When Tom Nairn declared that “Scotland will never be free until the last minister is strangled with the last copy of The Sunday Post,” he captured something many Scots of my generation instinctively felt: that the Church of Scotland represented a dour, repressive past from which the country needed to escape.

Twenty-one years ago, when as a recovering Catholic I first stumbled into Humanism, I largely agreed. I imagined a country that had shed its Calvinist carapace and emerged into the light of a confident secular European dawn, but things didn’t turn out quite as expected. As Woody Allen said, “if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans”.

I don’t need to tell you that the Church of Scotland was painfully slow to adapt to social change: slow to welcome gay people fully into the life of the church; slower still to permit same-sex marriage. Yes: the Kirk failed to move with the times, so the times moved on without it.

Ross Greer, Malcolm Offord and the growing revolt against mainstream politics

From Dundee, a demand for decent jobs, strong services and real democracy

Edinburgh’s success was hard won – and can’t be taken for granted,........

© Herald Scotland