Kenneth Roy
The vital clues
to Scotland’s
wretched health
Legal Briefs
The Dungavel contract
Jill Stephenson
We are in danger of
turning Scottish universities
into English ones
The Cafe
PPE
Michael Boulton-Jones
The three big threats
to mankind are about
to happen simultaneously
The Cafe 2
Let them exchange shirts
John Brown
What are we to make
of the Not Proven verdict
in the Wilson case?
The Cafe 3
Jeanette and me
Barbara Millar
The heroic sculptor
who refused to move
to London
John Cameron
Can’t Add, Doesn’t Even Try
22.09.11
No. 455
Gus Skinner
Midgie, unless her or his full name is actually The Midgie, is quite right to decry the spread of plurals. It resonated for me with a small piece on radio today about our failure to achieve good maths (or should that be math?) education for children across the UK. In a hotly contested debate one mathe-matician was, from her tone, passionate that data was a plural form. I have always thought so myself, or selves if you want to call me The Gus. And Midgie, and her or his counterparts, are right – sloppy slips have been an odd irritant, but why?
Words and punctuation are signs to meaning, don’t you think? That is their purpose and that is why they matter, not for themselves. It doesn’t matter how incompre-hensible to those of us over 25 we find the texting of young people. We may be jealous of their facility but we should perhaps be more jealous of their commitment to fidelity in long-term relationships. So here’s an equation. Learning only happens 32 weeks a year. The rest of the time we do something else; it used to be harvesting – corn, potatoes and fruit. Now children learn all the time.
Does such an equation matter? I think so. The major problem as we seek to integrate health, social care and eduction is that health and social care work in a culture that is 24/7/365, while education seeks to work in a culture of 6/5/180. I did and do highly value my teachers yet surely we need a new model. As the now defunct SCF said a decade ago the Victorian factory model of education will simply not serve. And, yes, health and social care face equal earthquakes.
A few years ago when I left my beloved Scotland for a while, one of the last things I saw was a Newsnight interview, carefully conducted, in which a director of education and a Catholic bishop debated why in the end this new school, combining with others, could not be opened. It seemed to boil down to the idea that, whilst everything else was agreed, there had not been agreement on sharing staff toilets.
Well, are we serious about creating our future? About merging services and about ending the scourge of sectarianism, by no means only in the west? Well done, SR, for its campaign and well done The Midgie for attention to detail. Pluralities, changing how words are used, and how services are organised, is what we have to deal with. (Well, tell me Midgie, should that be is or are?)
The Midgie replies: Are
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
Dusseldorf daze:
or the world
of Bill Jamieson
Christopher Harvie
I Who is Bill Jamieson and why is he saying these terrible things about me?
‘You never knew what would pop into his (Harvie’s) head, or indeed the point he was making, even after he had made it at great length.’ My fate at Bill’s hands seemed, at first glance, roughly par for the experience of academics with our fourth estate – and even in the SR Cafe – where in Scottish mediaspeak the title ‘professor’ must carry the collocation ‘nutty’, just as every dodgy road or office scheme must be ‘iconic’. But wait a minute …
Were I that abstruse, would I be revising ‘No Gods and Precious Few Heroes’ (1981) for its fifth edition, preparing a second edition of the ‘Oxford Floating Commonwealth’ (2002), and seeing my ‘Atlantic history’ ‘Floating Commonwealth’ (Oxford, 2008) called ‘a rich and varied pleasure’ by the ‘American Historical Review’? In the interstices of looking after my 93-year-old parents, and correcting student essays from Germany, I’m also completing a novel about the grandeur and decline of Clyde industry, and a memoir of the 2007-11 parliament, notionally called ‘The Last Free Spirit’. Do you get that (now vanished) gong for being obscure?
And if the Scotsman’s executive editor is that sharp, why is its circulation sinking faster than the Titanic?
II The MSP for Germany
So it’s not quite ‘Him write a buik? – Ah kent his faither!’. time. And we must tak’ tent of Bill’s bizarre obsession with Dusseldorf. I have visited this fine city three times; it is 300 miles away from Tuebingen. Bill’s geography would put Grantham next door to Joppa.
Land Baden-Wuerttemberg, my home between 1980-2007, with manufacturing at 35% of GDP, is Europe’s most successful region. If I have tried to get some EET committee witnesses to make and sell the useful things Scots can invent, instead of throwing their savings at Homer Simpson, then I’ve been infected by the Swabians’ inventive work ethic: they still compare themselves to the Scots, even if our manufacturing is now 14% of GDP. Industrial success is helped by a public transport strategy. In Tuebingen only a third drive to work; a further third walk or bike, the rest go by bus or train and in a few years by tram, which BaWue does brilliantly (the figures for Stirling Council employees were 82%, 11%, 6%, if you can bear to know).
