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Author: Duncan Maclaren

  • INTERNATIONAL

    'Rule Britannia' rhetoric can't redeem baleful Brexit

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 07 October 2016
    33 Comments

    The new situation was rammed home to me in a recent trip to a conference in Salamanca, where there is a Scottish seminary, and Madrid, where I have Spanish friends. Everyone I met was shocked at the news and it was as if there had been a death in the family. On the flight back to Edinburgh, it became clear to me that the Brexiteers were about to take my European nationality away from me and replace it with a Little Englander mentality that sees foreigners through a prism of otherness

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scots' UK election command good for democracy and compassion

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 07 May 2015
    4 Comments

    It has certainly been an extraordinary election where, for once, Scotland has played a central role, especially in the realm of new ideas. It will be good for democracy in the UK if the predicted SNP landslide occurs, to put progressive policies ahead of party advantage and ensure the neo-liberals in Cameron's team are stopped from unleashing the same chaos as Mr Abbott in Australia, and compassion, care for the most vulnerable and services such as the NHS remaining in public hands return to centre stage again.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scotland's brave quest for self-determination

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 16 September 2014
    31 Comments

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s remarks on the Scottish independence debate were front page news in Great Britain. If Mr Abbott had actually visited Scotland rather than follow the advice of the British PM, he would have seen that the whole debate had centred on the kind of society we wanted – one where social justice is paramount, our National Health Service is not privatised and rights are built into a written constitution.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Best of 2013: Margaret Thatcher versus the Scots

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 10 January 2014

    While any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind', I must admit to pouring a glass of good malt at the news of Thatcher's passing. The Southern English may laud her as the greatest prime minister after Churchill but for us Scots she was a hate figure who in the last days of her premiership scarcely dared to cross the border for fear of being assassinated.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 18 December 2013
    17 Comments

    After six years in Australia, I am returning home to Scotland to work for the next year's referendum, which will ask if Scotland should become an independent country. It is essentially a contest between the present insular, Little Englander nightmare and a place in the world as a sovereign state. That's worth leaving Australia for!

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Taking the Mickey out of North Korea

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 16 April 2013
    9 Comments

    We seem to think it is okay to publish pictures of Kim Jong-un with Mickey Mouse ears or refer to his late father Kim Jong-il as a 'pygmy'. Insulting a proud people, no matter how weird we think the regime is, does not win friends. The west would do well to remember this if it is to engage the regime in meaningful dialogue.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Margaret Thatcher versus the Scots

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 10 April 2013
    72 Comments

    While any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind', I must admit to pouring a glass of good malt at the news of Thatcher's passing. The Southern English may laud her as the greatest prime minister after Churchill but for us Scots she was a hate figure who in the last days of her premiership scarcely dared to cross the border for fear of being assassinated.

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  • RELIGION

    Cardinal's legacy transcends gay scandal

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 12 March 2013
    25 Comments

    Many Scottish Catholics are concerned Cardinal O'Brien's legacy will be solely one of drunken fumbles with adult men. We need to remember the other O'Brien: his passion for the poor, his courage in having workshops in Catholic schools on HIV/AIDS, his support for married clergy. The lynching must stop, and compassion begin.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Spend mentality' won't help the new Burma

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 20 February 2013
    5 Comments

    'Development is the new name for peace,' said Pope Paul VI in 1967. Well, not in Burma, where wars and religious disputes have caused the death or displacement of 190,000 people. Such horror stories don't concern the Western and Chinese business people who sweep in, salivating, to 'develop' Burma.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Unclenching the despotic fist in Burma

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 27 November 2012
    3 Comments

    To say, as Aung San Suu Kyi did, that both the Muslim Rohingya and the Buddhist Arakanese had breached human rights laws in the current conflict is akin to saying that whites as well as blacks violated human rights in apartheid South Africa. The Australian Government, in its treatment of asylum seekers, has lost the moral legitimacy to speak up for oppressed groups such as the Rohingya.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The best and worst of international aid

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 17 April 2012
    4 Comments

    Rumour has it the Government's projected aid budget increases will be cut to ensure a surplus. Some aid doesn't work: I was horrified as a young aid worker in the '80s being told that an open sewer in an Addis Ababa slum was a World Bank project. But aid does work if it is underpinned by a few key principles.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Targeting aid workers

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 03 April 2012

    Australian aid worker David Savage was severely injured by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. The Taliban tried to kill him in revenge for the shooting of 17 unarmed Afghan civilians by a deranged American soldier. In more innocent times aid workers were regarded as angels by all sides.

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