The Arnold Kemp Archives

Why I believe in Britain – on the eve of Scotland’s independence vote in 2014

From Prospect magazine website, September 11, 2014. One of Scotland’s best-known plays is Peter Pan. At the dramatic moment when the fairy Tinkerbell, traditionally played by a spotlight which flickers and then seems to go out, is close to death. Peter Pan turns to the audience and says she can only be saved if the audience demonstrates that they do believe in fairies by clapping their hands, which generally results in thunderous applause from adults and children alike.

Israeli Performers and the Edinburgh festival: A Personal View

Also published in the Scottish Review on 27 August 2014

Jerusalem’s Incubator Theatre company

This year’s theme for the Edinburgh International Festival – ‘War’ – was more apposite than planned, disturbed as the city was this summer by the rumble of distant guns.

The Fringe, which took shape along with the festival in the years after the second world war, is an open access event, with every church hall and pub backroom being turned into a venue, along with temporary pop-ups, from the glamorous ‘Famous Spiegeltent’ to a tiny two-man housing the Thermos Museum. This year someone even put on a one-woman show in a Fiat, luckily a stationary one.

A defence of the Red Road flats demolition plan

Destroying the unwanted flats and using them as a metaphor for change is not a bad message to take from Glasgow’s Games, writes Jackie Kemp From the Scotsman April 8 (this plan was later abandoned). THE Red Road flats are coming down – should it be with a bang or a whimper?

How to heat ourselves and not the spaces we occupy

From the Scotsman, Dec 13, 2013. Attacking those who dare to suggest alternative ways of affording to heat homes limits the discourse, writes Jackie Kemp. A FAMOUS Punch cartoon shows a stately lady showing a guest to her room. “It’s a little chilly,” she is saying kindly. “So I’ve put another dog on your bed.”

Rome listens to flock at last

Quizzing parishioners on faith and daily life could be a turning point for the Catholic Church, writes Jackie Kemp. Published in the Scotsman November 5 2013. It is a document that may have momentous implications for the future of a venerable institution which is recognised throughout the world. Tens of thousands of Scots are poring over it, considering their own responses and how to articulate them. No, it is not the white paper on Scottish independence. It is the Catholic Church’s questionnaire on social attitudes to the family, which for the first time asks for the faithful’s thoughts on the thorny issues of gay marriage, divorce and contraception. Across the country, it is sparking discussions of difficult subjects which for many years have been no-go areas. It as if a door which had been locked tight for many years had suddenly creaked open.

You understand it? Remembrance

 

Published in the Scotsman Nov 9, 2013

 

Jackie Kemp: Honouring social remembrance

There is an argument that Scotland never really recovered from the First World War. Picture: Getty

There is an argument that Scotland never really recovered from the First World War. Picture: Getty

 

 

Recalling the devolution vote of 1979.

The current winner-takes-all referendum campaign for Scottish independence is reminiscent of the febrile politics of the late 1970s, when a minority Labour government called Scotland ’s first constitutional referendum on…

Should hospital food be free?

Spending money we don’t have on food for patients who don’t enjoy it makes no sense. There is a better way, argues Jackie Kemp. Published in the Scotsman op-ed section on August 29, 2013.

Guantananmo: bloody stain on US values.

From The Scotsman, Published on 21/05/2013 00:00

Obama’s broken promises may prove a turning point in support for US, says Jackie Kemp

EITHER the office of the president of the United States is a powerless cipher, or Barack Obama is a charlatan and a coward. I have often spoken up for America, arguing that its leadership offers the world a better future than the alternatives, so it saddens me to write these words. But no other conclusion can be reached, given the current situation at Guantanamo.

Is access to online porn harming our children?

A version was published in The Scotsman Wednesday 31 October 2012. This sentence did not appear in the Scotsman article

“Relate this week said that large numbers of young people are ascribing problems with intimacy and relationships to their early introduction to the porn industry. Covering  this, Radio One newsbeat featured a young woman discussing how her university boyfriend insisted on having rough anal sex with her while watching porn on a handheld device. She said she thought she was “weird” for not enjoying it.”

I was saddened but not surprised by a Plymouth University survey published earlier on this week showing that it has become “common practice” for children to view pornography from age 11. The academics involved called for sex education in schools to include pornography.

