Rob A Mackenzie
There is indeed an alternative to the Hi-Arts conference in the name of Norman MacCaig. Here in Assynt we are celebrating Norman’s centenary with a week of walks, talks, art and ceilidhing from 5-13 November.
A host of local people who remember him well, love his poetry or share his passion for ‘this most beautiful corner of the land’ will be paying tribute. We’ll be welcoming many guests from around the country – including Liz Lochhead, Alan Taylor, Alan Riach, Sandy Moffat.
How I laughed and almost cried at Kenneth Roy’s MacCaig piece. I had the privilege of spending a day with MacCaig when we invited down to Carrick Academy to speak to the kids in the summer of 1991.
I am planning a poetry reading event (small scale) in Waxy O’Connor’s in Glasgow on Sunday the 14th, along the lines of the alternative event Kenneth describes his article. Absolutely no formalities!
Bill Boyd
On 18 October, Norman MacCaig’s poetry was presented in a new form when ‘Poems for Angus’, a setting of six of his elegies for A K MacLeod by a young Scottish composer, Stuart MacRae, was given its world première at a lunchtime recital in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
The work was commissioned in memory of Angus McIntosh (1914-2005), professor of English language at the University of Edinburgh, and one of the founders of the School of Scottish Studies. The first line of one of the poems set by MacRae, ‘He went through a company like a lamplighter’ (Praise of a Man) might have been written for him.
The composer was born and raised in Inverness, and studied music at Durham University and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. In his programme notes, MacRae described the full series of ‘Poems for Angus’ (published by MacCaig under that title in ‘The Equal Skies’, 1983) as ‘a kind of diary of loss and recovery’.
In some of his settings he sought ‘to amplify or resonate the power of the text’, in others ‘to illustrate the situations and character’ as he imagined them behind the text.
The work – brilliantly sung by Susan Bickley (mezzo-soprano) and played by Min-Jung Kym (piano), with Sergey Levitin, Konstantin Boyarsky, Christopher Vanderspar and Tony Hougham (strings) – was enthusiastically received by a packed audience. Everyone in my party felt it was a powerful and moving realisation of MacCaig’s text.
Karina Williamson
Excellent article on Norman MacCaig by Kenneth Roy. We are holding a poems and pints night in The Kay Park Tavern, Kilmarnock, tonight at 8pm. You are welcome to come.
Sandy Morton
Well, that was last Thursday, but we hope it
went well
Dorothy-Grace Elder
This revelation may not please SNP activists, already upset with abandonment of the referendum in the current parliament after nine years of it being SNP policy.
Torrance fleshes out, in alarming detail, how the Scottish Lib Dems refused to discuss a coalition when Salmond won power in 2007 unless he dropped his referendum plan before they met.
Torrance highlights the frantic phone calls between Salmond and the then Holyrood Lib Dem leader Nicol Stephen. ‘Alex again said he couldn’t agree to preconditions before formal talks,’ recalled one of those present, ‘but if he was to drop the referendum (Salmond said this more than once) he would be prepared to take a revised position to his party’s national council. Alex Salmond was not saying the referendum was non-negotiable. He was willing to talk about the referendum. It wasn’t clear what that consisted of but he was willing.’
This revelation may not please SNP activists, already upset with abandonment of the referendum in the current parliament after nine years of it being SNP policy. Many activists wanted it debated and officially recorded that the Unionist parties had ‘denied Scotland a voice’. But all this sets in focus what’s basically the Scottish cringe Salmond has fought against for decades.
Just three years after the Scottish Lib Dems refused mere talks unless the referendum was ditched in advance, the UK Lib Dems leapt into bed with the Conservatives, agreed a referendum in Wales and a UK referendum on AV, the PR system the Lib Dems least favour. Yet a Scottish quid pro quo is still taboo. I’d say this would be logical only to someone with a few squirrels loose in the attic.
Torrance interviewed some Salmond ex-staffers, a few of whom had suffered ‘train wreck’ bawlings out but most valued their time with him. ‘For those of us who were in the circle, it was great,’ recalled one of the chosen few. ‘We didn’t have much experience of how grown-ups operated and Alex made it very easy for us to learn and become more confident.’
Torrance sums up: ‘Salmond undoubtedly likes being surrounded by young, driven and, it has to be said, often star struck staffers.’ From what I saw, this is a Salmond weak point, extending to some over-ambitious younger politicians, people with little or no work experience in the grown-up world. The first Scottish Parliament set the tone for continuing divisions. It was a culture shock for those of us who had arrived as new SNP MSPs from years of disciplined and self-disciplined work in the outside world. The SNP group operated like a school playground of childish spites and bullying.
If there is a fault line in this author’s huge work, it’s one that almost every journalist makes: blaming only the political clash between fundamentalists for independence and devolutionists. But straight politics can be tackled. It’s at this point that the differences occur between what Torrance and other journalists saw from the outside and what it was like to be inside.