Dusseldorf, though, was where a director of the utility giant EoN welcomed that same EET committee in 2010 by producing his copy of ‘Fool’s Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil’ (Penguin, 1994) and asking me to sign it. At a meeting of Scottish Engineering at Holyrood no-one had heard of the book, let alone read it. Or think about the ‘Official History of North Sea Oil’, begun in 1994, slated for 2000, and due at last on 14 September.
III Read the Evidence
So much for the witticisms. But had I actually waffled? So I googled the on-line ‘Official Report of Sessions’ for the minutes of the Economy, Energy, and Transport (EET) Committee. In two meetings – 2009 no. 25 (30 September) and 2010 no 26 (29 September) I coincided with Bill.
In the first I quizzed Robert Peston of the BBC about his optimistic estimate of property boom-bust damage: losses of £ 13 billion. He admitted this as ‘a mistake’ subsequently corrected to ‘probably trillions’. Then I questioned Bill on how Scottish banking and business leaders allowed their debt creation to go completely beyond legal restraint. For the boards of HBOS and RBS ‘moral hazard’ was a euphemism for ‘shadow banking’ – between ‘robust business practice’ and outright financial criminality – created by computers, tax havens, and multi-national concerns. This thesis had been presented to the Council of Europe in 1975 by the Glasgow University sociologist John A Mack and the Tuebingen criminologist Hans-Juergen Kerner, in their prophetic – though in Scotland unread – report ‘The Crime Industry’.
The second meeting on 29 September 2010 was more technical, about our problem family of development quangos and the vital renewable energy campaign. Discussing technics in a deindustrialised nation means describing it, but the quangos could help create pump-storage projects to conserve irregular supplies of wind- or wave-generated power from offshore fields. New technology had pushed PS efficiency from 58% to 90%, opening up a new future for many hydro schemes.
I owed such information to talks arranged by former students with HQ personnel at Voith-Heidenheim, the world’s largest turbine builder, and with my colleague Professor Peter Frankenberg, formerly the CDU research and universities minister of BaWue, twice my guest at Holyrood.
In both cases, little correspondence with the Jamieson version.
My Scottish Tory friends have dropped their ‘Chris Harvie: MSP for Germany’ line. David McAlister became CDU minister-president of Lower Saxony in May 2010. A Scots Tory running a land with roughly Scotland’s GDP is the tribe’s first success in decades.
Bill might revive the Hanover connection, 1715-1837, through two bicentenaries: the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales’ (1812) and their friend Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ (1814). Both were key contributions to conservative European social thought through Carl-Friedrich von Savigny, James Lorimer, Max Weber, etc: rather healthier, these days, than the ‘light touch’ market mysticism of his own symposium Scotland’s Ten Tomorrows (2006).
IV ‘Greater Grossartia’
As to elites, Bill on ‘Greater Grossartia’ seemed a re-run of Thomas Balogh on the ‘English Establishment’ in 1959. It was cultivated, well-connected, socially assertive – but was it any good?
John Kay remarked over a Holyrood lunch in July 2010 that unless the bankers were forcibly reformed, the cash they had got from us via Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown in 2008 would slosh into yet more risky speculation. Sir Angus Grossart popped up to compare minor vandalism to Sir Fred Goodwin’s car to Hitler’s vicious anti-Semitic Reichskristallnacht (1938). A proportionate response?
Three years have passed and those responsible for our ‘pinstripe Darien’ – Goodwin, Crosby, Cummings, Hornby, MacKillop, Stevenson – haven’t been comprehensively questioned, let alone made to repair any of the vast damage they inflicted. I remember a Jeremy Peat-Ernst and Young-convened meeting on 17 June 2010 on the crisis at the New Club at which none of the above turned up. Bill was imminently expected but didn’t materialise.
In ‘Broonland’ (Verso, 2010) I had examined the peculiar socio-economic life that then expired, finding the value of the Mack-Kerner thesis as a tool to analyse the lawless roads of international finance. It increasingly enlivens the responsible bits of the Financial Times but figures nowhere in the dour pages of contemporary Scots social, economic or legal analysis.
I write against the background collapse of serious Scottish print journalism, involving not just the Hootsmon-Herald fall but the rise of PR and political ‘spin’ masquerading as reportage: google the study Dr Aeron Davis of Goldsmith’s College made of this contagion in Opendemocracy. Having thrown out a hundredweight of such promotional bumph from my Holyrood office, I still have the same amount to sift through as raw material.
