Kenneth Roy Why is Roseanna’s Catholicism an Issue

Barbara Millar

There is a queer
Scotchman come.
His name is Wilkie

Rear Window

Anne-Marie McManus

23.06.11
No. 421

George Gunn

I knew Eddie Morgan fairly well and the last time I saw him was in Fraserburgh just before his cancer kicked in and we had a grand discussion about the old Fraserbugh University. The first time I met him was in Wick when I was but a teenager.
    Eddie always admitted he enjoyed a steady income and he was very generous to me who had, and still has, none. Does the fact that he worked the capitalist system make him less a poet? No it damned well doesn’t.      Eddie was smart but he was also fortunate as he would be the first to tell you. All he was interested in was helping those who were less fortunate than himself. Poets these days do have a professional option and they can, as Edwin Morgan did, work in a university. You can hardly move in St Andrews without bumping into poets. But there are those who have no such career path and in Scotland most poets are skint most of the time. Despite Eddie’s revelations poetry is how you spell poverty.
     I had to laugh when the story broke because it was typical of him. Wherever he is he’ll be chuckling now. Unlike Donald Dewar it does not make him less of a character, it makes him more. You always got the unexpected from Eddie. As in life, so in death. The cash will benefit some young poets and that is all to the good. Whether the SNP need his spondoo-laks is another question but I do know he had a dream of an independent, progressive, liberal Scotland which can shine a light into the world, and so do I. He occupies a very special place in my life and always will, no matter what.

 

The dogma of

public bad, private good

is well past its sell-by

 

Andrew Hook

 

It was Mrs Thatcher, I suppose, who popularised the idea that privatisation was the answer to all our economic woes. Public ownership was bureaucratic, wasteful, and unenterprising. Private ownership was dynamic, efficient, and profitable.

     The Thatcherite battle-cry was: private sector good – public sector bad. As a form of economic policy, then, privatisation was always deeply ideological. It was driven by a fundamental distrust of the state. State ownership was a form of socialism, whereas free enterprise and the market lay at the heart of capitalism. For political conservatives, privatisation had to be the holy grail.
     It is no doubt this background that explains my uneasiness over what is going on in Greece today. I just cannot see privatisation simply as an economic policy. Its right-wing, ideological trappings are all too prominent. Yet the IMF and the European Central Bank are making a programme of wholesale privatisation a condition of the provision of further loans to the Greek government.
     What gives these bodies the right to dictate to a sovereign people the politically-charged fiscal and economic policies they should follow? Should not international bodies – whose funds derive from a range of countries with governments of different kinds – refrain from direct political interference of this sort? Surely it is up to the Greek people to decide how far their public sector should or should not be privatised?

 

We recently have had a series of examples which cast doubt on the dogma of public bad, private good. Tell that to the elderly living in care homes being run for profit rather than their wellbeing.

     No doubt the scale of privatisation being demanded of Greece would in the short term help to reduce the country’s burden of debt. But then short-termism is one of the fundamental flaws of market capitalism in general. Instant profit always prevails over long-term investment. Already there are widespread suggestions that the rush to privatisation will mean that Greece’s assets will be sold off at absurdly low prices.
     Recent history teaches a lesson here. What happened in Russia when the old communist state economy was sold off to the private sector? We all know the answer, and the group of Russian billionaires who were the beneficiaries of that example of unrestrained privatisation, are still throwing their weight around. What an irony it would be if the outcome of the policy now being inflicted upon the Greek people by bankers and their credit rating agency allies, was no other than the creation of a new generation of tax-avoiding, Greek shipping entrepreneurs.
     Nearer home, we recently have had a series of examples which cast doubt on the dogma of public bad, private good. Tell that to the elderly living in care homes being run for profit rather than their wellbeing. The dogma itself, it seems to me, is well past its sell-by date. We struggle to live with the legacy of the 1980s.
     How depressing it is that our coalition government frequently seems not to realise this. We still hear far too much about deregulation, the rolling back of the state, the wonders of competition, the evils of the public sector, and the glories of more and more privatisation. Is there a think-tank somewhere working on an analysis of the actual effects of privatisation in the UK from 1980 to the present? There certainly ought to be.

 

Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University