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Articles by Mike Small
Generation Z in France and Serbia
In such dark times, victories are rare and need to be celebrated. Lula’s clutching victory from the jaws of defeat to triumph over Flávio Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro is one such victory, which has massive global ecological consequences. But before exploring the nature of that success, let us look at the nature of the defeat of the long-serving leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić.
Doomers, Preppers and Andy Burnham’s Twiglets
My favourite item of the week was Andy Burnham urging people to ‘Be Ready’ for worsening climate threats - the day after opening up Jackdaw, a gas field that will emit over 35 million tonnes of CO2e. Sometimes the absurdism of Late Britain can put a smile on your face. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Andy Burnham has said he has stockpiles of beans, soup and Twiglets in case of a civil emergency.
Bailing Water from a Sinking Ship
In an act of spectacular self-harm, the Labour Government has approved the Jackdaw gas-field in the North Sea. First approved in 2022, Jackdaw was ruled unlawful last year by the Scottish courts, along with the huge Rosebank oil field, for failing to take into account its full impact on the climate. Now, under huge pressure from fossil fuel lobbyists and with the surround-sound of the billionaire media, the far-right, the deluded and the denialists, Andy Burnham has capitulated.
The Erasure of Normal People
Home > Opinion > The Erasure of Normal People This week has seen some bizarre examples of cultural erasure, and, interestingly, they’re all women. In Cardiff, Hanan Issa, the National Poet of Wales, was barred from the Senedd Ceremonial Opening while King of England was being welcomed. She was, it seemed, too political. Poetry must be sanitised. ‘National Poets’ must be controlled and censored.
Dockside – renting ‘on a whole new level’
Tenants are fighting back against eye-watering exploitation by companies like Goodstone Living. But the massive rent increases (on top of already extortionate rents) expose a wider political failure. Yesterday, 13 October, Living Rent members and tenants displayed a huge banner across Dockside apartments in Leith, to demand the cancellation of rent increases up to 18.4% faced by Intermediate-market rent (IMR) residents there.
Hugh MacDiarmid and a Hundred Years of the Scottish Renaissance
“Hugh MacDiarmid belongs to a select few poets of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats and Pablo Neruda among them, of whom it may plausibly be argued that they influenced, or even shaped, a national idea.
Salem’s Lot and the Bananas Right
Michael Gove has split with his girlfriend Lola Salem, a lecturer at Oxford University and contributor to the Telegraph and The Spectator, who has been charged with possessing indecent images of children. She appeared at Oxford Combined Court on 30 September 2026 and is now on bail. Since the story broke, there has either been an injunction against reporting on it, or all of Gove’s journalist networks have rallied round to delete her content and support him. Or both.
Jack McConnell’s Battle of Ideas
This year’s Battle of Ideas contains the usual stellar lineup of far-right cranks, libertarians, (very) confused leftists, Spiked groupies and, er Jack McConnell. The Scottish contingent is completed by Neale Hanvey, Jenny Lindsay and Stuart Waiton. The Battle of Ideas is the most prominent remnant of the LM Network, a series of front-groups propping each other up (see ‘Debating Matters’, the ‘Leeds Salon’, ‘The Academy’ and on and on).
Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere
All across Europe, revolts and uprisings are underway. It’s a level of insurgency we’ve not seen since the Indignados, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement of 2011-2013. We should not let the closed quietism of British politics mask us from the reality of revolt in Europe. The stifling torpor of the UK – which is busy censoring Zac Polanski for stating the most obvious point about the nature of Zionism – or excusing the neo-fascism of the Blackshorts – enforces a sort of crippling complacency.
They’re Live Streaming Firing Squads
Let’s keep up. Christa Pike has just recovered enough for them to try and kill her again. The President has urged Iran to bomb Los Angeles and San Diego, and now Pete Hegseth has ordered the killing of Nidal Hasan by firing squad to be livestreamed. This is the USA degenerating to the moral standards of ISIS.
Imaginary Places
You know World Book Day where you have to come to school as a character from a book? I remember my third son being so internally certain that he just WAS Prince Caspian that he just turned up without a costume, assuming the outside world would just ‘see him’ for what he truly was. That sort of wild and deep imaginary space is the gift of childhood that we eventually lose.