There may be a functional way out of the media crisis through copying the ‘quality regional’ press that 60% of Germans read, just as we could copy their public and mutual banks. Douce bourgeois prototypes are to hand in Dundee, Aberdeen and Airdrie. We should be trying – now – to grasp how this works. Creditably, Bill still publishes Allan Massie, Peter Jones, George Kerevan, Alf Young, and feisty ladies like Joyce MacMillan, Lesley Riddoch and Erikka Askeland; but, alas, his political staff seems limited to young men playing about with the statistical tautologies of John Curtice, uninstructed about how Holyrood or Scotland actually work. Remember them analysing the SNP collapse back in January, Bill? Do you really read what McTernan, Hassan, Kelly and Monteith write, Bill? To claim that a copy of ‘Der Speigel’ or Die Zeit’ is more relevant to Scotland than a month of the broadsheets or a decade of the tabloids isn’t exaggerating: these weeklies consciously live in an industrial, federal democracy and the conventions it has developed.
V The four-wheel drive of the Apocalypse
And here we get to the nub of the question, endlessly repeated in Bill’s columns: Trust the rich. Trust the Land of the Free. Trust the market. Trust the four-wheel drive of the Apocalypse. To this last, shoogliest, column a possible response of David Hume from his corner shrine at Hootsmon Hoose might be ‘Bloody Hell!’.
The American demand for hydrocarbon to fuel its ‘military-industrial complex’ – thank you President Eisenhower! – unknown in 1776, is insatiable, intolerant of carbon footprint considerations, and now quite impossible to service. It is twice that of Europe/Japan at 300 gigajoules per capita, six times greater than China: the engine of the West’s destruction.
Urban America might swerve round the guillotine of peak oil. Exurban America – ‘Greater Springfield’ – hasn’t a cat’s chance. Even the eupeptic Ed Glaeser, the maddest of ‘Wendy’s Wise Men’ six years back, no longer believes ‘sprawl is good’. So in the present scenario Bible-thumping Republicans have found themselves tied to Koran-thumping Saudi Wahabis on one side, and the Leninist capitalists of Beijing on the other, while the folk of America are increasingly unemployed, inefficient and indebted.
In the home of the free market the state, traditional owner of docks, airports, urban transit, rail passenger services, now owns General Motors itself. A slogan maybe for Homer Simpson – the Tam o’ Shanter of the 20th century – ‘Two legs good, four wheels better’ sums up the mounting mess, and alas motorised Scotland (see Stirling Cooncil, above) is already half-way down that yellow brick road to nowhere.
Cometh the hour, cometh the useful idiot: Bill’s Mephisto and Scotland’s most embarrassing historian since the imperially-delirious John Adam Cramb. Step forward Niall Ferguson, as indeed he has has already done in column after column of the Thoughts of the Managing Editor. But ‘Civilisation: The West Versus the Rest’ (Penguin, 2011) like so many ‘best-seller’ brands, is prefabricated, ‘scientifically-managed’, derivative, its ‘intellectual’ content pasted-in. Contrast this with Edmund Wilson’s ‘To the Finland Station’ (1940) and weep.
VI Sinister Interests
Which may explain why Bill feels threatened by an ageing scribbler ‘up at the villa’ for good, like the man in the Browning poem – certainly if the Hootsmon manages to keep the Borders railwayless, as a happy valley/gated community for the bankers. My advice? To go back to that eminent Victorian law reformer Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the friend of Browning and Thomas Carlyle. He based the policing of the economy on the Benthamite principle of the greatest good and, if it were infringed by sinister interests, wanted to wreak ‘juridical vengeance’, carried out by special commission and the full force of the criminal law.
Earlier this month the Scotsman carried an interview with Alistair Darling, who discovered Sir Fred Goodwin on his doorstep in December 2007, carrying a panettone (Italian cake, roughly the size of a human head) and worrying about his bank’s liquidity. Now the RBS had all the high-heid-yins of the city, Treasury, Inland Revenue, EU, etc on its board; which suggests that it wasn’t a safety mechanism but more of a ‘sinister interest’. This was the start of a farce so black even Saki couldn’t have written it.
Against this backdrop: our non-industrial economy, the casino economics of investment banking taught as scientific truth, and the capricious disordering of law by such non-taxpayers as the family Murdoch, the Benthamite principles of ‘rigidity and ferocity’ have their place. Having property confiscated and being banged up with unpleasant people in Barlinnie, Addiewell, Shotts, etc, might make fancy financiers and their confederates think twice.
If this is what really scares Bill about your man, fair enough. I can offer him in return the oldest advice in the journalist’s book: ‘Always check your references’ and let’s leave it at that.
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
to mankind are about
to happen simultaneously
The Cafe 2
Let them exchange shirts
John Brown
What are we to make
of the Not Proven verdict
in the Wilson case?
