Kenneth Roy
Why Michelle Mone
has to stay
in Scotland
The Midgie
Bad drivers
Steve Tilley
and others
The perils of
travelling by train
in Scotland
John Cameron
Kicking a man when he’s down
The short-list
Dumbing-down
the world’s literary
masterpieces
The Cafe 2
A problem of etiquette
Tom Gallagher
Why should Alex Salmond
be caressed with a feather
duster by Paxo?
The Cafe 3
Fitzpatrick takes on Hill
Howie Firth
We’re enjoying the
deep darkness, and the
light from the stars
Alistair R Brownlie
The brigands have
taken over
02.02.12
No. 509
SR’s remarkable growth as an independent magazine is based largely on word of mouth
Here are examples of our journalism:
* SR played a leading role in the successful campaign to save St Margaret of Scotland Hospice
* An SR investigation into Scotland’s care homes revealed the truth about Southern Cross a full year before the company collapsed. We put the facts in the public domain. They were ignored until it was too late
* SR campaigned for greater transparency in Scottish public life and won a landmark judgement from the Scottish information commissioner which has led to a transformation in the information available about executive salaries and pensions in public bodies
* Having discovered elderly people still living in a near-derelict block of flats in Glasgow, sometimes without a water supply, SR campaigned to have them decently re-housed. With the help of Scotland’s housing minister, Alex Neil, we succeeded
* SR continues to campaign – so far without success – to broaden the range of appointments to national organisations beyond a self-perpetuating elite
Since SR does not accept advertising or sponsorship of any kind, and since the support it receives from its publisher (the Institute of Contemporary Scotland) is limited, SR depends on the generosity of individual supporters through the Friends of the Scottish Review
Click here
Scotland’s
chance in
Abu Dhabi
Christopher Harvie
I
If Emirati teenagers have a Scotsman in mind it’s probably the actor Jason Flemyng, playing a smooth adman villain in their federation’s first feature film, ‘City of Life’ (2009).
This looks like an oddball co-production of ‘Top Gear’ and Bollywood about wannabees – Arab, Indian, Roumanian – trying to make it in the hyperglitz of Dubai City. It ends with a whopping car crash. Its Anglophonies come across as just that.
Alex Salmond, tak’ tent of the difference between the Vanity Fair of the island city and Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates’ largest state. You featured in the web-pages of Masdar City, its low-carbon prototype, when you visited in November 2011; as a guest at January’s World Future Energy conference, you got more local coverage than the UK delegation. The Sheikhdom has an astonishing growth record, a sovereign wealth fund to match, and going on the postgrad students I taught, its folk, who keep the spectacle of Dubai solvent, are bright, charming and witty – and realistic about their fascinating but risky position.
II
Historically, the British record wasn’t impressive, though the Scots input, now monumentalised by the ‘Queen Elizabeth 2’ moored at Dubai quay, seems better. Lieutenant John MacLeod was the first British resident in the Gulf in the 1820s, putting down the pirates in what became the Trucial States. When, after 1908, Persia was partitioned with Russia, a Scot, J G Lorimer, compiled the six-volume gazetteer of the region, standard until the digital age. The Gray Mackenzie trading company built Dubai’s first multi-storey in 1933; now Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest at 2,800 feet, is nearly an urban Munro.
‘The British spent almost nothing’, said Ateek Jakka, Social sciences research dean of the Al-Ain university, ‘so in 1971 we were not much more than an oasis, on a rough road from the coast. In 1960 it had been seven hours by camel’. Al-Ain is now nearly 400,000, a literal garden city on the Omani frontier and under the limestone ridge of its mountains. Whitehall kept the tottering Sheikh Shakbut until 1966, when his remarkable brother Zayed – Bedouin, entrepreneur, reformer: Robert Owen in a tent – replaced him and founded the federation in 1971, just as the oil began to flow.
Whitehall fumbled the ‘Trucial States’ as badly as it did the bounty of the North Sea. Harold Wilson’s pro-Israel line alienated the Emiratis, as would Mrs Thatcher’s schmoozing of the Saudis. Zayed, 1918-2004, was one of those reflective Bedouin chiefs the Brits were supposed to like – the great Wilfred Thesiger did – but the people for his ideas really came from waves of exiles from Lebanon, in chaos after 1973, Iranians and Iraqis after the revolution-and-war of 1979-81, Kuwaitis in 1991, Iraqis again after 2003.
