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Like Gerry Hassan (11 October), I too raised an eyebrow when I saw Joyce McMillan’s description of Alex Salmond as ‘one of the few western leaders of our time with the courage and gaiety to buck the trend and to dare to offer a politics of hope rather than of fear, mean-mindedness and decline’.
Ms McMillan’s comment reminded me of an earlier observation by a Scottish journalist, that she felt proud to be a member of a nation that had elected Tommy Sheridan to Holyrood. Ah doot the years to come will see such a dramatic turnaround in Ms McMillan’s view of Salmond, but such over-the-top praise is symptomatic of a little-noted theme in Scottish self-estimation, the hunger for a paladin of a leader who will reflect our idealist view of ourselves.
Biographers of Burns are no longer likely to get a literal bullet through the post for suggesting (as Catherine Carswell did) that Burns the man was a lesser being than Burns the poet, but there remains a reluctance to criticise the holy ones among us – except of course, when they fall, and suddenly they become open to attack. The morning after Donald Dewar died, I remember hearing a former moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland say on the wireless of Donald, that ‘we were blessed’ that he had walked among us.
I loved the grumpy old sod, but he was hardly sent to us by God as a sign of his love for us (unlike of course St Andrew, or so the Declaration of Arbroath tells us). The turnaround when his will was published and he was found to be quite well-off was, as Carol Craig observed, all too revealing of our lack of proportion. Ms McMillan’s ‘Joy of Eck’ shows we still have far to go, alas.
Edwin Moore
Well, it was good for laugh. Was David Torrance’s splenetic ‘Lamont Should be Applauded’ (2 October) piece competing for some kind of irony prize? He calls for a serious debate then proceeds to label those who were taken aback by Lamont’s benediction from Ruth Davidson the following:
‘Utterly simplistic…spewing predictable (not to mention black-and-white) bile…the paranoid "Scottish Left"…puerile and simplistic… fuzzy rhetoric…phoney rhetoric…central fraudulence of Salmondism…Scotland’s increasingly debased political culture.’
They are ‘paranoid’? One wonders who stole Torrance’s scone.
He asks what would the left have called Gaitskell’s introduction of prescription charges – well, you would think a historian would know that Nye Bevan, Harold Wilson and others resigned in protest over them. I wonder which of Torrance’s abusive terms he would apply to them?
Then, as for ‘fuzzy rhetoric’, he concedes that Lamont has failed to say what her alternative is, or how her means-testing would actually work – while he does exactly the same in his article. However, the devil is in the detail Mr Torrance. I have to say that I have yet to find that I can’t get on a bus because it is crowded out by free-loading retired millionaires scoffing their caviar blinis.
The fact is that Lamont was not proposing some new approach. All she was doing, in her characteristically woolly way, was trying to find some new way to attack the government. Labour have never yet come to terms with being an opposition. If anything is ‘simplistic’ it is their ‘If SNP is for it – we’re agin it’ approach even to the absurdity of opposing policies they themselves introduced.
Lamont is the leader of what was once Scotland’s dominant party. If she has a policy to propose, nothing is stopping her. Instead, she has simply negatively tried to criticise the Scottish Government for daring to implement the policies on which it was elected. Any credibility she or Torrance might have on that is surely blown out of the water by the fact that her very own Scottish Labour Party campaigned for these same policies at the last election.
Certainly the allocation of resources is the essence of political debate, but on this showing neither Lamont, nor David Torrance, has anything meaningful to contribute. A general whinge doesn’t
cut it.
Tom Berney
Having read David Torrance’s piece (11 October) about David Steel’s proposals for federalism as the next step after devolution for the United Kingdom, I must admit that I have not read these proposals. However, I can think of no current federal state whose constitutional arrangements could be adapted to fit the make-up of the UK.
For a start, the official title of our current ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ omits the anomalous self-governing territories of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. Next, the remaining political units of which it consists comprise (1) two former kingdoms internationally recognised as independent states (England and Scotland), (2) one former principality which was conquered by and incorporated into England in the early renaissance (Wales) and (3) the puppet kingdom of Ireland, whose governance was gradually taken over by the English crown over centuries and whose devolved parliament was abolished into the UK in 1801, declaring however that 26 of Ireland’s traditional 32 counties were detached in the 1920s and now form the Irish Republic, leaving six counties designated as Northern Ireland.
This suggests some difficulty for anyone trying to split the UK into federal units, given that the area of England is enormously greater than that of any other existing unit and England’s population vastly outnumbers the populations of all the rest of the UK. It can be argued that other federations have wildly differing sizes of states or provinces but the USA is not dwarfed by California, nor Canada by Ontario, nor Germany by Nord-Rhein Westfalen. Attempts to divide England into regions which might approximate to federal units have so far been have been feeble and rightly dismissed by their inhabitants. How, then, could the UK become a meaningful federal state?
Robin MacCormick
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