The Cafe 3
Jeanette and me
Barbara Millar
The heroic sculptor
who refused to move
to London
John Cameron
Can’t Add, Doesn’t Even Try
22.09.11
No. 455
Gus Skinner
Midgie, unless her or his full name is actually The Midgie, is quite right to decry the spread of plurals. It resonated for me with a small piece on radio today about our failure to achieve good maths (or should that be math?) education for children across the UK. In a hotly contested debate one mathe-matician was, from her tone, passionate that data was a plural form. I have always thought so myself, or selves if you want to call me The Gus. And Midgie, and her or his counterparts, are right – sloppy slips have been an odd irritant, but why?
Words and punctuation are signs to meaning, don’t you think? That is their purpose and that is why they matter, not for themselves. It doesn’t matter how incompre-hensible to those of us over 25 we find the texting of young people. We may be jealous of their facility but we should perhaps be more jealous of their commitment to fidelity in long-term relationships. So here’s an equation. Learning only happens 32 weeks a year. The rest of the time we do something else; it used to be harvesting – corn, potatoes and fruit. Now children learn all the time.
Does such an equation matter? I think so. The major problem as we seek to integrate health, social care and eduction is that health and social care work in a culture that is 24/7/365, while education seeks to work in a culture of 6/5/180. I did and do highly value my teachers yet surely we need a new model. As the now defunct SCF said a decade ago the Victorian factory model of education will simply not serve. And, yes, health and social care face equal earthquakes.
A few years ago when I left my beloved Scotland for a while, one of the last things I saw was a Newsnight interview, carefully conducted, in which a director of education and a Catholic bishop debated why in the end this new school, combining with others, could not be opened. It seemed to boil down to the idea that, whilst everything else was agreed, there had not been agreement on sharing staff toilets.
Well, are we serious about creating our future? About merging services and about ending the scourge of sectarianism, by no means only in the west? Well done, SR, for its campaign and well done The Midgie for attention to detail. Pluralities, changing how words are used, and how services are organised, is what we have to deal with. (Well, tell me Midgie, should that be is or are?)
The Midgie replies: Are
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
Dusseldorf daze:
or the world
of Bill Jamieson
Christopher Harvie
I Who is Bill Jamieson and why is he saying these terrible things about me?
‘You never knew what would pop into his (Harvie’s) head, or indeed the point he was making, even after he had made it at great length.’ My fate at Bill’s hands seemed, at first glance, roughly par for the experience of academics with our fourth estate – and even in the SR Cafe – where in Scottish mediaspeak the title ‘professor’ must carry the collocation ‘nutty’, just as every dodgy road or office scheme must be ‘iconic’. But wait a minute …
Were I that abstruse, would I be revising ‘No Gods and Precious Few Heroes’ (1981) for its fifth edition, preparing a second edition of the ‘Oxford Floating Commonwealth’ (2002), and seeing my ‘Atlantic history’ ‘Floating Commonwealth’ (Oxford, 2008) called ‘a rich and varied pleasure’ by the ‘American Historical Review’? In the interstices of looking after my 93-year-old parents, and correcting student essays from Germany, I’m also completing a novel about the grandeur and decline of Clyde industry, and a memoir of the 2007-11 parliament, notionally called ‘The Last Free Spirit’. Do you get that (now vanished) gong for being obscure?
And if the Scotsman’s executive editor is that sharp, why is its circulation sinking faster than the Titanic?
II The MSP for Germany
So it’s not quite ‘Him write a buik? – Ah kent his faither!’. time. And we must tak’ tent of Bill’s bizarre obsession with Dusseldorf. I have visited this fine city three times; it is 300 miles away from Tuebingen. Bill’s geography would put Grantham next door to Joppa.
Land Baden-Wuerttemberg, my home between 1980-2007, with manufacturing at 35% of GDP, is Europe’s most successful region. If I have tried to get some EET committee witnesses to make and sell the useful things Scots can invent, instead of throwing their savings at Homer Simpson, then I’ve been infected by the Swabians’ inventive work ethic: they still compare themselves to the Scots, even if our manufacturing is now 14% of GDP. Industrial success is helped by a public transport strategy. In Tuebingen only a third drive to work; a further third walk or bike, the rest go by bus or train and in a few years by tram, which BaWue does brilliantly (the figures for Stirling Council employees were 82%, 11%, 6%, if you can bear to know).
Dusseldorf, though, was where a director of the utility giant EoN welcomed that same EET committee in 2010 by producing his copy of ‘Fool’s Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil’ (Penguin, 1994) and asking me to sign it. At a meeting of Scottish Engineering at Holyrood no-one had heard of the book, let alone read it. Or think about the ‘Official History of North Sea Oil’, begun in 1994, slated for 2000, and due at last on 14 September.
III Read the Evidence
So much for the witticisms. But had I actually waffled? So I googled the on-line ‘Official Report of Sessions’ for the minutes of the Economy, Energy, and Transport (EET) Committee. In two meetings – 2009 no. 25 (30 September) and 2010 no 26 (29 September) I coincided with Bill.
