Bylines Scotland

I was careless enough a few weeks ago not to switch on the light as I descended into the cellar of my friend's house in the Minervois region of southern France. In the gloom, I missed my footing and tumbled through the air, desperately flailing my arms in search of some handhold that might break my fall. None was found. I crashed onto an ancient and very hard French stone floor. The upshot was a shattered upper left humerus and the quad tendon on my left knee torn from its anchor.

In the town centre in Wick, shop after shop is shuttered shut. "Even the Christian Charity Shop closed this summer", said one resident to me. "We have to drive for hours to go to a shoe shop, now", said Janet, another resident of the town. Wick had a thriving town centre some years ago - until a Tesco supermarket opened its doors. "Initially, we were all very happy with it", say some townspeople.

There is a growing sense that something has changed in Scotland, and not for the better. The truth is simpler. The problem never really went away. For a time it retreated from view. Today it is impossible to ignore. Repealing a law is not enough The Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Act is gone. Repealed in 2018 after years of political controversy, it now exists largely as a historical footnote and a case study in how quickly Scottish politics can become polarised.

The night of Saturday 27 June and the early hours afterwards saw the most populous city in Scotland play host to the Eurodance legend from Sweden, Basshunter, as the four walls of the Slay nightclub were filled with classic anthems from the past. Warming up The beats pounded harder than a sledgehammer on stone, the lights flashed brightly across the darkened room of the club and fans screamed louder than anything on Earth. And, yet, this was just the warmup.

Jess Hillary is a student writer based in Glasgow. She also writes for the Glasgow Guardian and is particularly interested in Scottish politics, public policy and current affairs. Her work explores political issues with a focus on the people and policies shaping Scotland.

As a tearful Keir Starmer offered his resignation as Prime Minister on Monday 22 June 2026, he became the sixth consecutive person in the role to resign before completing a whole term. The British public now faces the prospect of a seventh Prime Minister in a decade, an unprecedented number in modern British politics. And while most of the discourse surrounds Starmer's potential successor, Andy Burnham, there is potential for major consequences in Scottish politics.

There is something quietly disorienting about the idea of Ravenscraig, in part, being reborn as a data centre. Where furnaces once burned and 10,000 workers shaped steel into substantive products, the proposed Ravenscraig AI Energy Campus will produce little that is visible. No smoke. No flames. No tangible product. Just data moving invisibly through servers across 160 acres of remediated ground, consuming 550MW of electricity, the equivalent of half a million homes, in near-total silence.

Benbecula recounts the story of triple murder in 1857 by Angus MacPhee, a young labourer with a mental disorder, on the remote Hebridean island of Benbecula. The story is narrated by Angus's brother Malcolm MacPhee. Benbecula is one of the Darkland tales which are fictional reconstructions of real events in Scotland's past. The storyteller's burden The first paragraph of begins: "My name is Malcolm MacPhee.

A complaint about a £1,500 downsizing grant was never supposed to become an investigation into anti-social behaviour records, data retention policies and the limits of regulatory oversight. Yet that is precisely where this journey has led. What began as an attempt to understand why a grant application had been mishandled uncovered the disclosure of complaint records, an ICO investigation that upheld a complaint against North Lanarkshire Council and a series of questions that remain unanswered.

Everyone has an opinion on tax. Often it's focused on complaints about paying too much, government waste or simply being seen as a necessary evil. However, tax can be a far more liberating tool for social change than we perhaps realise. Ask yourself if you care about your pension, the NHS, roads, railways, social security and schools - taxes directly fund all these. Taxation is the foundation of Scotland's economy and if we don't collect taxes then public services simply don't exist.