The population went up from 40,000 to 1.6 million, mostly incomers, raised problems over rights of work and residence, yet religion is a whiggish sort of Islam, conservative but tolerant; the Sheikhs haven’t been challenged outside their pretty genuine tradition of accessibility. Democracy is ambiguous where the natives are scarcely 20%, and growth has been rattling away, along with that Arab curiosity for knowledge that intrigued westerners like Voltaire and the ever-fascinating Benjamin Disraeli.
After 1990 Dubai (add another million) and Abu Dhabi City became centres of trade to and from Russia – computers in, cash out – and the ex-Soviet ‘Oilistans’, India, Indonesia, China. Such are the destinations served by Dubai’s international airport: vast but efficient and unintimidating compared with Moscow Schermetyevo.
Along the coast the huge cement works around Ras Al Kaimah – a great port when Liverpool was a swamp: its poet-navigator Ahmad bin Majid’s books and charts guided Vasco da Gama to India – supply the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia. There’s ‘rest and recreation’ from regional conflicts; and the people have glitzy malls, where black-clad ladies shop for exotic gear to wear at home. Ownership of hotels is internationalised, and one of the biggest players is Scot Guy Crawford, boss of Jumeriah Hotels.
III
From the Ras motorway Dubai’s Burj isn’t easy to see behind high-tension wires and sandstorms. Urban growth has hit water-supply: long dry spells, desertification. Much water has to be pumped from Oman. Given cheap concrete and cheap oil, there’s roughly one car to two Abu Dhabians: an accent on power and speed, so awful accidents.
The government is anxious to mend this: new bus systems and in Dubai monorails and the elevated metro. Climate and sociological problems make adapting to pluralistic urban life difficult – Patrick Geddes would certainly have liked Al-ain’s greenery but counselled against its hot and bothered freeways. In Scotland we have learned the (very) hard way and could help: surely an opportunity for First or Stagecoach?
‘Green’ reform has not just featured in the imaginative Masdar projects. The UN-backed international renewables agency IRENA has settled, and in January the future energy summit drew, besides the FM, 26,000 other delegates. Its agenda – coping with renewables production and investment, the green city, recycling, carbon capture – is one that combines Scots and Arab experiences and concerns.
Bill Forsyth’s marvellous ‘Local Hero’, from 1982, went down a treat with the students. Its two muses Stella and Marina control the necessary fire and flood. And, happily, the humanities dean at Al-ain is the effervescent Manfred Malzahn, poet, critic, folk-musician, who did his Edinburgh PhD on ‘Scottish literature and national identity, 1979-81’.
IV
But this region is also the sharp end of geopolitics: Mackinder’s critical ‘heartland’, the key to the ‘world island’: Afghanistan is only an hour’s flying time away, its Chinese frontier two hours. The Iranians threaten the Hormuz straits, which connect the Gulf to the Indian Ocean and handle 35% of the world’s seaborne oil. An ‘alternative’ Abu Dhabi pipeline project is to reach the open sea at Fujirah, delayed but due to start pumping later in 2012. Building has started on the Emirates Railway which will, like the pipeline, bypass Hormuz. By 2017 it will be part of an Arabia-wide network – north to Kuwait, west to Mecca and Suez. And further west, an ambitious African sequence of Chinese railway schemes now suggest a landbridge connecting three of the BRICs – Brazil, India and China
Back to QE2-building skills (still there, on oil rigs and construction sites) powered-up by distance-learning and computer-modelling? In this Scottish and Abu Dhabi concerns seem to be running in parallel. Given Masdar’s experimental technology complex, Salmond could fix the two to complement each other, and insure against Gulf upheavals. Masdar City – twinned with Scapa Flow?
Meanwhile, according to the FT, ultra-plush nightclubs with six-figure supper bills are moving into Dubai ‘frequented by many a European banker’. Partying like it’s 1788?
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
be caressed with a feather
duster by Paxo?