Devolution Under Attack
The Tories have just abandoned their commitment to devolution and are now openly planning to dismantle Holyrood, as announced by Kemi Badenoch in Birmingham. It’s Back to the Future. The Conservative Party stopped actively opposing devolution for Scotland following the 1997 devolution referendum. Margaret Thatcher had dropped the earlier pro-devolution policy in 1976, and the party firmly opposed legislative devolution through the 1980s and 1990s, campaigning against the 1979 and 1997 referendums.
Hope, Again
“I will build the Britain my dad wanted to see.” It’s certainly an upgrade from: “My dad was a toolmaker.” Andy Burnham’s barnstorming speech at Labour Party conference certainly moved and captivated his audience and the reaction swept across social media.
AI Identity and Agentic Trust
If you asked your AI agent to kill your boss, what would its response tell you about your AI identity and access governance? Human Responsibility Before answering that it is worth considering the case where you asked a colleague to do the deed. In UK law a criminal liability for many criminal offences, depends upon a prohibited act (actus reus) together with the required state of mind (mens rea). In the conventional human case, criminal liability for many offences requires both.
The Garvaghy Road and the Celtic Alliance
Two weeks ago, the leaders of Scotland, Ireland and Wales met in Cardiff to sign an accord and announce a ‘Celtic Alliance’ [If You’re Feeling Sinister – Bella Caledonia]. Today, 200 police officers from Scotland have been deployed to Ireland to support the PSNI in connection with a contested parade in Drumcree, Portadown. It raises issues of substance about control and authority that go way beyond operational matters and tip into constitutional ones.
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That Fascist Feeling
Part of the tactics of the far-right is to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Some people refer to this as ‘Stochastic terrorism’ - an analytic description used in scholarship and counterterrorism to describe a mass-mediated process in which hostile public rhetoric, repeated and amplified across communication platforms, elevates the atmosphere of generalised fear. This is both the breeding ground of fascism and the medium for its messages.
On Scottish Generalism
Scotland suffers from institutional memory loss. One of the hidden aspects of the massive cuts to the University of Edinburgh announced last week is the attack on the eroded and hollowed-out Scottish Generalist Tradition. It’s a part of shifting baseline syndrome and the ongoing erasure of Scottish educational, philosophical and political traditions. It’s not new. In fact, we have been charting its decline for 50-plus years. But it is an acceleration.
Launching the Scottish Environmental Journalism Network
After more than a year exploring the complex relationship between rural Scottish communities, renewable energy and the need for a dramatic response to climate breakdown through The Power Shift: Investigating Scotland’s Green Energy Boom, The Scottish Beacon is launching a new environmental journalism network.
Slowly then All at Once
“This leaves Scotland. Here independence is an active issue. The population of 5.5 million puts the country in the 5-10 million band of Europe’s medium-sized states, such as Denmark, Norway, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. “Small is beautiful” appears to suit Europe’s distinctive welfare economies and keeps them ahead of their larger neighbours. Scottish unionists keep pointing to Scotland’s £25bn fiscal deficit, financed by London’s Treasury and sustaining the country’s struggling health service.
Is Edinburgh University a Scottish University at all?
The announcement of cuts at Edinburgh University supports the argument that some of our fundamental institutions are not our own. Here are some of the courses being axed: The cuts are not exclusively to Scottish Studies; they are right across the Humanities. Defenders of these cuts point out that some of these courses had very low numbers. But this is a self-fulfilling cycle.
Building a Sovereign European Cloud Ecosystem
In comparison to the four major US hyperscale cloud services there are dozens of EU regional cloud services. STACKIT is one of these and at its Cloud X Summit, STACKIT demonstrated how it is expanding from a European infrastructure cloud into a broader ecosystem encompassing enterprise applications, cybersecurity, data, AI, development tools, and cloud adoption services.
An Act of Monumental Cultural and Educational Vandalism
“There is a loss of any vestiges that the University of Edinburgh conceives of itself as primarily a Scottish institution.” – Alec Finlay. You could argue that this process began a long time ago, but this is certainly its end-point. More than 90 courses in the University of Edinburgh’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) will close to new admissions from next year.
Workload Identity & Cloud-Native Trust
Every cloud environment depends on machines trusting other machines. Virtual machines access storage. Containers communicate with databases. Serverless functions call APIs. CI/CD pipelines deploy applications, and microservices communicate with each other. Increasingly, AI models, inference workloads and autonomous agents are joining this web of machine-to-machine interaction. Every interaction requires answers to two fundamental questions: What is making the request, and should it be trusted?