In the first I quizzed Robert Peston of the BBC about his optimistic estimate of property boom-bust damage: losses of £ 13 billion. He admitted this as ‘a mistake’ subsequently corrected to ‘probably trillions’. Then I questioned Bill on how Scottish banking and business leaders allowed their debt creation to go completely beyond legal restraint. For the boards of HBOS and RBS ‘moral hazard’ was a euphemism for ‘shadow banking’ – between ‘robust business practice’ and outright financial criminality – created by computers, tax havens, and multi-national concerns. This thesis had been presented to the Council of Europe in 1975 by the Glasgow University sociologist John A Mack and the Tuebingen criminologist Hans-Juergen Kerner, in their prophetic – though in Scotland unread – report ‘The Crime Industry’.
The second meeting on 29 September 2010 was more technical, about our problem family of development quangos and the vital renewable energy campaign. Discussing technics in a deindustrialised nation means describing it, but the quangos could help create pump-storage projects to conserve irregular supplies of wind- or wave-generated power from offshore fields. New technology had pushed PS efficiency from 58% to 90%, opening up a new future for many hydro schemes.
I owed such information to talks arranged by former students with HQ personnel at Voith-Heidenheim, the world’s largest turbine builder, and with my colleague Professor Peter Frankenberg, formerly the CDU research and universities minister of BaWue, twice my guest at Holyrood.
In both cases, little correspondence with the Jamieson version.
My Scottish Tory friends have dropped their ‘Chris Harvie: MSP for Germany’ line. David McAlister became CDU minister-president of Lower Saxony in May 2010. A Scots Tory running a land with roughly Scotland’s GDP is the tribe’s first success in decades.
Bill might revive the Hanover connection, 1715-1837, through two bicentenaries: the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales’ (1812) and their friend Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ (1814). Both were key contributions to conservative European social thought through Carl-Friedrich von Savigny, James Lorimer, Max Weber, etc: rather healthier, these days, than the ‘light touch’ market mysticism of his own symposium Scotland’s Ten Tomorrows (2006).
IV ‘Greater Grossartia’
As to elites, Bill on ‘Greater Grossartia’ seemed a re-run of Thomas Balogh on the ‘English Establishment’ in 1959. It was cultivated, well-connected, socially assertive – but was it any good?
John Kay remarked over a Holyrood lunch in July 2010 that unless the bankers were forcibly reformed, the cash they had got from us via Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown in 2008 would slosh into yet more risky speculation. Sir Angus Grossart popped up to compare minor vandalism to Sir Fred Goodwin’s car to Hitler’s vicious anti-Semitic Reichskristallnacht (1938). A proportionate response?
Three years have passed and those responsible for our ‘pinstripe Darien’ – Goodwin, Crosby, Cummings, Hornby, MacKillop, Stevenson – haven’t been comprehensively questioned, let alone made to repair any of the vast damage they inflicted. I remember a Jeremy Peat-Ernst and Young-convened meeting on 17 June 2010 on the crisis at the New Club at which none of the above turned up. Bill was imminently expected but didn’t materialise.
In ‘Broonland’ (Verso, 2010) I had examined the peculiar socio-economic life that then expired, finding the value of the Mack-Kerner thesis as a tool to analyse the lawless roads of international finance. It increasingly enlivens the responsible bits of the Financial Times but figures nowhere in the dour pages of contemporary Scots social, economic or legal analysis.
I write against the background collapse of serious Scottish print journalism, involving not just the Hootsmon-Herald fall but the rise of PR and political ‘spin’ masquerading as reportage: google the study Dr Aeron Davis of Goldsmith’s College made of this contagion in Opendemocracy. Having thrown out a hundredweight of such promotional bumph from my Holyrood office, I still have the same amount to sift through as raw material.
There may be a functional way out of the media crisis through copying the ‘quality regional’ press that 60% of Germans read, just as we could copy their public and mutual banks. Douce bourgeois prototypes are to hand in Dundee, Aberdeen and Airdrie. We should be trying – now – to grasp how this works. Creditably, Bill still publishes Allan Massie, Peter Jones, George Kerevan, Alf Young, and feisty ladies like Joyce MacMillan, Lesley Riddoch and Erikka Askeland; but, alas, his political staff seems limited to young men playing about with the statistical tautologies of John Curtice, uninstructed about how Holyrood or Scotland actually work. Remember them analysing the SNP collapse back in January, Bill? Do you really read what McTernan, Hassan, Kelly and Monteith write, Bill? To claim that a copy of ‘Der Speigel’ or Die Zeit’ is more relevant to Scotland than a month of the broadsheets or a decade of the tabloids isn’t exaggerating: these weeklies consciously live in an industrial, federal democracy and the conventions it has developed.