The Cafe 3
Fitzpatrick takes on Hill
Howie Firth
We’re enjoying the
deep darkness, and the
light from the stars
Alistair R Brownlie
The brigands have
taken over
02.02.12
No. 509
SR’s remarkable growth as an independent magazine is based largely on word of mouth
Here are examples of our journalism:
* SR played a leading role in the successful campaign to save St Margaret of Scotland Hospice
* An SR investigation into Scotland’s care homes revealed the truth about Southern Cross a full year before the company collapsed. We put the facts in the public domain. They were ignored until it was too late
* SR campaigned for greater transparency in Scottish public life and won a landmark judgement from the Scottish information commissioner which has led to a transformation in the information available about executive salaries and pensions in public bodies
* Having discovered elderly people still living in a near-derelict block of flats in Glasgow, sometimes without a water supply, SR campaigned to have them decently re-housed. With the help of Scotland’s housing minister, Alex Neil, we succeeded
* SR continues to campaign – so far without success – to broaden the range of appointments to national organisations beyond a self-perpetuating elite
Since SR does not accept advertising or sponsorship of any kind, and since the support it receives from its publisher (the Institute of Contemporary Scotland) is limited, SR depends on the generosity of individual supporters through the Friends of the Scottish Review
Click here
Scotland’s
chance in
Abu Dhabi
Christopher Harvie
I
If Emirati teenagers have a Scotsman in mind it’s probably the actor Jason Flemyng, playing a smooth adman villain in their federation’s first feature film, ‘City of Life’ (2009).
This looks like an oddball co-production of ‘Top Gear’ and Bollywood about wannabees – Arab, Indian, Roumanian – trying to make it in the hyperglitz of Dubai City. It ends with a whopping car crash. Its Anglophonies come across as just that.
Alex Salmond, tak’ tent of the difference between the Vanity Fair of the island city and Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates’ largest state. You featured in the web-pages of Masdar City, its low-carbon prototype, when you visited in November 2011; as a guest at January’s World Future Energy conference, you got more local coverage than the UK delegation. The Sheikhdom has an astonishing growth record, a sovereign wealth fund to match, and going on the postgrad students I taught, its folk, who keep the spectacle of Dubai solvent, are bright, charming and witty – and realistic about their fascinating but risky position.
II
Historically, the British record wasn’t impressive, though the Scots input, now monumentalised by the ‘Queen Elizabeth 2’ moored at Dubai quay, seems better. Lieutenant John MacLeod was the first British resident in the Gulf in the 1820s, putting down the pirates in what became the Trucial States. When, after 1908, Persia was partitioned with Russia, a Scot, J G Lorimer, compiled the six-volume gazetteer of the region, standard until the digital age. The Gray Mackenzie trading company built Dubai’s first multi-storey in 1933; now Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest at 2,800 feet, is nearly an urban Munro.
‘The British spent almost nothing’, said Ateek Jakka, Social sciences research dean of the Al-Ain university, ‘so in 1971 we were not much more than an oasis, on a rough road from the coast. In 1960 it had been seven hours by camel’. Al-Ain is now nearly 400,000, a literal garden city on the Omani frontier and under the limestone ridge of its mountains. Whitehall kept the tottering Sheikh Shakbut until 1966, when his remarkable brother Zayed – Bedouin, entrepreneur, reformer: Robert Owen in a tent – replaced him and founded the federation in 1971, just as the oil began to flow.
Whitehall fumbled the ‘Trucial States’ as badly as it did the bounty of the North Sea. Harold Wilson’s pro-Israel line alienated the Emiratis, as would Mrs Thatcher’s schmoozing of the Saudis. Zayed, 1918-2004, was one of those reflective Bedouin chiefs the Brits were supposed to like – the great Wilfred Thesiger did – but the people for his ideas really came from waves of exiles from Lebanon, in chaos after 1973, Iranians and Iraqis after the revolution-and-war of 1979-81, Kuwaitis in 1991, Iraqis again after 2003.
The population went up from 40,000 to 1.6 million, mostly incomers, raised problems over rights of work and residence, yet religion is a whiggish sort of Islam, conservative but tolerant; the Sheikhs haven’t been challenged outside their pretty genuine tradition of accessibility. Democracy is ambiguous where the natives are scarcely 20%, and growth has been rattling away, along with that Arab curiosity for knowledge that intrigued westerners like Voltaire and the ever-fascinating Benjamin Disraeli.
After 1990 Dubai (add another million) and Abu Dhabi City became centres of trade to and from Russia – computers in, cash out – and the ex-Soviet ‘Oilistans’, India, Indonesia, China. Such are the destinations served by Dubai’s international airport: vast but efficient and unintimidating compared with Moscow Schermetyevo.
Along the coast the huge cement works around Ras Al Kaimah – a great port when Liverpool was a swamp: its poet-navigator Ahmad bin Majid’s books and charts guided Vasco da Gama to India – supply the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia. There’s ‘rest and recreation’ from regional conflicts; and the people have glitzy malls, where black-clad ladies shop for exotic gear to wear at home. Ownership of hotels is internationalised, and one of the biggest players is Scot Guy Crawford, boss of Jumeriah Hotels.