Ten ideas to reset Scotland’s independence movement after Cardiff meeting
For a long time, the independence movement felt like a liminal space, a movement and a country in-between states, expectant and curious. But more recently that movement has become moribund, tied down by old grievances, bitter divisions and an obsession with process over substance. If the Cardiff meeting galvanised the forces of self-determination across these islands, it also revealed the extent to which they were in need of renewal.
Gym Etiquette, Ed Sheeran and the Zone of Interest
David Aaronovitch was invited onto BBC radio to discuss his Substack. As you are. He was initially there to explore an incident at his gym where “one women, probably in her 50s, was wearing a T-shirt expressing her opposition to “genocide” in Palestine.” He writes: “All we need to know for the moment is that for many Jews the genocide accusation has come to feel like hate speech directed at them.
The Post-Cardiff Unionist Meltdown
The monumental backlash against the leaders of the Celtic Nations gathering in Cardiff to sign a Memorandum of Understanding which asserted the right to self-determination continues to gather pace. Writing plaintively in The Spectator Stephen Daisley writes [Is it too late to save the United Kingdom?]: “The slow demise of the United Kingdom is suddenly gaining speed.” This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
A Historic Day in Cardiff
In a moment that was perhaps higher in symbolism than substance, the leaders of the Celtic Nations gathered in Cardiff and signed a Memorandum of Understanding which asserted the right to self-determination. The Scottish and Welsh governments also signed the Cardiff Agreement which commits the governments of Edinburgh and Cardiff to work together across a range of shared policy priorities, including but not limited to: tackling child poverty and improving outcomes for children and families.
If You’re Feeling Sinister
An Irishman a Welshman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar. Actually, it’s not a joke, and the Irishman’s an Irish woman. The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Scottish National party leader, John Swinney, and the Sinn Féin vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, are going to sign a declaration at a landmark conference in Cardiff tomorrow that will call on Westminster “to prepare, plan and facilitate constitutional change in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”.
Finding the Radiance In Between
Leftfield is our regular preview of Scottish Left, anti-capitalist and radical events, publications and projects. Contact us here for suggestions to publicise your events. ‘Finding The Radiance In Between: Reimagining Scotland’s Creative Spaces‘ is a new report published by Creative Balance, a research and advocacy project which explores the wellbeing of racialised people working in Scotland’s creative industries.
Burnham's Brigadoon
So it turns out that a Scottish democracy, or certainly steps towards it, will arrive not by way of a Constitutional Assembly, a popular process, or a specific trigger point, but just ‘a feeling’. A second referendum on Scottish independence will arrive, Brigadoon-like, out of the Scotch Mist.
Circling the Wagons
In the wake of Andy Burnham’s statement at PMQs there is now an almighty panic in Unionist quarters trying to desperately to explain away his comments as either a) a mispoken blunder b) misunderstood or c) somehow not worth noticing at all.
How to Leave a Voluntary Union
So Now IS the Time, apparently. Andy Burnham has laid out the conditions for a second Scottish independence referendum during Prime Minister’s Questions. Sort of.
Blackshirts Over the White Cliffs of Dover
Late Britain is descending into a very dark place. The descent, despite the arrival of Andy Burnham, the marked decline in migrant crossings, and the recent expose of the dark money behind Reform UK, is accelerating. It ow has its own momentum that is divoced from fact or rational discourse. In Dover, and a few days later in Portsmouth, large groups of masked men gathered to block roads and attempt to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers into Britain.
Rising Star: Rising Star NeonSecurity
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Democratising the Edinburgh Festival
I was going to say that as the festival ends the numbers of tourists subsides, but they don’t really. Overtourism in Edinburgh is relentless. Inevitably, there’s been some reflection on this year’s festival, with some grumblings that audiences were down towards the end of August. Amazingly, some pundits have suggested that the festival should be synced with the Scottish school holidays. This is an idea we’ve been banging on about for years.
The Go Radio Politics Show Scottish Labour Leadership Special
Joe Fagan and Michael Marra are the only candidates for the leadership of the Labour Party in Scotland. Here, faced with mild scrutiny by Bernard Ponsonby they can’t give a credible answer to the question How do you have the democratic right to have a vote on leaving a voluntary Union? This is an interview with a very sympathetic interviewer and it quickly turned into a car crash. See from 17.00. “It will become clear” Michael Marra.
A’ Ghàidhlig ann an Dùn Èideann Tro na Linntean / Gaelic in Edinburgh Through the Centuries
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” Remember Andrew Marr’s outburst against Gaelic a couple of years ago? He claimed that bi-lingual road signs were ‘ridiculous’ at a Labour Party event he was chairing.