V The four-wheel drive of the Apocalypse
And here we get to the nub of the question, endlessly repeated in Bill’s columns: Trust the rich. Trust the Land of the Free. Trust the market. Trust the four-wheel drive of the Apocalypse. To this last, shoogliest, column a possible response of David Hume from his corner shrine at Hootsmon Hoose might be ‘Bloody Hell!’.
The American demand for hydrocarbon to fuel its ‘military-industrial complex’ – thank you President Eisenhower! – unknown in 1776, is insatiable, intolerant of carbon footprint considerations, and now quite impossible to service. It is twice that of Europe/Japan at 300 gigajoules per capita, six times greater than China: the engine of the West’s destruction.
Urban America might swerve round the guillotine of peak oil. Exurban America – ‘Greater Springfield’ – hasn’t a cat’s chance. Even the eupeptic Ed Glaeser, the maddest of ‘Wendy’s Wise Men’ six years back, no longer believes ‘sprawl is good’. So in the present scenario Bible-thumping Republicans have found themselves tied to Koran-thumping Saudi Wahabis on one side, and the Leninist capitalists of Beijing on the other, while the folk of America are increasingly unemployed, inefficient and indebted.
In the home of the free market the state, traditional owner of docks, airports, urban transit, rail passenger services, now owns General Motors itself. A slogan maybe for Homer Simpson – the Tam o’ Shanter of the 20th century – ‘Two legs good, four wheels better’ sums up the mounting mess, and alas motorised Scotland (see Stirling Cooncil, above) is already half-way down that yellow brick road to nowhere.
Cometh the hour, cometh the useful idiot: Bill’s Mephisto and Scotland’s most embarrassing historian since the imperially-delirious John Adam Cramb. Step forward Niall Ferguson, as indeed he has has already done in column after column of the Thoughts of the Managing Editor. But ‘Civilisation: The West Versus the Rest’ (Penguin, 2011) like so many ‘best-seller’ brands, is prefabricated, ‘scientifically-managed’, derivative, its ‘intellectual’ content pasted-in. Contrast this with Edmund Wilson’s ‘To the Finland Station’ (1940) and weep.
VI Sinister Interests
Which may explain why Bill feels threatened by an ageing scribbler ‘up at the villa’ for good, like the man in the Browning poem – certainly if the Hootsmon manages to keep the Borders railwayless, as a happy valley/gated community for the bankers. My advice? To go back to that eminent Victorian law reformer Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the friend of Browning and Thomas Carlyle. He based the policing of the economy on the Benthamite principle of the greatest good and, if it were infringed by sinister interests, wanted to wreak ‘juridical vengeance’, carried out by special commission and the full force of the criminal law.
Earlier this month the Scotsman carried an interview with Alistair Darling, who discovered Sir Fred Goodwin on his doorstep in December 2007, carrying a panettone (Italian cake, roughly the size of a human head) and worrying about his bank’s liquidity. Now the RBS had all the high-heid-yins of the city, Treasury, Inland Revenue, EU, etc on its board; which suggests that it wasn’t a safety mechanism but more of a ‘sinister interest’. This was the start of a farce so black even Saki couldn’t have written it.
Against this backdrop: our non-industrial economy, the casino economics of investment banking taught as scientific truth, and the capricious disordering of law by such non-taxpayers as the family Murdoch, the Benthamite principles of ‘rigidity and ferocity’ have their place. Having property confiscated and being banged up with unpleasant people in Barlinnie, Addiewell, Shotts, etc, might make fancy financiers and their confederates think twice.
If this is what really scares Bill about your man, fair enough. I can offer him in return the oldest advice in the journalist’s book: ‘Always check your references’ and let’s leave it at that.
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
22.09.11
No. 455
Gus SkinnerWords and punctuation are signs to meaning, don’t you think? That is their purpose and that is why they matter, not for themselves. It doesn’t matter how incompre-hensible to those of us over 25 we find the texting of young people. We may be jealous of their facility but we should perhaps be more jealous of their commitment to fidelity in long-term relationships. So here’s an equation. Learning only happens 32 weeks a year. The rest of the time we do something else; it used to be harvesting – corn, potatoes and fruit. Now children learn all the time.
Does such an equation matter? I think so. The major problem as we seek to integrate health, social care and eduction is that health and social care work in a culture that is 24/7/365, while education seeks to work in a culture of 6/5/180. I did and do highly value my teachers yet surely we need a new model. As the now defunct SCF said a decade ago the Victorian factory model of education will simply not serve. And, yes, health and social care face equal earthquakes.
A few years ago when I left my beloved Scotland for a while, one of the last things I saw was a Newsnight interview, carefully conducted, in which a director of education and a Catholic bishop debated why in the end this new school, combining with others, could not be opened. It seemed to boil down to the idea that, whilst everything else was agreed, there had not been agreement on sharing staff toilets.
