He escaped the
death penalty, but
was robbed of his life
The positive
power of
the death knock
In my favourite place,
we were locked in
by 6.30pm
John Cameron
I was the sort of Neanderthal father who believed it was idiotic for any girl to go out dressed like a tart, get drunk and put herself in harm’s way with predatory low-life. As my daughter, now a happily married mum, reminds me she had to endure everything from: ‘That’s not a skirt, that’s a pelmet’, to ‘You are absolutely not going out like that’.
I read with some scepticism a British Crime Survey that 20% of British women claim they have been the victim at some time of an actual or attempted sexual assault. This turned to incredulity when I saw a Mumsnet self-reporting survey claiming that 10% of women had been raped and 35% had been sexually assaulted.
When faced with dodgy gender statistics, I turn to my feminist guru, Germaine Greer, whose magisterial views have entertained me across half a century and who writes:
Historically, rape was not a crime committed against women but an offence against men by other men. The man who had control of the woman – her father, guardian or husband – had a case against the man who had made unauthorised use of her.
She believes that much of the confusion about rape levels and hysterical press reports on the lack of convictions are the product of our outdated legal system. Arguing that the offence of rape should be abolished, she insists it would be better if such attacks were classified as ‘assaults of a sexual nature with varying degrees of gravity’.
Under such a system, she says, one could distinguish between marital rape, date rape, stranger rape and consensual sex between an 18-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl.
It would certainly seem likely that the reason it is so hard to get convictions in rape cases is because the crime in this country is judged as second in severity only to murder. Like racist assault, rape gets special treatment because of political targets and is ramped up by the media in rhetoric normally associated with honour killings and the Taliban.
Far from all being potential rapists, most men, after a period of youthful fumbling, are fairly circumspect and a new system of gradations of sexual assault is clearly required.
Today’s banner
Spring lambs, Ayrshire
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Words have
never been more
important
Bill Jamieson
I
When Ashley Highfield assumed high command of the Scotsman’s parent company Johnston Press late last year, his introductory email to staff did not go down at all well. In fact, it triggered a howl in the newsroom and a volley of apprehensive tweeting. He expressed a keen desire to gather us round – oh dear – ‘the digital camp fire’.
In the Scotsman wigwam the mood turned black. Staffers swore they heard boxes of Swan Vestas being rattled. So when he came to Edinburgh this week to address staff in what used to be the Scotsman canteen (how the health of a company can be measured by the fortunes of its canteen: we have gone in six years from a full self-service restaurant with a constant choice of hot meals to restricted meal times to the replacement of plates and cutlery by disposable plastic to full withdrawal of all food last year). The rattle of matchboxes would have surprised no-one.
In the event he made, even for world-weary journalists, a mildly reassuring impression and was even given a round of applause: not the disconnected bedroom geek with bottle bottom spectacles many had expected but a cross between a soft sell marketing manager and perennially puzzled head of IT. While short on any financial numbers or trading update (the group is in closed period), there were sighting shots on digital users across the group by 2020; a glimpse of potential survival; and priority to be given for online expansion, funded for the most part, however, by (yet more) cost savings and efficiencies.
Cynics suppressed that sardonic smile: when all else fails, clutch at straws. JP was not, he insisted ‘a sunset stock’. Quite what it all means we will have to wait and see. But at least there was something resembling a plan beyond tomorrow, even though any heat from that digital camp fire looks a long way off.
II
Three public meeting events took me out of the office and brought a most unexpected surprise. The first was to a crack of dawn meeting at the Royal Society of Edinburgh organised by Scottish Financial Enterprise where I was on a panel to discuss media assessment of the financial sector. Douglas Fraser, business editor at BBC Scotland and Andrew Bolger of the Financial Times did a valiant job defending Robert Peston from the clear unease he generates across his audience.
I voiced my suspicion that it was most definitely in the national interest that Pesto famously broke the news of the Lloyds Bank ‘merger’ with HBOS on the BBC just before markets opened that fateful morning. It forestalled another share price collapse and a bank run far bigger than Northern Rock. Was he not ‘helped along’? Given that HBOS had 25 million customers, we would not then have had a banking problem or an economic problem but a law and order problem. Much though Pesto has become the Wayne Rooney of BBC business news, his very appearance remains mildly alarming for many. I think this audience found Stephanie Flanders much more to their liking.
The next day I was chairing a lunch discussion on prospects for family-owned businesses. Such was the anger generated over lack of bank lending support, bordering at times on venom, I began to feel almost sympathetic to the lone young banker present, clearly several rungs below the credit department where loan applications from the most stricken sectors (commercial property, retail, hotels and restaurants) appear to be automatically blocked. It seemed only yesterday we were berating the bankers for leading to excess. Now their descent to the depths of negativity exasperates almost everyone.
Then off to the Mitchell Library Glasgow to chair a session of the Aye Write Book Festival with authors of two great books: Justin Cartwright’s ‘Other People’s Money’ and Philip Coggan’s ‘Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order’. This was a well-attended session with lively questions from the floor. Disconcerting though the themes of these books were – the inability of even the most traditional private banks to protect themselves from the rampant greed of recent years, and Coggan’s view that we are likely to default or inflate away the debt mountain – I found the discussion curiously refreshing – just I had felt the other events to be. Why so? The three had one great feature in common. Not once did anyone raise that labyrinthine obsession of Scotland’s political class these days: ‘indyref’.
III
This is my final month in full-time staff journalism after 43 years working for more than eight newspaper titles. It’s more ‘slow fade’ than lights out. I do plan to continue to write for the Scotsman and other outlets and have spent the last three days in abject misery tooling up a new PC to handle graphics for a website. It’s not the machine – it’s all the wretched baffling software, the maze of instructions and the never ending demand for passwords. How about ‘Forgotten111’? They say never write them down but I now have a notebook full of them.
I do not at all believe we are in the death throes of journalism. I only have to look at the electronic gadgetry I now need to use every day to see that the urge to communicate and for people to hear and see news is stronger than ever. And news is our business: fresh, reliable, speedy, accurate, and delivered with some style. Words are our craft, our raison d’etre, the mission of our lives. And words have never mattered more.
Certainly, it has been hard not to despair at the decline of print circulations. But I was cheered by a recent piece by Mark Jones in the Times pointing out how newspapers had now become fashion accessories on the Milan catwalk. We’re all the rage where it matters.
He made a telling point about the enduring attraction of newspapers over electronic media: with the print edition there is at least a progression and a sense of closure. You read the paper, fold it and feel some completion once read. But with so-called ‘social media’ there is no such closure or sense of ending at all: it’s relentless, non-stop, 24/7 till the senses are battered and we slump with exhaustion on our iPad keyboards. ‘Forgotten111′ is a future of sorts, with no folding. I certainly don’t plan to be foldin’ myself yet awhile.
Bill Jamieson is executive editor of The Scotsman. He is writing here in a personal capacity
