Sùil Eile air Ceòl 's Craic air a rèidio

'S E AN App is motha tha mi a' cleachdadh air a' fòn-làimhe 's e fear a' BhBC gus èisteachd ris an rèidio (sin nuair nach eil mi a' cleachdadh a' fòn airson craoladh air an rèidio).

Ach bho chionn ghoiridh tha mi air mo bheò-ghlacadh le làrach-lìn a chuir caraid thugam. Dealbh mòr den phlanaid agus bidh thu a' sguabadh thairis air le do chorrag.

Ge bith càite a bheil thu a' stad tha thu a' lorg stèisean rèidio ionadal an àite.

Tha mi air a bhith eadar Alasga agus Astràilia agus a h-uile àite air an t-slighe Tha "RadioGarden" coltach ri a bhith ag èisteachd ri Shortwave nuair a bha thu òg, an saoghal tighinn thugad fo na plaideachan.

Ach mar as àbhaist tha an combaist ga do stiùireadh dhachaigh.

Bho àm gu àm bidh mi a' lorg "Ceòl 's Craic" rèidio air Facebook, ceòl an t-saoghail tro mheadhan na Gàidhlig.

Le preasantair ùr, Alana NicAonghais, an t-eòlas ciùil aig an Dotair Raibeart agus an riochdaire, Laurie Cuffe, tha am prògram sgoinneal, ùr-nòsach agus farsaing an coimeas ri na tha ri fhaighinn air a BhBC.

Bha fiù's agallamh aice le seinneadair Killing Joke an t-seachdainn sa chaidh.

Tha iad airidh air luchd-èisteachd nas fharsainge.

Translation - The App I use most often on mobile phone is the BBC one for listening to the radio (when I'm not using the phone for broadcasting on the radio).

But recently I've been caught with a website a friend sent me. a big image of the planet that you sweep across with your finger. Wherever you stop you find the local radio station of the area. I've been from alaska to australia and everywhere in between .

"radiogarden" is like listening to shortwave when you were young, the world coming to you under the blankets. But as usual, the compass guides you home. From time to time, I find "Ceòl 's Craic" radio on Facebook, world music through the medium of gaelic.

With a new presenter, Alana MacInnes, the musical knowledge of Dr Robert and the producer, Laurie Cuffe, the programme is fantastic, innovative and wide-raingng compared to what is available on the BBC.

They even had an interview with the singer from Killing Joke last week. They deserve a wider audience .

By the minute, how a Corbyn-Sturgeon deal would work

From my Daily Record column

WANT to know what a Corbyn government would look like? The answer is not to be found by traipsing around the Palace of Westminster in the wake of Nicola Sturgeon, entertaining as the First Minister's day out to London was.

Making tentative arrangements with Labour to oppose Brexit was by far the most significant part of Sturgeon's visit.

But exercising power is a serious and more subtle business. A Labour administration which relies on some arrangement with the SNP is the least fantastic scenario available to a political imagination that puts the words "prime minister Corbyn" into a sentence.

What his government could really look like is to be found in a little clicked corner of the Cabinet Office website.

The department is the clearing house of government, the link between Downing Street and the world of Whitehall and beyond. In its online tomes lie the published minutes of all the private meetings between the Tory Government and the DUP on which, until recently at least, Theresa May relied in a confidence and supply arrangement for her Commons majority.

The records, to quote the Politico website, who first perused them, offer a "tantalising glimpse of the clout wielded by DUP leader Arlene Foster behind the scenes".

They detail the near-monthly meetings of the six-strong "coordination committee" of senior Tory and DUP MPs, set up last year to ensure the voting deal runs smoothly in Parliament.

It is chaired by May's de-facto deputy David Lidington, who sits alongside chief whip Julian Smith and Treasury minister Mel Stride on the Government side.

On the other side of the table are DUP leader at Westminster, Nigel Dodds, his chief whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson.

All boys together. Well, not quite.

The terms of reference state explicitly that neither Foster nor May should be members. "Neither party leader will sit on the committee but may attend from time to time on Privy Council terms."

That "but" is the unbolted stable door allowing Foster to attend every meeting bar one since the first gathering in July 2017.

Imagine, if you can, the credibility of a Scottish First Minister if Holyrood had not been sitting since January 2017 and MSPs were paid £8million salary in that time.

However, Foster, still under the shadow of the £500million "cash for ash" heating scandal during her stint as Stormont's enterprise minister, and the collapse of devolved government in Northern Ireland, has a regular audience with some of the most powerful figures in the UK Government.

According to the minutes of the meetings a succession of Brexit, defence and security ministers are dragged in every few weeks to give personal briefings to this DUP star chamber. It seems Foster is spending more time and exercising more power in Whitehall than she is in Belfast.

Given the way Whitehall works on precedent this is an entirely credible template for how a minority Labour government would be guided by the civil service to handle a confidence and supply arrangement with the SNP.

Sturgeon would be in Whitehall a lot more often, and not just appearing as a Westminster minx, sticking her head around the door of Tory Brexiteer meetings to give them a fright.

Sturgeon's visit to London had a twofold purpose - rappelling in to try to organise cross-party opposition to Brexit is important and burnishes her heavyweight image, of course.

But it also helps her twitchy MPs looking over their shoulder at the narrow gap back to Labour candidates in the 2017 snap election.

Why vote Labour in Scotland, they will argue on the doorstep, when we can have Nicola sorting them out?

Given the opposition operation is so disfunctional that Corbyn contrived this week to miss a Commons vote on child poverty, which he tabled himself, letting the Government win by just five votes, perhaps Labour could do with some help at Westminster.

Gove, a cabinet Hamlet snared by his Scottish past

From my Daily Record column today

A FELLOW journalist is researching a biography of Michael Gove, the Hamlet of the House ("to be or not to be") or parliament's Poundshop Macbeth ("stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires"), depending on your point of view.

I met the writer on a Commons staircase as Gove was at the despatch box in the chamber for the Fisheries Bill debate.

Rush to the reporters gallery, I urged him, where his opening chapter was being written in front of our eyes. There was Gove, the arch-Brexiteer, on the stump defending Theresa May's Brexit deal - which he does not believe in - to the hilt.

By doing so he invoked the memory of his family's experience of Britain joining the Common Fisheries Policy in the 70s, vowing there would be no "last-minute sell-out" of fishing interests this time.

Gove, the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish merchant, told MPs: "I was a boy then but the consequences had a profound impact on my family and on my father's business. There is no way I can ever forget what happened then."

There was laid bare the personal forces which left this brazen Brexiteer trapped in May's Cabinet as her political life hung by a thread.

This sensitive awareness of the totemic value of fishing, the consequences for Scottish Tories and May's "our precious union" left Gove hamstrung.

Instinctively, intellectually, he wanted to walk out.

But doing so would put him in the camp of recently resigned former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab in declaring the deal a threat to the Union, and walking into the SNP narrative.

Quitting as Environment Secretary would also condemn the Brexit fishing deal as a sell-out, a death sentence for Scottish Tory MPs.

So there is Michael Gove, a complex character, his destiny, his vision shaped and snared by his Scottish past.

Would you pass me that quill, Mr Shakespeare?