Well, are we serious about creating our future? About merging services and about ending the scourge of sectarianism, by no means only in the west? Well done, SR, for its campaign and well done The Midgie for attention to detail. Pluralities, changing how words are used, and how services are organised, is what we have to deal with. (Well, tell me Midgie, should that be is or are?)
Here are examples of our journalism:
Christopher Harvie
Were I that abstruse, would I be revising ‘No Gods and Precious Few Heroes’ (1981) for its fifth edition, preparing a second edition of the ‘Oxford Floating Commonwealth’ (2002), and seeing my ‘Atlantic history’ ‘Floating Commonwealth’ (Oxford, 2008) called ‘a rich and varied pleasure’ by the ‘American Historical Review’? In the interstices of looking after my 93-year-old parents, and correcting student essays from Germany, I’m also completing a novel about the grandeur and decline of Clyde industry, and a memoir of the 2007-11 parliament, notionally called ‘The Last Free Spirit’. Do you get that (now vanished) gong for being obscure?
And if the Scotsman’s executive editor is that sharp, why is its circulation sinking faster than the Titanic?
Land Baden-Wuerttemberg, my home between 1980-2007, with manufacturing at 35% of GDP, is Europe’s most successful region. If I have tried to get some EET committee witnesses to make and sell the useful things Scots can invent, instead of throwing their savings at Homer Simpson, then I’ve been infected by the Swabians’ inventive work ethic: they still compare themselves to the Scots, even if our manufacturing is now 14% of GDP. Industrial success is helped by a public transport strategy. In Tuebingen only a third drive to work; a further third walk or bike, the rest go by bus or train and in a few years by tram, which BaWue does brilliantly (the figures for Stirling Council employees were 82%, 11%, 6%, if you can bear to know).
Dusseldorf, though, was where a director of the utility giant EoN welcomed that same EET committee in 2010 by producing his copy of ‘Fool’s Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil’ (Penguin, 1994) and asking me to sign it. At a meeting of Scottish Engineering at Holyrood no-one had heard of the book, let alone read it. Or think about the ‘Official History of North Sea Oil’, begun in 1994, slated for 2000, and due at last on 14 September.
In the first I quizzed Robert Peston of the BBC about his optimistic estimate of property boom-bust damage: losses of £ 13 billion. He admitted this as ‘a mistake’ subsequently corrected to ‘probably trillions’. Then I questioned Bill on how Scottish banking and business leaders allowed their debt creation to go completely beyond legal restraint. For the boards of HBOS and RBS ‘moral hazard’ was a euphemism for ‘shadow banking’ – between ‘robust business practice’ and outright financial criminality – created by computers, tax havens, and multi-national concerns. This thesis had been presented to the Council of Europe in 1975 by the Glasgow University sociologist John A Mack and the Tuebingen criminologist Hans-Juergen Kerner, in their prophetic – though in Scotland unread – report ‘The Crime Industry’.
The second meeting on 29 September 2010 was more technical, about our problem family of development quangos and the vital renewable energy campaign. Discussing technics in a deindustrialised nation means describing it, but the quangos could help create pump-storage projects to conserve irregular supplies of wind- or wave-generated power from offshore fields. New technology had pushed PS efficiency from 58% to 90%, opening up a new future for many hydro schemes.
I owed such information to talks arranged by former students with HQ personnel at Voith-Heidenheim, the world’s largest turbine builder, and with my colleague Professor Peter Frankenberg, formerly the CDU research and universities minister of BaWue, twice my guest at Holyrood.
In both cases, little correspondence with the Jamieson version.
My Scottish Tory friends have dropped their ‘Chris Harvie: MSP for Germany’ line. David McAlister became CDU minister-president of Lower Saxony in May 2010. A Scots Tory running a land with roughly Scotland’s GDP is the tribe’s first success in decades.
Bill might revive the Hanover connection, 1715-1837, through two bicentenaries: the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales’ (1812) and their friend Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ (1814). Both were key contributions to conservative European social thought through Carl-Friedrich von Savigny, James Lorimer, Max Weber, etc: rather healthier, these days, than the ‘light touch’ market mysticism of his own symposium Scotland’s Ten Tomorrows (2006).
John Kay remarked over a Holyrood lunch in July 2010 that unless the bankers were forcibly reformed, the cash they had got from us via Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown in 2008 would slosh into yet more risky speculation. Sir Angus Grossart popped up to compare minor vandalism to Sir Fred Goodwin’s car to Hitler’s vicious anti-Semitic Reichskristallnacht (1938). A proportionate response?
