Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Scottish Government’s Case for a Second Independence Referendum

On 19 December 2019 – a week after the Westminster General Election at which the SNP, again, won an overwhelming majority of Scottish seats – the Scottish Government published its long-awaited case for a second independence referendum: Scotland’s Right to Choose: Putting Scotland’s Future in Scotland’s Hands. 

The document does three main things, aimed at four distinct audiences. First, the bulk of the discussion is devoted to setting out the democratic case for holding a second referendum by the end of 2020. This is based on three claims: that the people of Scotland, as members of a multi-national Union based on consent, have the sovereign right to determine their own constitutional future; that there has been a material change in circumstances since the 2014 referendum; and that the Scottish Government has a mandate to hold a referendum. The material change…

Alex Salmond has been a controversial figure (to say the least) in Scottish politics for quite some time. Recently, he sparked further controversy when he introduced his newly founded Alba Party alongside a strategy to secure a supermajority for Scottish independence in the upcoming 2021 Scottish Parliament election. While it is not clear what exactly makes a supermajority in Salmond’s understanding, how he aims to achieve it is.

The Scottish election system is different from that of Westminster. Instead of a pure first past the post system(FPTP) Scotland uses the Additional Member System(AMS). Scots elect a Member of the Scottish Parliament(MSP) in their constituency just as they do for Westminster elections, but additionally they vote within their electoral region to send seven further MSPs to Holyrood. While the MSPs in constituencies are chosen according to FPTP, MSPs within the region are not. This is what Alex Salmond and his AlbaParty…

(Born around 1532- Died April 6, 1590)
Son of William Walsingham and Joyce Denny.
Married to Anne Barne and Ursula St. Barbe.
Father of Frances Devereux, Countess of Essex and Mary Walsingham.
Sir Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth I’s “Spy Master” and was one of her primary secretaries. It was Walsingham and his men who discovered the Babington Plot and were able to stop it and protect Elizabeth.

Sir Francis Walsingham was born around 1532 to William Walsingham and his wife Joyce, probably at Foots Cray, near Chislehurst, Kent. His father was a very wealthy lawyer who died in 1534 when Francis was around two years old. After William’s death, Joyce married the courtier Sir John Carey in 1538; Carey’s brother William was the husband of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s elder sister. In 1548 Walsingham enrolled at King’s College, the most Protestant and reformist college of the University of Cambridge, and…

When we think about spies, we often think of modern examples like the ones we see in movies. However, spies and their spymasters have been working hard to protect their countries and their rulers for centuries. For Queen Elizabeth I, the only man she could trust to be her spymaster was Sir Francis Walsingham. But is it fair to call Walsingham as only Elizabeth’s “spymaster”? That is the question that John Cooper tries to answer in his book “The Queen’s Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England”. Who was Sir Francis Walsingham and what did he do to help his queen and his country?

First and foremost, Walsingham was a Protestant. This is very important to understand because, in this time, your religion determined where you stood on certain political and international issues. Walsingham would flee to universities in other countries while Mary I was…

Have you ever read a history book and wondered what life was really like for those who lived in the past? To understand a time period and the motives of the people of the past, we have to understand the structure of their society. How they understood things like class, sex, violence, government, and religion is essential for us to understand what separates us from our ancestors. What they ate, what they wore, and where they slept also give a unique insight into the time period. It can be a difficult undertaking to figure out all of the different aspects of the past connect and to present it cohesively, yet acclaimed historian Ian Mortimer has embraced this challenge head-on to tackle one of the most complex periods of the past; the Elizabethan era. His love letter to the Elizabethan age entitled, “The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England” is a…

SOME might argue that the latest global temperature, as measured by x15 NASA/NOAA AMSU (advanced microwave sounding unit) satellites, measuring literally every square inch of the lower troposphere (the exact place where ‘man-made global warming’ is supposed to occur) might be an anomaly caused by the de-industrialisation experiment carried out during draconian COVID-19 lockdowns.

Not so, according to the UN’s own meteorological agency, the WMO.

They concluded that despite the draconian COVID-19 lockdowns that initiated the greatest de-industrialisation science experiment ever carried out in human history, CO₂ levels failed to drop…

Ergo, if CO₂ concentrations didn’t budge, at all, during the most comprehensive global science…