III
From the Ras motorway Dubai’s Burj isn’t easy to see behind high-tension wires and sandstorms. Urban growth has hit water-supply: long dry spells, desertification. Much water has to be pumped from Oman. Given cheap concrete and cheap oil, there’s roughly one car to two Abu Dhabians: an accent on power and speed, so awful accidents.
The government is anxious to mend this: new bus systems and in Dubai monorails and the elevated metro. Climate and sociological problems make adapting to pluralistic urban life difficult – Patrick Geddes would certainly have liked Al-ain’s greenery but counselled against its hot and bothered freeways. In Scotland we have learned the (very) hard way and could help: surely an opportunity for First or Stagecoach?
‘Green’ reform has not just featured in the imaginative Masdar projects. The UN-backed international renewables agency IRENA has settled, and in January the future energy summit drew, besides the FM, 26,000 other delegates. Its agenda – coping with renewables production and investment, the green city, recycling, carbon capture – is one that combines Scots and Arab experiences and concerns.
Bill Forsyth’s marvellous ‘Local Hero’, from 1982, went down a treat with the students. Its two muses Stella and Marina control the necessary fire and flood. And, happily, the humanities dean at Al-ain is the effervescent Manfred Malzahn, poet, critic, folk-musician, who did his Edinburgh PhD on ‘Scottish literature and national identity, 1979-81’.
IV
But this region is also the sharp end of geopolitics: Mackinder’s critical ‘heartland’, the key to the ‘world island’: Afghanistan is only an hour’s flying time away, its Chinese frontier two hours. The Iranians threaten the Hormuz straits, which connect the Gulf to the Indian Ocean and handle 35% of the world’s seaborne oil. An ‘alternative’ Abu Dhabi pipeline project is to reach the open sea at Fujirah, delayed but due to start pumping later in 2012. Building has started on the Emirates Railway which will, like the pipeline, bypass Hormuz. By 2017 it will be part of an Arabia-wide network – north to Kuwait, west to Mecca and Suez. And further west, an ambitious African sequence of Chinese railway schemes now suggest a landbridge connecting three of the BRICs – Brazil, India and China
Back to QE2-building skills (still there, on oil rigs and construction sites) powered-up by distance-learning and computer-modelling? In this Scottish and Abu Dhabi concerns seem to be running in parallel. Given Masdar’s experimental technology complex, Salmond could fix the two to complement each other, and insure against Gulf upheavals. Masdar City – twinned with Scapa Flow?
Meanwhile, according to the FT, ultra-plush nightclubs with six-figure supper bills are moving into Dubai ‘frequented by many a European banker’. Partying like it’s 1788?
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
02.02.12
No. 509
Here are examples of our journalism:
Click here
If Emirati teenagers have a Scotsman in mind it’s probably the actor Jason Flemyng, playing a smooth adman villain in their federation’s first feature film, ‘City of Life’ (2009).
This looks like an oddball co-production of ‘Top Gear’ and Bollywood about wannabees – Arab, Indian, Roumanian – trying to make it in the hyperglitz of Dubai City. It ends with a whopping car crash. Its Anglophonies come across as just that.
Alex Salmond, tak’ tent of the difference between the Vanity Fair of the island city and Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates’ largest state. You featured in the web-pages of Masdar City, its low-carbon prototype, when you visited in November 2011; as a guest at January’s World Future Energy conference, you got more local coverage than the UK delegation. The Sheikhdom has an astonishing growth record, a sovereign wealth fund to match, and going on the postgrad students I taught, its folk, who keep the spectacle of Dubai solvent, are bright, charming and witty – and realistic about their fascinating but risky position.
Historically, the British record wasn’t impressive, though the Scots input, now monumentalised by the ‘Queen Elizabeth 2’ moored at Dubai quay, seems better. Lieutenant John MacLeod was the first British resident in the Gulf in the 1820s, putting down the pirates in what became the Trucial States. When, after 1908, Persia was partitioned with Russia, a Scot, J G Lorimer, compiled the six-volume gazetteer of the region, standard until the digital age. The Gray Mackenzie trading company built Dubai’s first multi-storey in 1933; now Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest at 2,800 feet, is nearly an urban Munro.
‘The British spent almost nothing’, said Ateek Jakka, Social sciences research dean of the Al-Ain university, ‘so in 1971 we were not much more than an oasis, on a rough road from the coast. In 1960 it had been seven hours by camel’. Al-Ain is now nearly 400,000, a literal garden city on the Omani frontier and under the limestone ridge of its mountains. Whitehall kept the tottering Sheikh Shakbut until 1966, when his remarkable brother Zayed – Bedouin, entrepreneur, reformer: Robert Owen in a tent – replaced him and founded the federation in 1971, just as the oil began to flow.
