Conter: Glasgow's Anti-Capitalist Journal of Scottish Socialist Thought
Conter is a Scottish socialist online publication based in Glasgow, published at conter.scot, covering politics, economics and culture from an explicitly anti-capitalist standpoint. Edited by journalist David Jamieson, it describes its project as a journal of anti-capitalist thought, combining a website of news analysis and long-form essays with a podcast, Contercast, and a print edition launched in Glasgow in December 2019. Conter occupies a distinctive place in Scotland's media landscape: neither a party newspaper nor a mainstream comment site, but an independent left platform built to argue — about Scottish independence, class politics, war, the economy and the failures, as it sees them, of Scotland's political and media establishment.
Why Conter? The Founding Argument
Conter's editor set out the case for the publication in a founding essay titled Why Conter? Why now?, published as the project launched its first print edition on Friday 6 December at the Flying Duck in Glasgow. The timing was deliberate: the launch came in the middle of the intense 2019 general election period, when the old certainties of British politics established since the late 1970s appeared to be coming apart. Jamieson's argument was that moments of major political change should encourage, rather than halt, debate and intellectual life on the left — that a premium on immediate action was no reason to stop thinking. He warned that the crisis of the social order would persist and probably deepen whatever the election outcome, and that even the most favourable result for the left would come under instant pressure from the state, parliament and international forces. A journal, in this account, was not a luxury beside the real business of politics; it was part of how a movement understands the terrain it is fighting on.
David Jamieson and the Editorial Voice
David Jamieson, a journalist, writer and socialist activist based in Glasgow, is Conter's editor and its most recognisable voice. Outside profiles consistently introduce him by that role — Brave New Europe, which regularly cross-posts Conter material, bills him as editor of Conter, a Scottish anti-capitalist website, and as host of Contercast. His weekly column anchors the site, ranging from the strategy of the independence movement to foreign policy and media criticism. His writing style is polemical and essayistic: long, argued pieces that quote opponents at length before answering them. A widely shared example dissected the Scottish commentariat's reaction to the resignation and later arrest of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, arguing that leading columnists had judged her character rather than her record. Another examined what he called the moral collapse of Scotland's leading opinion writers over Gaza, accusing established voices of equivocation in the face of the killing of Palestinian journalists. Supporters and critics alike treat the column as a set-piece of the Scottish left's weekly argument.
Politics: The National Question
No topic defines Conter more than the national question — how socialists should approach Scottish independence. The site's position, argued repeatedly by its editor, is that pro-independence socialists must keep reassessing their case rather than repeating the scripts of 2014. When a Panelbase poll put support for independence at 55 per cent, the level of the Yes vote that never was, Jamieson used his column to argue that the assumptions of the referendum campaign were no longer adequate, that the national question had assumed new weight in global politics amid shocks to the globalised order, and that the right — through Brexit, Trump and governments in Turkey and Italy — was answering it more successfully than the socialist left, while the neoliberal centre simply ignored it. Conter's treatment draws on the classical Marxist criticism of social democracy — the artificial separation of economics and politics — and applies it to Scotland: independence, in this framing, is a question of working-class political power, not only of flags, borders or currency.
History as Armoury: John Maclean
Conter regularly mines Scotland's radical history for present use. A representative essay by contributor Sophie Johnson argued that the anti-war class politics of John Maclean, the Glasgow schoolteacher and socialist who opposed the First World War, is needed again with war raging in Europe. The piece retold Maclean's 1914 stand in the British Socialist Party press — his insistence that the first business of British socialists was opposition to their own ruling class, echoing Karl Liebknecht's formulation that the main enemy is at home — and his part in the international movement that held that line as the Second International collapsed. Publishing history of this kind is a deliberate editorial choice: Conter treats figures such as Maclean not as heritage decoration but as a usable tradition for current arguments about war, militarism and the Scottish state.
Economics, Europe and the Wider World
Although Scotland is its home ground, Conter's brief runs to political economy and international affairs. Its output has covered the gig economy through the eyes of couriers' organisers in Britain and Denmark, the European Union's politics and the Catalan independence dispute, the fall of Kabul and the end of humanitarian intervention as a doctrine, and the economics of Thatcherism's long afterlife in British public life. Cross-posting on Brave New Europe has carried Conter essays to a continental audience under headings from austerity and corruption to geopolitics and fake news. The unifying thread is a materialist reading: institutions such as the EU are assessed not by their self-image but by whose interests they serve, and internationalism, in Conter's phrase-making, must be built from below between workers rather than from above between governments.
Contercast and the Podcast Operation
Alongside the written journal, Conter produces Contercast, its podcast, hosted by Jamieson and — in its earlier and best-known pairing — co-hosted with writer Cat Boyd. The podcast has travelled beyond Scotland's left media niche: an appearance by Jamieson and Boyd on the Bungacast podcast in March 2021, ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections, discussed the socialist case for independence, the contradictions of an independent Scotland in the EU, and the factional strife among Scottish nationalists. More recently Conter has used subscription platforms to distribute its audio, telling readers that it publishes new and exclusive podcasts every week, with a monthly roundup for free subscribers sampling editions on topics such as the fragmentation of Scottish politics ahead of Holyrood 2026, the Labour Party's internal conflicts, civil liberties litigation over Palestine Action, and the war in Iran. Paid subscriptions, readers are told, fund the site's ability to maintain and expand that output.
Print Ambitions
Conter began online, but print was part of its founding gesture: the first print edition was launched at an event at the Flying Duck, a Glasgow bar and arts venue long associated with the city's independent cultural scene, in December 2019. Choosing a physical launch for a journal of anti-capitalist thought, in election season, underlined the project's belief in the journal as an object of collective discussion — something to be argued over in rooms, not only scrolled past. That older form sits comfortably in Glasgow's long radical publishing tradition, a city whose history of independent socialist papers, bulletins and freesheets stretching back through the 20th century is a matter of record on the Scottish left.
Glasgow: The City Behind Conter
Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, is the natural home for a publication of Conter's kind. It was the city of Red Clydeside, of Maclean and the rent strikes, and it remains the centre of Scotland's trade union, publishing and cultural life, as well as its sharpest inequalities. Conter's Glasgow base places it inside the debates it covers: Holyrood politics reported at close quarters, a Scottish media establishment concentrated in the central belt to argue with, and a working-class readership whose support for independence the site treats as the decisive political fact of modern Scotland. Its self-description as a Scottish publication, rather than a British one with a Scottish edition, reflects an editorial centre of gravity that is Glasgow first and London a long way second.
How Conter Sustains Itself
Like most independent left media, Conter is reader-funded in character: its podcast operation explicitly invites supporters to upgrade to paid subscriptions to sustain and grow output, while keeping free roundups in circulation so its analysis reaches non-subscribers. That model shapes the product — depth and argument over volume, a small number of substantial pieces rather than a churn of agency copy. The site carries no pretence of neutrality and does not chase the advertising logic of mainstream digital news; its economy is one of committed readers, syndication to sympathetic platforms such as Brave New Europe, and the unpaid or underpaid labour typical of movement publishing.
Conter in Scotland's Media Landscape
Scotland's left media ecology includes party papers, radical magazines and a crowded field of independence-supporting websites. Conter's niche within it is the long argument: theoretically literate, historically grounded and willing to criticise the independence movement's own leadership as sharply as it criticises unionism or Labour. For WorldNM's directory it is listed as a Scottish socialist online publication based in Glasgow, covering politics, economics and culture. Whether a reader agrees with its anti-capitalist line or not, Conter has established itself as one of the reference points of the Scottish left's internal debate — a journal founded on the proposition that in a crisis, thinking is a form of action.
