Culture

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’.

Culture

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.
Politics

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.

 

Arnold Kemp archive

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.

Tiny school wants one for the roll
Social Affairs

Tiny school wants one for the roll

    • “One more pupil please!” reads the appeal sent out by Rebecca Ridgway, desperate to find a young family prepared to move to one of the emptiest places in Europe to stop the school roll falling below 20 at her children’s primary.

    Ridgway – who runs the adventure holiday company founded by her father, the yachtsman John Ridgway – takes her two children, Hughie, eight, and Molly, 10, to school each morning in an open boat with an outboard motor from their home in Ardmore, in Sutherland.

Social Affairs

i for ingenious

JACKIE KEMP from online publication “Journalist’s Handbook” April 4 2011.
The i – a concise version of the Independent newspaper priced at a very reasonable 20 pence a day or £35 a year – appears to be doing rather well. ABC sales figures at the start of this year were around 130,000 and are reportedly heading for 160,000 now. That is double the number of people who subscribe to the Times website and, at a time when in many newspaper groups resources have been migrating from print to online editions, it presents an interesting idea.
Could it be that there is still some mileage in the hoary old newspaper? Could there be something too in this new, sexy concept of concision?

Literature

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.

Culture

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.

Politics

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.

Devolution

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.

Culture

Thoughts on churches

  • The Observer, Sunday 13 January 2002 
    • There is nothing like a row among Christians for sheer malevolence. Bishop Nazir-Ali, said to be the leading contender to succeed George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself all over the front page of the Times yesterday because, as the paper rather piously reported, there was a ‘whispering campaign’ against him. But thanks to the Times, it wasn’t sotto voce but more a scream from the rooftops.

    The allegations against the Bishop of Rochester included the suggestion that he once had been a Roman Catholic, hardly an unforgivable aberration in a Christian. There was, of course, a less visible and uglier subtext, for Dr Nazir Ali is from Pakistan.

People

Henry McLeish’s resignation as First Minister

  • The Observer, Sunday 27 January 2002 01.46 GMT
  • Article history
    • There is a school of newspaper writers who believe in adding culinary detail in order to satisfy the dictum of the great American journalist A.J. Liebling, who said that the first duty of the reporter was to convince the reader that he was there.

    In the heyday of the Sunday Times Insight team, a great deal of manpower was expended on what was called the theory of corroborative detail. A friend recalls phoning the butler at the Hirsel in 1963 to establish just what Alec Douglas-Home had for breakfast on the morning he received the call to lead the Tories.

Politics

On a resignation by Wendy and critics of Holyrood

The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2002

    I once asked a leading herbalist if he had a cure for a hangover. His reply was brief and crushing: ‘Don’t get one.’ We have to fall back, therefore, on some foul Italian concoction or Jeeves’s recipe for Bertie Wooster – two raw eggs and a dash of Tabasco. In politics, the equivalent is a spell in the wilderness. It has been the fate of many, some of whom, like Churchill and de Gaulle, have gone on to greatness.

    In Scotland, Wendy Alexander has exchanged a portfolio in the Scottish Executive for a seat on the backbenches while Alex Salmond, conclusively confounding my suspicion that he has become addicted to Westminster, has announced his intention of returning to Holyrood in 2007. By then, he appears to acknowledge, he will have been on the fringes of the main action for too long, and the expectation is that he will attempt to resume the SNP leadership.

Politics

On consultants and chief executives

The Observer, Sunday 30 June 2002

    I have always entertained an especial detestation for the Irish saint Ursicinus of Saint-Ursanne, a pal of St Columba, who loathed wine and those who served it. Down the years, only management consultants have aroused my deeper dislike. The growing scandal surrounding corporations is thus an ill wind. It has wiped millions off the stock markets but it has brought an end to the myth of the visionary chief executive and punctured the arrogance of the consultant.

    In my not always happy experience, there could often be an unhealthy degree of connivance between them. The executive called in consultants to help him force through changes on which he had already decided. The consultants, with an eye on their fee, were always happy to oblige even if the scheme were rash, dangerous and ill-advised or, as often seemed to happen, a false economy.

Politics

Decline of the Scottish Conservative Party

The Herald Jan 18-20, 1989, ran as a three-part series.

PUBLIC squalor and private affluence, Professor Galbraith’s famous phrase, implies a polity where individual wealth and consumption are encouraged and public spending restrained.

Devolution

Problems facing Scotland in Europe

The Herald c 1989

…At Westminster Scottish opinion is organised on party lines; Parliament speaks for Scotland only as part of the UK, not as an entity with preoccupations of its own. It cannot even muster a Scottish Select Committee and English MPs are drafted in as cannon fodder. Our disagreements ease the path of our political rulers, the Tory Ministers in Scotland, who enjoy constitutional legality but lack popular authority.

Yet it is becoming clearer as we move towards the economic and political development of the European Community that the enunciation of a Scottish viewpoint will be increasingly vital if we are not to become peripheral or even second-class citizens.

Devolution

Scotland in Europe

The Herald c 1989

AS A SLOGAN, Scotland in Europe is like a piece of glass. If it catches the sun it sparkles like a jewel, dazzling and beguiling. In other lights you can see right through it.

Devolution

Subsidiarity and an official handbook to Britain

From the Herald, Ediotiral Notebook, 16 January 1993

ON my desk this week landed a handsome volume. Its cover carries a colour photomontage including pictures of the Queen, Big Ben, and Mrs Betty Boothroyd, the admirable Speaker of the Commons who looks like becoming one of the TV personalities of the decade. Britain 1993 is an official handbook prepared by the Central Office of Information. I looked through it in the expectation of being irritated by it and was not disappointed. But its crassness surprised even me.

Politics

ON the rise and fall of the SDA

WE had hardly sat down for our ”power breakfast” when we got into an argument. A lecture in elementary economics is pretty hard to take at that time in the morning but that is what my old sparring partner Professor Donald MacKay was giving me.

Donald, I happen to know, was not brought up in the Glasgow bar-room school of argument but he has acquired some of its mannerisms. He hunches his shoulders to prosecute his argument with greater intensity and he wags his finger to underline his points.