Should an
independent Scotland
be part of NATO?
The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
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
* 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
A Monkee is dead at 66
Bob Kernohan:
a Tory grandee who
dabbles in Christianity
John Dalrymple
I’m not really clear what a ‘weekend essay’ is, but a whole Saturday and Sunday are certainly required to get beyond the sense of frustration occasioned by Bob Kernohan’s offering on ‘the condition of politics’ (1 March).
I want to warm to Bob – those resonantly reassuring tones stored in your mind’s ear as you read him, that association he has with a coherent conservative theology.
Despite previous experience, I begin again to anticipate something akin to a profound and inspiring sermon from a respected old Scots minister. But Bob never fails to disappoint. Strip away the style and rhetoric and the content remaining amounts to nothing much more than the standard paper-thin justifications for the lofty world view of a Tory grandee who dabbles in Christianity.
On this occasion, he begins by arguing in support of his ‘populist and opportunist’ thesis that the SNP loses no opportunity to appeal to an inevitable Scottish political anglophobia. Strange that. It has always seemed to me that it draws attention to the gaping democratic deficit that at regular intervals imposes on Scotland governments that Scotland does not vote for. In the face of this recurring deficit – the magnitude of which, if you have any sense of Scottish national identity, reduces the vaunted West Lothian question to nothing larger than a puny Pumpherston point-of-order – Bob seems to argue for a resigned and marginalised self-abnegation. Fine for British nationalist Scots like Bob (whose party just happens to benefit from it); but otherwise anathema.
So it’s not really populism that Bob objects to in the SNP, but rather its hard-headed (one might even say pragmatic and empirical) response to a very real and well-evidenced crisis in the life and work of Scotland. It’s Bob himself who betrays the populist within when he vaporises about ‘the party to which I still have the honour to belong’, and his duty ‘to frustrate the SNP and save my country’. And it’s Bob himself, later in his essay, who attempts to validate that ultimate form of political opportunism that he grandly terms the ‘Tory tradition’, and which the rest us know at first-hand as the enlightened self-interest of the rich and powerful. It only just eludes Bob’s analysis that it’s this ‘Tory tradition’ that (post Blair and Clegg) all three British parties now embrace (sometimes despite themselves), hence his struggle to discern a genuine distinctiveness in any of them.
But it’s here that we get to the really tricky part. What does Bob actually believe? I can fully understand his implied assertion that the ‘Tory tradition’ must always protect ‘the Crown’ as it seeks to sustain an undemocratic, anachronistic aristocracy at the head of Britain’s ‘state’ (even as I despair of the SNP’s – let’s hope temporary – abandonment of a republican future for Scotland). But he surely cannot be serious (with us or with his Christian self) when he implies that it has at its heart a concern for ‘Christian values’ let alone ‘the rule of law’. The historical evidence is all to the contrary, and Cameron’s current scapegoating of the poor and disabled in the name of ‘welfare reform’ is merely the latest indicator of the bottomless chasm that exists between the worldly ‘Tory tradition’ and the kingdom of heaven.
John Dalrymple is a social worker
