Blog - Chris Creegan

Making sense of Manchester

24/05/2017

When the news started filtering through from Manchester 24 hours ago I feared the worst. Like so many of us, I hoped first that there wouldn’t be fatalities. Then I hoped that the numbers wouldn’t keep rising. And all the while I hoped that it wouldn’t be terror.

The day the new dawn broke

04/05/2017

‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ I remember that dawn and the speech but I wasn’t there to hear it. I had left the Festival Hall shortly before Tony Blair arrived. As I said good morning to the night and headed away from the revelry I had another new horizon on my mind. […]

The party’s over

23/04/2017

‘It really is all over!’, was the message I received from one of my oldest friends when I switched on my phone after a day-long meeting on Friday. Fortunately, he wasn’t referring to our friendship. That’s withstood a fair bit over the years like any close friendship has to. Rather he was referring to the […]

Tim Farron: Keep calm and carry on

19/04/2017

Travelling back from Glasgow to Edinburgh yesterday evening I found myself cheek by jowl with a couple of guys having a drink. Quite a lot of a drink in fact. There was so much whisky involved that I felt quite intoxicated. It was a curious predicament towards the end of a curious day. And then […]

PrEP: a sweet pill to swallow

10/04/2017

It’s not often that I shed a tear at a public policy announcement. But today I did. I cried when I heard that Scotland had become the first of the UK nations to approve the provision of PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) by the NHS to prevent HIV. The announcement was made by the Scottish Medicines Consortium […]

A way to go: Jog Scotland’s new partnership

05/04/2017

‘From the Colorado mountains, To the California sun, I won’t stop until I get there, I will run, run, run.’ I’ve been running for a long time. And the lyrics to Michelle Lewis’ song Run, Run, Run, get right under my skin.

A letter to Lawrence

25/03/2017

I went to see you this week. On Thursday in fact. I hadn’t intended to when I woke up that morning but 12 hours later I was stood in front of our old front door in Stoke Newington. The house looked as sturdy as ever. They built them to last in the Victorian housing boom […]

Indyref 2: Can we learn to disagree well?

13/03/2017

‘Here we go, here we go, here we go’, is a refrain often heard on football terraces. But for many of us who lived through the tumultuous years of the 1984-5 miner’s strike it will be remembered as the chant on picket lines. It was a time of deep division and the scars are still […]