People

John Smith

ACROSS the Ness from the hotel policeman keep watch from the roof of the Eden Court Theatre where the Tory conference is in session. The Prime Minister is arriving shortly to bring this melancholy but oddly inspiring week in British politics to a conclusion.

It has been melancholy, of course, because of the cruel death of John Smith. In its grief the British political establishment has found a rare unity. Our adversarial system has the virtue of in the end producing a Yes or a No to any political question. Its defect is that its perpetual mutual slagging becomes arid. The prying eyes of television, and the eavesdropping radio microphones, have revealed also its petty, schoolboy side.

Places

A win at Kelso races

THE old saying that you don’t meet many poor bookies has a self-propelling logic. Once I did see a bookie at Kelso come close to a lynching after he had increased the odds to drum up trade: just in time a runner arrived with more cash as the punters turned nasty. It is a profession in which incompetence is quickly punished.

People

Billy Connolly

ONCE, during a short season on the staff of the old North British Hotel in Edinburgh, I took up in the lift such notables as Gene Kelly, Kenneth More, and Sir Arthur Bliss. Quite apart from acquiring a lasting appreciation of the patience of those who have to wait on the public, and a tendency, out of a lingering feeling of solidarity, to tip too much, I have been dining out on my days as a lift boy ever since.

Glamour rubs off on those who find themselves close to it but celebrity is a two-way street. This week in Edinburgh, a tourist in my own home town, shuttling about the place as a consumer of culture, I have again seen this truth at work.

People

Michael Heseltine

THE class politician is recognisable, among other things, by his ability to improvise. It is a necessary gift not just in the bearpit of the Commons at question time. There are moments, too, when a speech has to be discarded or radically adjusted at the last minute.

People

Spy Kim Philby – distrusted by his Russian masters

NO THEME has preoccupied post-war British writers more than that of betrayal. It is arguable that Le Carre is our major post-war novelist and the figure of the spy is pervasive in the literature of our time. As in Le Carre’s An Honourable Schoolboy, he is a metaphor for more general infidelities in an age that has seen the rapid loosening of marital and familial ties.

The figure of Kim Philby, in particular, continues to haunt the imagination. His extraordinary career has already been thoroughly documented, by the journalist Phillip Knightley and others, and most people are reasonably familiar with it in outline.

A convinced Marxist, he was recruited as a KGB agent while at Cambridge. He entered the British foreign service in 1941 and was first secretary at the British embassy in Washington from 1949 to 1951. After the defection to Moscow of Burgess and Maclean, his friendship with Burgess led to an investigation. Although nothing could be proved against him he was forced to resign. He went to the Middle East as Observer correspondent until he disappeared from Beirut in 1963, surfacing soon afterwards in Moscow as a KGB major-general and confirming that he had been the ”third man” in the Burgess and Maclean case.

People

Scots champion of EC ideal

Herald, Oct 5 1989. Stanley Budd was Scotland’s representative at the Commission of the EC. Arnold Kemp writes: Stanley Budd brought a whiff of exotic diplomatic circuits to his task of representing the European Community in Scotland.

His house in Edinburgh, with its grand piano (of which he was an enthusiastic amateur), had a friendly elegance to which was added a hospitable and convivial welcome. If one had to listen to an arcane discussion about the agricultural fund, there was no nicer place in which to do so.

Politics

Devolition finance: The Barnett foumula

Derivation v Equalisation: A row over Scottish funding from the 1990s, Arnold Kemp, the Herald. It is interesting to note how the debate over funding has changed since then, I think. Jackie Kemp.

The long-standing principle of equalisation means that all revenues (except local government tax) are remitted to the centre. They are then allocated according to a formula that takes account of need, sparsity of population and so on. This system reflects the essential idea of the unitary state — that all its citizens should have a similar expectation of services irrespective of the wealth of their region.

[Critics] assumes that a Scottish Assembly would be financed by a system of derivation rather than equalisation. Under this principle expenditure is related to revenue raised in a particular geographical area. 

Devolution

Arguments for a Scottish Parliament

THIS week Mr Malcolm Rifkind attacked the Constitutional Convention proposals for a Scottish parliament. He chose to do so on political and economic grounds. Yet there is much more to the question than that.

Except among those naive enough to think that England would gladly part with North Sea oil revenues, home-rule sentiment does not arise from the perception that it will make us rich. It arises from deeper cultural feelings of loss and confusion.

Devolution

Consensus is the key to a successful scheme of devolution

THE Queen is dead, long live the King. As far as the Scots are concerned John Major will promise nothing but a change of style and perhaps the end of the poll tax. Scotland has barely been mentioned in the contest and none of the contenders has been ready to contemplate any change of policy. Mr Major has specifically rejected a parliament with tax-raising powers and all three evidently assumed that Mrs Thatcher’s departure and a review of the community charge would have a sufficiently tonic effect on the party’s fortunes north of the Border.

