The Arnold Kemp Archives

Creative Scotland, and its ‘crude ethic of sado-competition’

Creative Scotland, and its ‘crude ethic of sado-competition’

This piece appeared in the Scottish Review on May 31, 2012. For legal reasons, the last 2 pars were removed. They are reinstated here. Below is a photo of Creative Scotland execs in Cannes the same week they announced the end of flexible funding. Joyce McMillan knows what she is talking about when it comes to judging performances. The Scotsman’s theatre critic has spent a few years of her life rattling across Scotland on night trains from small towns – the proverbial ‘Shotts in the dark’ – writing reviews. The fact that she knows most of Scotland’s theatre people pretty well and in general is held in respect by them does not interfere with her ability to do her job. She can give a bad review if it’s required.

‘Confusion To Our Enemies’

Selected Journalism of Arnold Kemp (1939-2002) edited by Jackie Kemp. (go to forthcoming titles on nwp.co.uk for more info).

From the Foreword by Professor Tom Devine: Arnold Kemp, one of the greatest of Scottish journalists and editors of the 20th century, died prematurely at the age of 63 in 2002. He edited The Herald with memorable elan and panache between 1981 and 1994 and his prolific writings also regularly graced the pages of the Scotsman, the Guardian and the Observer in a career which spanned more than four decades from the year he began his first job in journalism in 1959 as a sub-editor on the Scotsman, fresh out of Edinburgh University.

My father Arnold Kemp and the Leveson Inquiry

My father Arnold Kemp and the Leveson Inquiry

From the Scottish Review March 21, 2012. What would Arnold Kemp have thought of the Leveson inquiry? My father, journalist and editor of this parish, will have been dead 10 years this September. So it was something of a surprise to his nearest and dearest to be called by the Guardian and told that his name had been raised at the Leveson inquiry in connection with a tragic and distressing case surrounding his columnist Jack McLean in the early 90s, a case touched on by Kenneth Roy in his SR column (13 March).

The agenda behind the bill: feminisation of Scotland

The agenda behind the bill: feminisation of Scotland

From the Scottish Review, Dec 2011. This piece is also in the Scottish Review anthology, Scottish Review 2012, available from www.scottsihreview.net. It seems bizarre that the Scottish Government has forced through such a wide-ranging set of laws as the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Bill in the name of anti-sectarianism.

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. …”

Robert Kemp on the 21st Edinburgh Festival, from the Scottish Field 1967

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.

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. …”

Robert Kemp on the 21st Edinburgh Festival, from the Scottish Field 1967

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.

Ireland – land of many welcomes

AS day breaks the storms blow in again from the south-west. From the radio, left on overnight, come the strains of a sonata; heard faintly against the noise of the wind, it sounds like an Aeolian harp, the notes carried as if from a great and mysterious distance.

Later in the day the tourists walk stiffly but resolutely on the beach as the waves roll in from the Atlantic. Behind them the mist clings to the slopes of an elemental landscape of bog and crag.

A book on the Highland Clearances

From the Observer 21 October 2001

If, as Ambrose Bierce argued, a violin is the revenge exacted by the intestines of a dead cat then history, in the hands of a skilled interpreter, may avenge vanished generations. The Highland Clearances are a good example of the phenomenon.

One view is that landowners brutally swept away the native people. Harder-nosed academics say that the Clearances were part of an inevitable change. But although we are in an age of opulence, a time when, in the words of Luiz Felipe Scolari, the Brazilian football coach, we tie dogs up with sausages, we seem to grow ever more bitter about the misfortunes of our Highland forebears who lived not in Arcadia but often in poverty.

Architecture in Scotland

From the Observer 7 October 2001

THE FAILURE of high-rise architecture in Scotland’s cities is so universally acknowledged that it is often assumed that tower blocks are inherently incapable of supporting civilised life.  The Wee Malkies, the urchins of Stephen Mulrine’s poem, will come as surely as rats to a cargo ship.  They will put out the stair-head lights, sabotage the lifts and make the journey from entrance to flat more hazardous than any midnight walk along the meanest city streets.

Not just in Glasgow or Edinburgh, but in London and Paris, too, towers have become symbols of alienation, poverty and despair, the very evils they were designed to overcome.  Yet this form of urban architecture can succeed.  For the rich, the high tower can be a secure fortress, guarded by concierges where residents pay their dues and repairs are carried out without delay.

The rise and rise of the unattributed quote

From the Observer 28 July 2002

There are times when politics approaches blood sport. All last week, before his sudden decision to resign, poor Henry McLeish looked like a hunted fox, increasingly terrified by the baying of the media pack.

The press, of course, was perfectly within its rights to pursue the matter tenaciously. McLeish and his advisers signally failed to deal with it promptly, openly and fully. But some aspects of the media pursuit left me feeling uneasy.

By chance, the evening before the resignation, I was at Stirling University to hear Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, deliver the third Hetherington Memorial Lecture. Rusbridger’s theme was political language. He demonstrated how an open discourse between media and politicians has become virtually impossible. Indeed, the relationship has become an arid kind of game in which the politicians stonewall their inquisitors.

