister, Robert Jenrick, caused consternation when he refused to call in the proposal for scrutiny, leaving the final decision to the local authority.

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April 30, 2008 file photo, shows a submarine and its owner Peter Madsen. (Niels Hougaard /Ritzau via AP, File).

Struan Stevenson: A Scandi TV drama, a real-life murder and the race to become a Scottish space port

FEW people will have realised that the new BBC Scandi-noir mini-series The Investigation has a bizarre Scottish connection. The gripping plot follows Copenhagen Police Chief Jens Møller, as he tries to solve the 2017 murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall on board a homemade submarine. One of the key people now bidding to mastermind Scotland’s first rocket launch from a controversial spaceport in Sutherland was originally the business partner of Peter Madsen, the Danish inventor and entreprene