Culture

Pronounciation

At Edinburgh university we were taught that Southern English speech provided an example of hypercorrection: they would talk of lawr and ordah in Indiar, and claim that buttah is bettah than mahgarine.

Places

Litter in Glasgow’s West End

SINCE the storms of early January a plastic bag, blown by the wind, has lodged in a tree outside the window and has assumed the shape of a bird. In some lights it looks like a roosting heron. On the rare occasions when it is caught by the rays of the winter sun, its appearance is more that of some exotic dove from the rain forests, its dirty white transformed in the rosy glow of sunset.

Here in our corner of the West End the human zoo produces much spoor. From time to time its accumulation is such that I don gloves and old clothes and sally out with brush and shovel. As I work away in the midden, restoring it to some kind of order after the depredations of various visitors, or extract the week’s offerings that have been jammed into the hedge by passers-by, I amuse myself by reconstructing in my mind the provenance of the jetsam and flotsam.

Culture

On Scotland’s neglect of its past

THESE fine, or not so fine, spring mornings have found me walking in Kelvingrove Park for constitutional purposes, and I have stopped once or twice to admire the splendid fountain, by the architect James Sellars and the sculptor John Mossman, erected in 1871-2 to commemorate the inauguration of the Loch Katrine water scheme.

It is richly carved in Scottish Gothic and since its restoration a couple of years ago it spouts voluptuous jets of water behind which can be glimpsed the bright pink blossom of the Japanese cherry trees. Much of the detail piously commemorates Lord Provost Stewart, whose civic genius created the water scheme, but its crowning inspiration is Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake.

With my shoe I clean the inscription set in the ground and think it apt that Sir Walter’s name should be covered with mud. The neglect not only of Sir Walter Scott but of its own history is a striking aspect of contemporary Scotland. There can be few other countries that are now so cut off from their own past as is Scotland, so forgetful and so careless of it.

The Arnold Kemp Archives

“Confusion to our Enemies: Selected Journalism of Arnold Kemp (1939-2002)”

The archive on these pages contains some examples of Kemp’s writing, most of which are not in the anthology of Kemp’s journalism published by Neil Wilson Publishing on September 10 2012.

“Arnold Kemp was considered by many to be the most outstanding Scottish journalist of the second half of the 20th century, being instrumental in modernising and revitalising both the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald…In his 14-year editorship of the Herald, his urbane style attracted readership loyalty and reinvigorated what was an ailing newspaper when he arrived in 1981, as it took on the challenge of great technological change… In 1991 (under his leadership), the circulation peaked, record-breakingly at more than 127,000, before the Murdoch-inspired price-cutting wars began.” From The Herald 10.09 2002.

Arnold Kemp archive

Arnold Kemp 1939 -2002

From The Herald 10.09 2002 : ” Arnold Kemp was considered by many to be the most outstanding Scottish journalist of the second half of the 20th century, being instrumental in modernising and revitalising both the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald…In his 14-year editorship of the Herald, his urbane style attracted readership loyalty and reinvigorated what was an ailing newspaper when he arrived in 1981, as it took on the challenge of great technological change… In 1991 (under his leadership), the circulation peaked, record-breakingly at more than 127,000, before the Murdoch-inspired price-cutting wars began.”

Devolution

On Academic Devolution

THOSE of us who can remember the devolution decade of the seventies, when Scotland came so close to acquiring an Assembly (without tax-raising powers), will have allowed themselves a small smile on hearing the news, this week, that there is to be a measure of academic devolution in Scotland.
Our universities are to be withdrawn from the funding mechanisms controlled by the Department of Education and Science in London and are to come under the control of a new body answerable to the Scottish Office.

The Past

Leith Provident Fleshing Department

CERTAIN things separate one generation from the next as surely as a frontier post. Teenage music is a ghetto which older people cannot enter. If they do they may make themselves ridiculous. The clouds of bad language that rise from groups of girls at some of the posher schools in the West End are intended not just in the spirit of epater les bourgeois but to cement a group solidarity that excludes adults.
Last week I gave a talk to teachers taking a course at Jordanhill and during lunch with my fellow speakers the conversation turned to another sure indicator of age. The test is simple: Can you remember your mother’s Co-operative number? If you can you are probably over 50.
The first entries in your brain cells have clarity and permanence never later emulated. I have difficulty remembering the various pin numbers needed to make the hole in the wall cough up cash but I can instantly recall not only my mother’s Co-operative number (38660) but my parents’ telephone number as well (WAVerley 3701).

Places

On a lost umbrella

PROPPED up beside me as I write is an umbrella or, in that it is large and untidy, a gamp. It is of the promotional kind that is now almost universal, and it advertises a company or a partnership called Sedgwick.What Sedgwick does or where it is to be found, I know not, but I have been advertising its name since Wednesday night.