Grow Like a Tree
We have lost one of our most important thinkers. I first came across Wendell Berry in Vermont in 1995. His collection of essays, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community has been a wellspring of wit and wisdom to draw from ever since. His writing seemed to anticipate (and resist) the horrors of today, and the clarity of his thinking was often mistaken for simplicity. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Banning the Barbecue
I was struck by a note from the climate scientist Bill Maguire, which pointed out that the British Government was: Spending on HS2 - a couple of hundred miles of railway between London and Birmingham - £100 BILLION + & Spending to tackle wildfires and extreme weather - 'almost a £100 million'. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Burnham as King Cnut not King of the North
It’s Friday and the British government are urging people to stock up on tinned food and take steps to ensure they are prepared for a national emergency. The move is in response to the dangers of a collapse in the food system from a combination of heatwave, drought, wildfires and climate change. The Prime Minister last week explained that he didn’t want to announce the go ahead for Jackdaw and Rosebank during the wildfires because of the ‘wildfires’. Sure.
Oidhche nam Bàrd, Naming the Snakes, the Workers Observatory Zine & more
This is from the A is for Architecture Podcast: “…for this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Maria Fusco, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee, about her publication, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, published by Vanguard Editions, which describes her study of the Palacio Pombal, Lisbon, which Maria produced for the Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2017.
Fish and Chips Economics
The British Government has issued a new piece of propaganda and it’s fair to say it’s going down badly. It has heavy Eat Your Cereal (2014) vibes about it. Cod we take a moment of your time to set out how public spending works in Scotland?
American Psycho
As America descends further into it’s own absurdist fascism, as grotesque as it is cruel, it apparently has no limit. There are no guardrails. As attacks on Greenland and Canada develop - and cruelty against humans is mirrored by horrors against wild animals, the descent is accelerating as we approach the mid-term election in November. This is not as chaotic and out of control as it looks. Much of it has a clear ideology behind it and most of it was in the (denied) Project 2025.
Flash Floods and the Optics of Climate Whiplash
The flash floods in Edinburgh quickly became a social media phenomenon of instant virality.
Building Sustainable Cities
As the fiasco of the Debenham’s fire in Princes Street affects tram services and has a knock-on effect across parts of the city, Transport Scotland announces: “We are working with Network Rail to carry out a high-level feasibility study for the potential use of tram-trains on the South Suburban line in Edinburgh. The study will identify practical challenges and opportunities, and inform and supplement the wider regional mass transit appraisal.
Soul Mining
“It used to be that the public knew where Labour’s hearts were and we had to win the argument that they could trust our heads. A big part of our challenge is now the opposite. We can make the sums add up but we must rediscover our soul.” Michael Marra As the Labour Party in Scotland sees its leadership contest grind to an anticlimactic conclusion, it’s worth reflecting on just how it continues to engage in such studied self-harm.
Object to the MachairWind Proposal Today
The proposed MachairWind development by Iberdrola is an industrial development on a scale never before seen in the Inner Hebrides. It threatens to desecrate and destroy some of Scotland’s most iconic cultural and ecological places. * MachairWind will affect Colonsay, Islay, Jura, Iona, Mull, Coll and Tiree, but really it will affect all of us. This is the industrialisation of the seas, the desecration of the Inner Hebrides. It’s an abomination. The plans have met mass opposition from islanders.
Celebrating Hugh MacDiarmid
Happy birthday to Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) – born #OnThisDay, 11 August, 1892. Here’s a small collection of films and essays about the great writer. This is a documentary made to commemorate the 80th birthday of Hugh MacDiarmid. The poet speaks about his life and work in conversation with his son Michael Grieve and fellow poet Norman MacCaig. HUGH MacDIARMID: No Fellow Travellers can be viewed via the National Library of Scotland but cannot be viewed elsewhere or embedded.
We Face COLLAPSE | Aaron Bastani Meets Kevin Anderson
Scottish Politics at the moment seems to consist of short-termist NE pundits serving Big Oil as plumes of smoke literally engulf the city of Aberdeen, ex-politicians obsessing about Nicola Sturgeon, or a handful of Scottish Labour politicians you’ve never heard of pleading their allegiance to other Scottish Labour politicians you’ve never heard of. It’s. Very. Depressing. To step outside this sort of desultory politics we’re featuring a range of podcasts each week.
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