Non-cronies working hard on uncontroversial public issues had their efforts hit regularly, the bullies operating like kids kicking over sandcastles. As an insider, I saw that the taproot of all trouble was the poisonous atmosphere. I did not suffer from Salmond, indeed he was delighted when I won a 17% swing to the SNP in a Labour citadel in Glasgow’s east end and I genuinely admired his bountiful skills and charisma.
But he seemed unable to control his acolytes.
The group was rife with low-level dirty tricks and lacking any concept of fairness and normal discipline. Some could hardly get their heads up to attack Labour for spinning against Margo MacDonald and anyone else isolated as a target.
This book dismisses MacDonald as ‘unmanageable’; customary SNP spin. But I shared a Holyrood office with her, saw she was a diligent worker who was treated abominably and was the only ex-Westminster MP denied any role.
Some were intensely jealous of her public popularity.
Discipline was non-existent for a menagerie of pets, while I witnessed MacDonald being humiliated before a group meeting and getting two years punishment for missing a vote one day when she was unwell, despite saying her assistant had rung the whips. Yet Kenny MacAskill, who’d turned coat and ingratiated himself with Salmond, suffered nothing when the enterprise committee wrote attacking his absences.
When MacDonald’s condition of Parkinson’s was eventually leaked, she blamed ‘SNP snakes’ and ended her decades in the SNP. The stupidity of all this malevolence was that the SNP vote tumbled in Lothians, while, as Torrance points out, MacDonald as an Independent, ‘got enough votes to elect two Margos’.
The book edges closer to the atmosphere by quoting Campbell Martin, a Nationalist MSP who wrote in the Scotsman years before the SNP gained power about careerism and downplaying independence. Martin wrote:
‘The members of the devolved SNP administration would still be able to call themselves ministers and be ferried around in ministerial cars. It’s a simple way to further the careers of the very small number of MSPs who form the current leadership clique. Independence, unfortunately, comes a poor second in the current career path leadership strategy.’
Martin was actually expelled from the party for expressing this (common) view. Contrastingly, I was amazed that Salmond appeased ambitious cronies and failed to slap down egos. Immature spite fests ignored both party and public interest. Example: once Jamie Webster, shop steward at the Govan shipyard, rang me, as a Glasgow MSP, asking me to put in an oral question on the yard’s future at a time when hundreds of jobs were under threat.
As this book points out, Sturgeon is now ‘Salmond’s anointed successor’, but he has previous on blind spots – John Swinney had his fierce support as ‘the right person to lead the SNP’.
Gaining an ‘oral’ is actually rare, but the Govan question won through. Shortly before I was due to ask it, a regular message boy, whip MSP Brian Adam, appeared nervously at my desk. ‘I’ve come from Alex,’ he said. ‘He says "tell Dorothy she doesn’t need to do what I’m going to ask if she doesn’t want to"’ – a strange prefix. Do what? ‘Withdraw the Govan question,’ replied Adam. The ‘what!‘ My assistant and I could be heard in the Royal Mile. I was horrified – this was the only question on the shipyard that desperate week. Workers and families were waiting to know what the Scottish Executive replied to a question on their fate which their shop steward had initiated. It was already printed in the Holyrood Bulletin. Imagine the shame for the SNP if ‘question withdrawn’ was announced.
At Holyrood, people knew that Nicola Sturgeon regarded Govan as hers, long before she won the seat. But why did Salmond half pander to a sly ploy to stop that question by another Glasgow MSP? Why hadn’t he given a ‘go to hell’ message? I conveyed that message; asked the question in the chamber and got a surprisingly good pledge of support from the then Labour executive. Sturgeon got in with a supplementary – indicating SNP frantic lobbying for her as the parliament hardly ever lets two same-party MSPs ask ‘orals’ on the same subject. From that day, I wondered just how much strongman Salmond really was in charge.
As this book points out, Sturgeon is now ‘Salmond’s anointed successor’, but he has previous on blind spots – John Swinney had his fierce support as ‘the right person to lead the SNP’.
The Swinney years, ending in the loss of eight Holyrood seats, were worse for behaviour than under Salmond – yet many accused ‘The Daddy’ for setting the tone. Other parties dubbed the SNP ‘the nasties’. I resigned after repeated internal attempts to harm a campaign I started for Scotland’s 550,000 chronic pain sufferers. The only way to protect that work was to quit ‘Scotland’s party’ and become an Independent. In fact, three SNP MSPs, totalling over 80 years of party loyalty among us, quit the party in the first two parliaments. That’s an indicator that another book waits to be written. But, for detailed history of Scotland’s greatest modern fighter, Torrance’s work is a classic.
Dorothy-Grace Elder is a former SNP, later Independent,
MSP for Glasgow. She is a political columnist with the
Scottish Daily Express and has written and broadcast
in Scotland for many years
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web