Redgauntlet

Redgauntlet is back for 2025. Last month, the First Minister invited the leaders of Scotland’s major political parties, churches and trade unions to a summit which aims to lock Reform UK out of Holyrood after the 2026 Elections.  Earlier that week, one Norstat poll had suggested that Nigel Farage’s party could win as many as 15 seats in the Scottish Parliament next year. The same poll found that R...

The final episode of the inaugural season of Redgauntlet, ‘Scotland and the World’, investigates Scotland’s place in the axis of Atlanticism over the last 25 years and asks how Scotland’s left can support those on the frontlines of anti-imperialist struggle. Has the first quarter-century of the Scottish Parliament strengthened ‘fortress Scotland’ or has it created avenues to advance a worldview in...

The Scottish independence referendum was the climax of a phase in politics when many people on the left - on either side of the debate - had a good sense of what was to be done. They didn’t always agree, but it often felt like the energy would endure regardless. The decade that followed was shaped by the sense that the winners had lost and the losers had won. The SNP skyrocketed. Labour collapsed....

In 2004, Edwin Morgan wrote that Scots wanted their new parliament at the foot of Edinbrugh's Royal Mile "to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture." What Scots did not want of their parliament, however, was a "nest of fearties." Ultimately, continued Morgan, "the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want." Today,...

The second episode of Redgauntlet examines the role of writers, storytellers and artists in shaping our politics. In the 1980s and 1990s – so the story goes – writers, artists and intellectuals prodded Scotland towards constitutional change, giving voice to a working class that was muted by the Union. Amidst the doldrums of devolution, sometimes it feels as if those times are past.
 To explore wha...

Redgauntlet is the Scottish politics show from Skotia and Scottish Left Review. Our first episode explores Scotland's constitutional bind. John Swinney insists independence will be line one of the SNP’s general election manifesto, but he knows his party has exhausted the constitutional routes to a second referendum. Scottish Labour looks set for gains across the central belt in July, while Kei...