Alex Salmond renounces SNP leadership in 2001

  • From The Arnold Kemp Archives:  Observer, Sunday 28 January 2001
    • Somewhere at home I have a collection of tapes of political interviews dating from the early 1990s. I have always meant to listen to them again, not for their substance but for the eccentric extraneous noises.

    Interruptions by waiters have a deadly effect on anecdotes; they are always perfectly timed to ruin the punch-line. The chatter and laughter of fellow diners constitute other hazards.

Alex Salmond renounces SNP leadership

  • From The Observer, Sunday 28 January 2001
    • Somewhere at home I have a collection of tapes of political interviews dating from the early 1990s. I have always meant to listen to them again, not for their substance but for the eccentric extraneous noises.

    Interruptions by waiters have a deadly effect on anecdotes; they are always perfectly timed to ruin the punch-line. The chatter and laughter of fellow diners constitute other hazards.

Attacks on asylum seekers in Glasgow

    • From the Observer Sunday 27 May 2001 
      • A general practitioner who has patients in one of the tougher housing schemes in the west of Scotland told me the other day that he uses an old banger to do his rounds. This is a strategem to protect his car, and himself, from theft, attack or worse.

      That there are places in urban Scotland to which most of us would not willingly go during the day and certainly never visit at night is a fact which as a society and a political culture we have chosen not to confront. It is regrettable, we seem to feel, but it is part of our lives. We prefer not to cast too much light on the dark world of the ‘schemies’.

The prohibition of drugs


From the Observer, Nov 25, 2001

Since the days of Adam and Eve, forbidden fruit has lost little of its power to tempt. There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that prohibition is counterproductive and may actually stimulate the consumption of the banned goods. In 1675, Charles II forbade by proclamation the sale of tea, coffee, chocolate and sherbet from private houses. His aim was to discourage sedition. In Scotland, the pulpit denounced tea-drinking as frivolous and ungodly. A consequence of such fiats was that tea became the national drink.

In Ireland, on the introduction of the Euro

rom the Observer, 30 December 2001

The currency may change but life goes on. Ireland, as it prepared for the euro, fell about the Christmas feast as if it hadn’t a care in the world. The free-range Wexford turkey was the least of it: the ancestral Irish festive board is not complete without a ham and a hunk of spiced beef as well.

 

In Ireland on the introduction of the Euro

 From the Observer, 30 December 2001

The currency may change but life goes on. Ireland, as it prepared for the euro, fell about the Christmas feast as if it hadn’t a care in the world. The free-range Wexford turkey was the least of it: the ancestral Irish festive board is not complete without a ham and a hunk of spiced beef as well.

On a compilation of Scots poetry

The Observer, Sunday 1 July 2001

    At the heart of what makes poetry Scottish lies the question of language. There are at least four varieties. First, there is the Scots of the old court before the Union of the Crowns. Then came the vigorous and assured tongue used by Robert Burns in his best poems, or richly put in the mouths of his native characters by Sir Walter Scott.

On Scottish self esteem

    • Arnold Kemp
    • The Observer, Sunday 8 July 2001
      • The Scottish identity has long been a rich source of material for writers and academics. They are attracted to it because it is such a ragbag of disparate elements and influences.

      It has survived, undoubtedly, because Scotland has wanted to be different from England, just as the Tartan Army conducts itself with sozzled amiability as it marches around the world in order to show up the English supporters.

Cronyism and Jack McConnell

  • The Observer, Sunday 18 November 2001
    • The word crony has become the standard terms of abuse for the Scottish Labour Party, but it acquired its pejorative overtones only relatively recently. Souter Johnie was Tam O’Shanter’s ‘ancient, trusty, drouthy crony’: they had been ‘fou for weeks thegither’. In his diary Samuel Pepys spoke warmly of a ‘chrony’ and some think the word sprang from seventeenth-century student slang at Cambridge University.

    In the political sense it now means something just short of corruption. Cronyism is to friendship as cunning is to wisdom – ‘Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise’, wrote Francis Bacon. Cronyism in the political meaning appears to have been used for the first time by a journalist on the New York Times in 1952. He was describing the Truman administration’s practice of appointing friends to government posts irrespective of their fitness for them.

An early assessment of the Scottish Parliament

  • Arnold Kemp
  • The Observer, Sunday 16 December 2001 00.41 GMT
    • The legendary Irish heroine, Grace O’Malley, who led a band of 200 sea-raiders from the coast of Galway in the sixteenth century, found her enemies among the Irish as well as the English, and was eventually pardoned by Queen Elizabeth. The Scots turned to the same Queen to help them get rid of Rome and the French.

    The old political truth, that your enemies are not necessarily those who sit on the opposite benches, has emerged to haunt the Labour Party in Scotland. It has been in many ways a wretched couple of years since our new parliamentarians took the stage. The death of Donald Dewar, the embarrassment of Henry McLeish and the private troubles of our new First Minister, Jack McConnell, have damaged the standing of the Parliament, though mostly in the eyes of those who didn’t much value it in the first place.