Hamish Henderson and Scotland:
a crucible of experiment
Tessa Ransford
on a prophetic
visionary
Get SR free in
your inbox three
times a week
Click here
Alistair Hayes,
Scotland’s runner-up Y0ung Thinker
of the Year,
writes in today’s SR
Click here
Lockerbie
An overview by Morag Kerr of the Justice for Megrahi Committee
Click here
SR Anthology 2012
Click here
The Cafe
The Cafe is our readers’ forum. Send your contribution to islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s banner
Near Commonwealth House (HQ of the Games) – just in case anyone goes hungry
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Skintland? The
schoolboy Economist
has a point
John Cameron
Alex Salmond’s famously thin skin was on view when he toured the studios to vent his spleen on the Economist’s spoof map of ‘Skintland’ heading a piece on independence. But the real purpose of his foot-stamping was to distract attention from the magazine’s analysis which took a serious look at his claims about a separate Scotland’s economy. Referring to Oban as Obankrupt and the western islands as Outer Cash, Pie in the Skye and Rock All is schoolboy humour but the economic content of the article is no joke.
The magazine, founded by a Scot in 1843, warned that our soaring welfare bill far surpasses that of England and that we have ‘one of Europe’s vulnerable, marginal economies’. It did not say the Scottish statelet must end up a bankrupt but it rightly argued the supposed advantages of separation are not as great as Salmond contends. And it is manifestly obvious to everyone except the most rabid nationalist that we will be more vulnerable to economic catastrophe than if we had stayed in the union.
Oil is a finite resource and if we claim a major share of the North Sea assets, we will have to take a major share of the liabilities, thereby cutting the value of future oil revenues. We have shale reserves to fill the gap but Salmond bet the house on renewables which rely on consumer subsidy and the inconvenient fact is that most consumers are English. Why would they remain willing to pay subsidies to a foreign country if, as seems likely, Eastern European pressure leads to the EU’s ‘climate-change’ targets being binned?
The future of Scotland’s financial services is clouded by the Icelandic and Irish ‘small-nation’ fiascos so that banks and insurers are likely to shift their headquarters to London. Much ridicule has been cast on the notion of the Airdrie Savings Bank running a Scots pound but staying with the pound sterling has its own (mini-euro) problems.
Alex Salmond’s zany economic rhetoric has not commended him to the Bank of England which is most unlikely to allow him any say in the fiscal management of sterling. Yet if a fiscal management agreement with the UK government cannot be agreed, inward investors and potential Scottish bond-holders will have no assurance of economic stability. The downside to such an agreement is the constraint it will place on Salmond’s freedom to set competitive tax rates – already blunted by the UK’s aim to reduce corporation tax.
Our predictably humourless reaction to schoolboy teasing must not be allowed to divert attention from the need for a serious debate in which economics have a key place. It is clear the SNP do not want such financial questions raised, but in the long run-up to the referendum Salmond demanded, they will appear frequently in reports and articles. By over-reacting in this ridiculous manner, he has shown such a manifest weakness that even the disunited and leaderless unionist opposition can hardly fail to exploit it.
The Guardian noted that Edinburgh’s 18th-century Enlightenment made it the ‘Athens of the North’ – the fear is that it will retain the description in the 21st century for financial reasons.
The Stübing Case – where a German brother and sister, who grew up separately, met as adults, fell in love and had four children – finally arrived before the Strasbourg court. Germany criminalises incest under a 500-year-old law so the brother was jailed but he appealed to the federal constitutional court which predictably upheld the law. What was not predicted, however, was the powerful dissension of the court’s vice-president Winfried Hasswemer, one of Germany’s most distinguished legal scholars.
The case went on to the European Court of Human Rights which loves to give controversial rulings but on this occasion its nerve failed and it supported Germany’s medieval laws. The case has provoked international debate because the incest taboo is not universal – in old Appalachia a virgin was defined as a girl who could run faster than her brothers. According to official census returns from Roman Egypt in the first three centuries CE, up to one third of all marriages in some districts were between brothers and sisters.
There has been a great deal of anthropological study of brother-sister marriage during this period and it is by far the most important documented exception to the incest taboo. It is clear that brother-sister unions played a major role in early human evolution and there is certainly no Egyptian evidence linking it to negative genetic effects or bad marriages.
Although illegal in many countries, Russia, China, Holland, Spain, France, Turkey and Israel have no legal prohibitions on consensual sex between an adult brother and sister. In fact a legal rationale for the prohibition of sibling incest is hard to find and the German lower court had referred to the potential damage to the structure of family life. This was not relevant in the Stübing case because no family unit had ever existed with the partners meeting as strangers, making the relationship one between consenting adults.
The constitutional court claimed that the prohibition of incest was rooted in ‘cultural history’ but the court cherry-picked evidence and some cultures are not greatly fussed about it. It also hinted at genetic diseases but that has overtones in Germany of Nazi eugenics and the evidence from Roman Egypt certainly does not support this speculative theory. In fact it is so difficult to make a legal case against sibling incest, the Strasbourg court was simply asked whether Germany was allowed to make such a law and it ruled it was.
I think that is an unsatisfactory result and that the debate should continue because genetic sexual attraction (GSA) exists and we need vaild reasons to criminalise the practice. GSA is rare between people raised together in early childhood due to a reverse sexual imprinting known as the Westermarck effect, which desensitises later sexual attraction. Yet with widespread artificial insemination and adoption, GSA is ever present because brothers and sisters reared separately tend to find each other highly sexually attractive.
Many will argue they find brother-sister sex repulsive but some heterosexuals find gay sex repulsive which is presumably the reason gay men used to be thrown into British jails.
John Cameron is a physicist and former Church of Scotland parish minister
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web