SNP Larkhall

08/09/2026

Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at:  Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 In the Hera…

08/09/2026

Michael Shanks was appointed Minister of State in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on 21 July 2026. Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at:  Or by&nbs…

08/09/2026

Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at:  Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 By Liz S BB…

08/09/2026

Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at:  Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 The Daily R…

08/09/2026

Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at:  Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 In the Guar…

07/09/2026

In July 1887 a cottage in a small village in the Mearns became the first building anywhere on earth lit by electricity made from the wind.

James Blyth was professor of natural philosophy at Anderson's College in Glasgow, and he spent his holidays at Marykirk in Kincardineshire. In the garden there he put up a thirty three foot windmill with four cloth sails on a tripod of tarred timber, wired down to a bank of accumulators. In a moderate breeze it charged enough to light ten twenty five volt bulbs, with power left over to drive a small lathe.

He offered the surplus to the village, free, to light the main street. Marykirk turned him down. The account that has come down to us is that they considered electricity to be the work of the devil.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh gave him a gold medal in 1892. He licensed an improved machine to a Glasgow firm in 1895 and it supplied emergency power to the asylum at Montrose. Then the whole idea went quiet for sixty four years, until the first public utility wind turbine in Britain went up at Costa Head in Orkney in 1951. Scotland now runs on the thing Marykirk said no to. What is the best offer you have ever seen somebody refuse?

07/09/2026

I’ve written to the new Chair of Court at the University of Dundee ahead of tomorrow’s Court meeting to raise serious concerns about the proposed redundancies and the impact they are having on staff and students.

The University is now proposing more than 1,000 redundancies in under two years. Yet it appears to be just 38 FTE short of the staffing target previously agreed by Court and set out in its Strategy to Recovery.

That cannot be ignored.

I’ve also raised concerns about the lack of meaningful engagement with staff and campus unions, and the support being offered to those facing redundancy.

Many staff have contacted me in recent months, expressing their desperation and anxiety about what lies ahead.

I want to see the University recover and thrive. But that recovery cannot come at the expense of the people who make the University what it is — or the future of our city.

I’ve asked for an urgent meeting with the Chair of Court and will continue to press for a plan that protects staff, supports students and puts the University on a sustainable path forward.

07/09/2026

Two hundred and seventy years ago a young Scot in Edinburgh did something nobody had managed before. He weighed a gas. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Joseph Black was born in 1728 to a Scottish merchant family settled at Bordeaux, and he was sent home to be educated, first at Glasgow and then at Edinburgh. In 1754 he presented a medical thesis there on a white powder called magnesia alba, and buried inside that quiet piece of student work was one of the great discoveries of the age. Heating the powder made it lighter. Something was escaping. Black caught it, measured it, proved it would smother a candle, and named it fixed air. We call it carbon dioxide. He had shown that air is not one single thing but a family of different gases, each with its own weight and its own character.

Seven years later at Glasgow he did it again. Ice sitting in a warm room takes a long time to melt, and while it melts it stays stubbornly at the same temperature. Black worked out why. Heat was pouring into it and going somewhere invisible, hiding inside the change from solid to liquid. He called it latent heat, the heat that lies concealed. A young instrument maker at the same university named James Watt was listening carefully, and what he did next with a steam engine rearranged the world. Black went on to hold the chair of chemistry at Edinburgh for more than thirty years and died there in 1799, one of the quiet giants of the Scottish Enlightenment. 🪻

A merchant's son from a Scottish family abroad, sent home to learn, who ended up teaching the world how to measure the things it could not see. The blood remembers.

Every country has its famous inventors. Which Scot do you think has been most unfairly forgotten?

07/09/2026