Mask-off outbursts by Maga insiders and most strikingly, the destruction and reconstruction of the presidential seat, with a huge new $300m ballroom, means Trump isn’t planning to leave the White House when his term ends, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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Small-minded drugs policies are killing Scots
NEIL FINDLAY MSP is dismayed by the SNP attitude to the drugs crisis: like Portugal, Scotland needs to decriminalise drugs
BEN CHACKO speaks with Knesset member OFER CASSIF about rising political violence, the prospects for peace and his continuous ‘silencing by suspension’
The City is leaning on Rachel Reeves to cut welfare spending — when what’s needed is cuts to all the benefits given to the mega rich, corporations and banks to help them not pay or blatantly dodge their fair share of tax, explains BERNIE EVANS
The choice between two Blairites to revamp the tepid centrism of our ruling party doesn’t even come as cold comfort as we wander the city streets suffering from their third decade of austerity and the fifth of wage stagnation, writes MATT KERR
ANN HENDERSON looks at the trailblazers of the Women’s Trade Union League and their successful fight for female factory inspectors — a battle that echoes in today’s workplace campaigns
HENRY FOWLER puts the strike of public-sector workers in New Zealand in the wider context of deteriorating employment conditions throughout the world’s major economies
MAT COWARD looks back at a protest 105 years ago this month, whose reporting by the media bears uncomfortable similarities with demos today
ALBERT Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Nowhere is this more true than in the current drugs policy.
As a young man growing up in a mining community in the ’80s and ’90s, cannabis was the drug of choice at that time. Then heroin hit the cities and housing schemes before the rave scene popularised ecstasy.
A few years ago I chaired a session of the Scottish Parliament health committee. I took the opportunity to tell the then Cabinet Secretary Shona Robinson that the streets of Scotland were now awash with cheap cocaine (the new drug of choice for many) and that this was having a terrible impact on our young people, their families and communities.
What depressed me about our exchange was the lack of awareness of the extent of the problem and the complete lack or urgency in dealing with it — indeed the impression I got was that she and journalists reporting the committee’s business simply didn’t believe the point I was raising.
This feeling was exacerbated in subsequent parliamentary exchanges with the Public Health Minister Joe Fitzpatrick — all the more remarkable as his home city of Dundee, the place he represents, has the highest levels of addiction and drugs deaths in Britain and Europe.
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