Jonathon Shafi

IN periods of high political drama, there is a tendency to zoom into the minutiae. Who is voting in what direction; what personalities are jostling for position; frantic updates on negotiations; calculations around parliamentary arithmetic.

SOMETIMES in politics you have to go back to square one. Strategies need reassessed, ideas require interrogation, and built-up preconceptions need challenged.

UNIVERSALLY respected broadcast journalist Bernard Ponsonby left a damning critique of the political class as he retired from STV. Scottish politics, he said, suffers from “a real dearth of thinkers”.

THE new Police Scotland “Hate Monster” campaign has provoked a widespread backlash on social media.

WE were in the heat of the 2014 independence referendum campaign, with a growing sense of anticipation. The polls had altered substantially since the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement. The Yes movement was in the ascendency.

IN the post-2014 era, Nicola Sturgeon towered above politics. Partly down to her own undoubted talents and abilities, she became for at least a period, the most popular Scottish politician of the devolution era.

AT the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last week, South Africa presented a devastating case against the conduct of the Israeli campaign in Gaza.

It is not the protestors who are undermining the United Nations, global aid agencies and international humanitarian law

IN the thin strip of land that forms Gaza, the median age is 19. According to the UN secretary-general the situation is unbearable. “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza, Antonio Guterres said.

IN the 1970s, the SNP took up what would become one of the party’s best-known slogans: “It’s Scotland’s Oil.” There was a quiet genius to it. In three small words lay the economic case for independence, the argument for Scottish statehood and the injustice of the existing structure of the British state.