England’s self-obsession unwittingly revealed

Jackie Kemp’s opinion piece on National Theatre show “this House” from “The Scotsman”, published Friday 12 October 2012 

 A CRUCIAL period for Scotland has been virtually erased from history in a play about Labour’s bid to stay in power in the 70s, writes Jackie Kemp

A Tribute to Arnold Kemp

From The Herald, April 15, 2013.

ARNOLD Kemp, a former editor of The Herald, was toasted as “one of Scotland’s finest ever journalists” during an event to celebrate his life at the Aye Write! Festival in Glasgow.

TRIBUTE: Robin McKie, Jackie Kemp, Julie Davidson and Magnus Llewellin celebrate Arnold Kemp at the Aye Write! festival. Picture: Gordon Terris arnold kemp: Editor of The Herald between 1981 and 1994.
 
Robin McKie, The Observer’s science correspondent, made the tribute during a wide-ranging, amusing and at times surprising debate that was prompted by his life and work.

Mr Kemp, who died suddenly in 2002 aged 63, would have loved the conversation.

Reading newspapers is vital.

Friday comment column from the website allmediascotland 14/9/2012

READING a quality Scottish daily newspaper remains indispensable for anyone who wants to be well-informed about Scottish affairs.

A country minister’s war-time sermons

The presbyterian minster of the last century has often been caricatured but a box of Arnold Low Kemp’s hand-written sermons which survive in the National Library of Scotland reveal a kindly man attempting to give comfort to his parishioners in troubled times. For some of this period, his own younger son Arnold Kemp was missing though he did survive. (Read the story of this escape here)

 

On April 15 1934, Arnold Low Kemp gave a sermon in his parish at Longhope on Hoy in the Orkney Islands in which he condemned the treatment of Jews in Germany from the pulpit, asking people to take an interest in matters that may have seemed far away: ”There are people who cannot see beyond themselves, or their kin, or their own country… we share in the amazement at so-called Chrstian Germany ‘s treatment of Jews.”

Just days before Germany invaded Poland, on August 20 1939, Arnold, who was by now the minister at Birse in Aberdeenshire gave a sermon on the text:

 

Crossoword tribute Herald

I APPRECIATED the tribute to the late Arnold Kemp by John McKie (alias Myops) incorporated into the Wee Stinker crossword on September 23. It was, as usual, very clever yet…

Richard Nixon

IT is one of the odd characteristics of our political life that the little things may be more dangerous than the large.  Chancellor Norman Lamont may with impunity squander billions on the fruitless defence of sterling. This matters little in the public mind beside his inability to keep his Access bill inside its credit limit.

Perhaps there is some validity in this way of assessing the real person. A character in a Jane Austen novel — one of her succession of charming men who turn out to be scoundrels — was found to be of light and careless disposition because he went to London to get his haircut.

And in London this week another victim of the treacherous turns of political life was making a triumphant return. They used to call him Tricky Dick but, thin as a cheroot, he received a standing ovation from a highly discriminating audience after a speech to a private dinner. Delivered with passion and fluency, without notes of any kind, it could only be described as a tour de force.

My deep shame at this bigoted protest

Comment piece from the Observer September 2 2012

Batsheva, the Israeli contemporary dance group, should have been one of the hits of this year’s Edinburgh international festival. They got five-star reviews for their witty, sexy and creative show.

Robert Kemp on the Edinburgh Festival

“Twice before in my life I have seen Europe go dark and watched the doves of peace having their necks wrung. …”

Playwright and journalist Robert Kemp wrote this celebration of Edinburgh Festival for the Scottish Field in 1967 in the build up the Arab Israeli war. It was one of the last things he wrote as he died later that year.

Festivals are not like people. They never “grow up”. So perhaps it would be a mistake to make too much of the 21st Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama (to bestow upon it the full title which leaves out a lot of what happens), except that to say that its continuance for all of those years proves that the original idea was a durable one.

All those years…I , who happen to have seen something of them all, find it difficult to believe that among this years’ audience there will be those who were not born when the early Festivals took place. For them it may seem a venerable institution this Edinburgh Festival Society which some at first predicted would not last for more than a few years.