Whitehall fumbled the ‘Trucial States’ as badly as it did the bounty of the North Sea. Harold Wilson’s pro-Israel line alienated the Emiratis, as would Mrs Thatcher’s schmoozing of the Saudis. Zayed, 1918-2004, was one of those reflective Bedouin chiefs the Brits were supposed to like – the great Wilfred Thesiger did – but the people for his ideas really came from waves of exiles from Lebanon, in chaos after 1973, Iranians and Iraqis after the revolution-and-war of 1979-81, Kuwaitis in 1991, Iraqis again after 2003.
The population went up from 40,000 to 1.6 million, mostly incomers, raised problems over rights of work and residence, yet religion is a whiggish sort of Islam, conservative but tolerant; the Sheikhs haven’t been challenged outside their pretty genuine tradition of accessibility. Democracy is ambiguous where the natives are scarcely 20%, and growth has been rattling away, along with that Arab curiosity for knowledge that intrigued westerners like Voltaire and the ever-fascinating Benjamin Disraeli.
After 1990 Dubai (add another million) and Abu Dhabi City became centres of trade to and from Russia – computers in, cash out – and the ex-Soviet ‘Oilistans’, India, Indonesia, China. Such are the destinations served by Dubai’s international airport: vast but efficient and unintimidating compared with Moscow Schermetyevo.
Along the coast the huge cement works around Ras Al Kaimah – a great port when Liverpool was a swamp: its poet-navigator Ahmad bin Majid’s books and charts guided Vasco da Gama to India – supply the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia. There’s ‘rest and recreation’ from regional conflicts; and the people have glitzy malls, where black-clad ladies shop for exotic gear to wear at home. Ownership of hotels is internationalised, and one of the biggest players is Scot Guy Crawford, boss of Jumeriah Hotels.
From the Ras motorway Dubai’s Burj isn’t easy to see behind high-tension wires and sandstorms. Urban growth has hit water-supply: long dry spells, desertification. Much water has to be pumped from Oman. Given cheap concrete and cheap oil, there’s roughly one car to two Abu Dhabians: an accent on power and speed, so awful accidents.
The government is anxious to mend this: new bus systems and in Dubai monorails and the elevated metro. Climate and sociological problems make adapting to pluralistic urban life difficult – Patrick Geddes would certainly have liked Al-ain’s greenery but counselled against its hot and bothered freeways. In Scotland we have learned the (very) hard way and could help: surely an opportunity for First or Stagecoach?
‘Green’ reform has not just featured in the imaginative Masdar projects. The UN-backed international renewables agency IRENA has settled, and in January the future energy summit drew, besides the FM, 26,000 other delegates. Its agenda – coping with renewables production and investment, the green city, recycling, carbon capture – is one that combines Scots and Arab experiences and concerns.
Bill Forsyth’s marvellous ‘Local Hero’, from 1982, went down a treat with the students. Its two muses Stella and Marina control the necessary fire and flood. And, happily, the humanities dean at Al-ain is the effervescent Manfred Malzahn, poet, critic, folk-musician, who did his Edinburgh PhD on ‘Scottish literature and national identity, 1979-81’.
But this region is also the sharp end of geopolitics: Mackinder’s critical ‘heartland’, the key to the ‘world island’: Afghanistan is only an hour’s flying time away, its Chinese frontier two hours. The Iranians threaten the Hormuz straits, which connect the Gulf to the Indian Ocean and handle 35% of the world’s seaborne oil. An ‘alternative’ Abu Dhabi pipeline project is to reach the open sea at Fujirah, delayed but due to start pumping later in 2012. Building has started on the Emirates Railway which will, like the pipeline, bypass Hormuz. By 2017 it will be part of an Arabia-wide network – north to Kuwait, west to Mecca and Suez. And further west, an ambitious African sequence of Chinese railway schemes now suggest a landbridge connecting three of the BRICs – Brazil, India and China
Back to QE2-building skills (still there, on oil rigs and construction sites) powered-up by distance-learning and computer-modelling? In this Scottish and Abu Dhabi concerns seem to be running in parallel. Given Masdar’s experimental technology complex, Salmond could fix the two to complement each other, and insure against Gulf upheavals. Masdar City – twinned with Scapa Flow?
Meanwhile, according to the FT, ultra-plush nightclubs with six-figure supper bills are moving into Dubai ‘frequented by many a European banker’. Partying like it’s 1788?
