‘Are there any
trees close
to your property?’
Vacancies
Fancy becoming a chair?
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
The Cafe
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My left-wing father,
who called George MacLeod
a patronising old fraud
John Cameron
The local Labour Party was then a broad church of pragmatic working-class progressives who would incorporate any useful idea without the sour doctrinal negativity of today. Yet even then it was difficult to work out where to put the growing underclass of welfare malingerers and problem families so that they would do the least harm to decent people. Spreading them throughout a housing estate created poisonous enclaves and tempting as the suggestion was to transport the lot to Australia, that option was no longer available. In the end little could be done bar accepting that ‘sink-estates’ of intractable families were inevitable and that the insane idea of tower blocks only made things worse.
There was a general consensus on most issues and some, such as education and policing, were ‘off-the-table’ so unlike today a chief constable could rely on political support. Though the post-war years were pretty depressing the fact was that each year things got better and by the turn of the 1960s it was true that many people had never had it so good. Returning servicemen gave the Kirk some exceptional ministers and the Billy Graham campaign helped the church to reach its highest-ever numbers in the 1950s. However it never worked out how to cope with television or the huge increase in both car ownership and working wives so that serious decline started in the mid-1960s.
The Kirk also developed a habit of following doubtful prophets up blind alleys as my father’s frequent clashes in the General Assembly with George MacLeod bore witness. Yet when he referred to MacLeod as a ‘patronising old fraud’, Andrew Herron gleefully observed that he would have caused less offence had he denied the divinity of Christ. The Kirk has never been a broad church in the Anglican sense and it has always had a pretty narrow ‘received’ position which only gradually changes across the generations.
My father was clearly seen as too ‘left-wing’ by the church of his day which preferred the ‘fellow-traveller’ warbling of a grandee like MacLeod to his genuine proletarian realism. Towards the end of his life he said the General Assembly had an undeserved reputation for prescience and that on almost every major modern issue it had been wrong. I thought that a rather harsh comment but across the last half-century I have noted its consistently poor judgement on everything from global warming to narcotics legislation.
He was highly articulate with vast experience of a working class rapidly exiting the Kirk, but for the General Assembly, the packaging was always more important than the message. At his crowded funeral, Labour politicians and ministers from the local presbytery were present but it passed without notice or regret at the Kirk’s George Street headquarters. To my amusement, some well-known members of Glasgow’s criminal fraternity arrived to say farewell to someone who had always been kind during their spells in prison.
It frightened some of the villagers but my mother was touched and he would certainly have been delighted by their presence – it would have been just his sort of thing.
