Martin Docherty-Hughes

SOCIAL democracy in the 21st century faces as many complex challenges as at its emergence as a political philosophy in the early 19th century, both at home here in Scotland and across the globe. Nevertheless, the main tenants of social democracy still hold true and that is a clear and unashamed support for a more democratic state at each and every level of society.

THE brazen abduction of exiled Belarussian activist Raman Pratasevich from a Ryanair flight forced to divert to Minsk this week was a shocking and saddening event for those who support freedom of conscience and the rule of law everywhere.

AS an MP with an interest in foreign and security policy, nothing makes my heart sink faster than hearing another chinless Tory wonder chunter on about the "special relationship".

THERE are some ideas that, no matter how daft they are, never seem to go away. And so it was this week as the idea that the SNP’s decades-long commitment to ridding Scotland of nuclear weapons after independence would be sacrificed in favour of a long-term leaseback agreement surfaced menacingly like a Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine in the Firth of Clyde.

IN joining me on our digital journey across Estonia, I do hope you will have recognised that I don’t propose revolutionary answers to our digital situation, for such methods of change usually require profound upheaval and conflict and those who support that type of approach are most often those who seek to gain advantage, economically and socially and direct how we should live and be governed.

‘LITTLE else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”

SOMETIMES, when you’re on a long digital journey, it’s time to climb the metaphorical Munro, sit down and take in the view. No more so than when the road ahead seems to be full of obstacles and challenges. Today the view seems composed of a range of mountainous and rocky tests, with the main one being the most pressing global public health crisis in the last century.

MANY have argued that Scotland should know its place and limit its ambitions, and if we are not careful, we will allow the same voices of self-pity and limitation reduce our opportunities after we regain the sovereignty so many of us have dreamed of. In many ways, I have campaigned all my political life not just to free our nation in the traditional sense, but importantly to free ourselves, we the people who will make up that society individually and collectively so we can reach our full potential. We have much to give the world and in the digital age we have even more ways of giving back to the world and enhancing what it means to be a democratic, modern nation state in the digital age.

"JUSTICE delayed is justice denied”. William Ewart Gladstone was right: we the citizen should expect justice to be delivered in a manner which ensures equal access to the law

‘LAND was the raw material of the agricultural age, iron the raw material of the industrial age. Data is the raw material of the information age.”