Welcome

We in the UK are in dire straits, so I’m joining the public debate about the future of our country – the four nations of the UK.

Once a community worker in impoverished areas of Scotland while lecturing in history at Edinburgh University, then a broadcaster with Scottish Television, BBC and C4, I have just rounded off an academic career as Walt Disney Professor of Media and Communication at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. I reckoned I could never better teaching at the world’s most elite college of international relations, so it was time to stop teaching and enter the fray about the future of my own country.

My main focus now is on getting the message across that the UK has to fess up to its political leaders’ failures of the last 20 years and rejuvenate, re-develop and re-boot. My particular angle is that we’ll do well to see our country in the perspective of Asians who have rebuilt theirs during the decades that we, on many measures, have been declining.

Scotland, above all, needs a new song since the moral collapse of the SNP and the disintegration of the socialist vision of Keir Hardie’s Labour Party. And, thinking about Keir Hardie, I love the man so much that I dedicated my latest book to him:

WHO ARE WE, AND HOW WILL WE SURVIVE IN THE AGE OF ASIA?

This book, inadequate though it is, is in some ways the culmination of both my longstanding study of East Asia (about which I have published several books) and the social activism imbibed from my patriotic parents – a Scots Irish amalgam. I’ve  transformed my thinking during decades engaging with other countries and cultures, running an FE college for school dropouts, an international business and an independent school, but have never wavered from the belief that it matters for all humanity – not just the British – that this country prospers. Read the book to find out why.