Sean Bell

Edinburgh

Journalist, former @SourceScot editor. Bylines at @jacobin @telesurenglish @heraldscotland @ScotNational @SunScotNational He/Him

Featured in: Favicon

thenational.scot Favicon

eveningtimes.co.uk Favicon

bellacaledonia.org.uk Favicon

1africafocus.com Favicon

heraldscotland.com Favicon

iwradio.co.uk

Articles

Justice for Scotland’s tenants is impossible while pandering to landlords

2 weeks ago | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Sean Bell

“Murderer! Thief! How can you take the last penny out of a poor man’s pocket?”“I have to – I’m a landlord.”– The Producers (1967)THIS article will allow me to pay my rent. By now, I suspect my esteemed editor knows that when a fresh pitch of mine arrives in his inbox, it is motivated not just by the urge to elevate our Discourse with some elegant polemic, but also the need to once again plug a rather desperate hole in my finances.
To survive, the Edinburgh Fringe must build a fairer future

1 month ago | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Sean Bell

FOR better or worse, here is the story that always sticks with me about the Edinburgh Fringe. In the late Seventies, my father was sent to review a show – a ‘rock ‘n’ roll reinterpretation of Shakespeare’, if you please – at which he was one of the two people who comprised the entire audience. As the show began, a young man with an electric guitar took to the stage. “If music be the food of love…” he intoned, before thrashing out a thunderous riff.
The Rule You Followed Brought You To This - Bella Caledonia

Nov 8, 2024 | archive.is | Sean Bell

The Rule You Followed Brought You To This: Trump, Harris and the AftermathI’m Mr Bad Example, intruder in the dirtI like to have a good time and I don’t care who gets hurtI’m Mr Bad Example, take a look at meI’ll live to be a hundred and go down in history– Warren ZevonIN the days to come, remember this: they got exactly what they wanted. Not everyone, of course.
The Rule You Followed Brought You To This

Nov 7, 2024 | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Sean Bell

The Rule You Followed Brought You To This: Trump, Harris and the AftermathI’m Mr Bad Example, intruder in the dirtI like to have a good time and I don’t care who gets hurtI’m Mr Bad Example, take a look at meI’ll live to be a hundred and go down in history– Warren ZevonIN the days to come, remember this: they got exactly what they wanted. Not everyone, of course.
The SNP has not yet understood what opposing genocide requires

Sep 2, 2024 | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Sean Bell

“A person is courageous so long as he has no need for courage, but he collapses when the issue becomes real, and he is forced to understand courage as an act of ‘surrender’, a detachment from human involvement, and his content himself with being a spectator rather than a participant in life.” – Ghassan KanafaniANGUS Robertson is really, really sorry, you guys.
A Great Nothing: Election 2024

Jul 7, 2024 | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Sean Bell

“I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because everything circle has one… I am the centre of everything surrounded by a great nothing.” – Fernando Pesso, The Book of Disquiet IN 1997, a few weeks before Tony Blair’s New Labour won its historic victory, the American writer Gore Vidal found himself in his natural condition, i.e. demonstrating that in him, the United States maintained a strategic reserve of aristocratic disdain...
Swinney, Forbes and what comes next

May 9, 2024 | bellacaledonia.org.uk | Sean Bell

“You know, this is the same garbage from last week’s game. I’m starting to recognize things.”– The Odd Couple, Neil SimonIT was, shall we say, a study in contrasts. This is what normally happens when Scotland is posed against the outside world of which it is only nominally a part.
Review: Against Landlords

Apr 6, 2024 | heckle.scot | Sean Bell

In the interests of full disclosure, this review should begin with an admission: when it comes to landlords and the housing crisis over which they survey like Nero with his fiddle, my perspective is some leagues distant from ‘unbiased’. I write this in between checking my email to make sure I still have a home, or if my rent will be increased to levels usually only demanded by those in possession of a ski-mask and a getaway car.
Tom Nairn’s spirit endures but can his work continue?

Nov 27, 2023 | heckle.scot | Sean Bell

According to legend, the Partisan Review editor William Phillips, after enduring a Marxist tirade from the critic Kenneth Tynan, wearily replied that Tynan’s arguments were so old, he’d forgotten the answers to them. Tom Nairn’s enemies, by contrast, didn’t have that excuse — they never had any answers for his arguments. Instead, they had the edifice of the British state — crumbling, absurdly Ruritanian, Escher-like in its illogic, but sadly enduring, nevertheless.
'Break-up Of Britain?' event draws on ‘the best of Tom Nairn’s legacy’

Nov 19, 2023 | thenational.scot | Sean Bell

Tom Nairn's thinking shaped the event THE inaugural Break-up Of Britain? conference, a symposium celebrating the renowned Scottish political thinker Tom Nairn and named for his most famous work, was held in Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms yesterday, less than a year after his death in January of this year.