Three years have passed and those responsible for our ‘pinstripe Darien’ – Goodwin, Crosby, Cummings, Hornby, MacKillop, Stevenson – haven’t been comprehensively questioned, let alone made to repair any of the vast damage they inflicted. I remember a Jeremy Peat-Ernst and Young-convened meeting on 17 June 2010 on the crisis at the New Club at which none of the above turned up. Bill was imminently expected but didn’t materialise.
In ‘Broonland’ (Verso, 2010) I had examined the peculiar socio-economic life that then expired, finding the value of the Mack-Kerner thesis as a tool to analyse the lawless roads of international finance. It increasingly enlivens the responsible bits of the Financial Times but figures nowhere in the dour pages of contemporary Scots social, economic or legal analysis.
I write against the background collapse of serious Scottish print journalism, involving not just the Hootsmon-Herald fall but the rise of PR and political ‘spin’ masquerading as reportage: google the study Dr Aeron Davis of Goldsmith’s College made of this contagion in Opendemocracy. Having thrown out a hundredweight of such promotional bumph from my Holyrood office, I still have the same amount to sift through as raw material.
There may be a functional way out of the media crisis through copying the ‘quality regional’ press that 60% of Germans read, just as we could copy their public and mutual banks. Douce bourgeois prototypes are to hand in Dundee, Aberdeen and Airdrie. We should be trying – now – to grasp how this works. Creditably, Bill still publishes Allan Massie, Peter Jones, George Kerevan, Alf Young, and feisty ladies like Joyce MacMillan, Lesley Riddoch and Erikka Askeland; but, alas, his political staff seems limited to young men playing about with the statistical tautologies of John Curtice, uninstructed about how Holyrood or Scotland actually work. Remember them analysing the SNP collapse back in January, Bill? Do you really read what McTernan, Hassan, Kelly and Monteith write, Bill? To claim that a copy of ‘Der Speigel’ or Die Zeit’ is more relevant to Scotland than a month of the broadsheets or a decade of the tabloids isn’t exaggerating: these weeklies consciously live in an industrial, federal democracy and the conventions it has developed.
The American demand for hydrocarbon to fuel its ‘military-industrial complex’ – thank you President Eisenhower! – unknown in 1776, is insatiable, intolerant of carbon footprint considerations, and now quite impossible to service. It is twice that of Europe/Japan at 300 gigajoules per capita, six times greater than China: the engine of the West’s destruction.
Urban America might swerve round the guillotine of peak oil. Exurban America – ‘Greater Springfield’ – hasn’t a cat’s chance. Even the eupeptic Ed Glaeser, the maddest of ‘Wendy’s Wise Men’ six years back, no longer believes ‘sprawl is good’. So in the present scenario Bible-thumping Republicans have found themselves tied to Koran-thumping Saudi Wahabis on one side, and the Leninist capitalists of Beijing on the other, while the folk of America are increasingly unemployed, inefficient and indebted.
In the home of the free market the state, traditional owner of docks, airports, urban transit, rail passenger services, now owns General Motors itself. A slogan maybe for Homer Simpson – the Tam o’ Shanter of the 20th century – ‘Two legs good, four wheels better’ sums up the mounting mess, and alas motorised Scotland (see Stirling Cooncil, above) is already half-way down that yellow brick road to nowhere.
Cometh the hour, cometh the useful idiot: Bill’s Mephisto and Scotland’s most embarrassing historian since the imperially-delirious John Adam Cramb. Step forward Niall Ferguson, as indeed he has has already done in column after column of the Thoughts of the Managing Editor. But ‘Civilisation: The West Versus the Rest’ (Penguin, 2011) like so many ‘best-seller’ brands, is prefabricated, ‘scientifically-managed’, derivative, its ‘intellectual’ content pasted-in. Contrast this with Edmund Wilson’s ‘To the Finland Station’ (1940) and weep.
Earlier this month the Scotsman carried an interview with Alistair Darling, who discovered Sir Fred Goodwin on his doorstep in December 2007, carrying a panettone (Italian cake, roughly the size of a human head) and worrying about his bank’s liquidity. Now the RBS had all the high-heid-yins of the city, Treasury, Inland Revenue, EU, etc on its board; which suggests that it wasn’t a safety mechanism but more of a ‘sinister interest’. This was the start of a farce so black even Saki couldn’t have written it.
Against this backdrop: our non-industrial economy, the casino economics of investment banking taught as scientific truth, and the capricious disordering of law by such non-taxpayers as the family Murdoch, the Benthamite principles of ‘rigidity and ferocity’ have their place. Having property confiscated and being banged up with unpleasant people in Barlinnie, Addiewell, Shotts, etc, might make fancy financiers and their confederates think twice.
If this is what really scares Bill about your man, fair enough. I can offer him in return the oldest advice in the journalist’s book: ‘Always check your references’ and let’s leave it at that.
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
