All places on the programme are free, except the cost of travel to and from the venue.
The event will include debate on issues of the day, dialogue with guest speakers, and the presentation by each delegate of a short paper on a subject of their own choice.
If you are eligible for the programme and interested in taking part, or know anyone who might be interested, please contact Islay McLeod on her usual email address:
islay@scottishreview.net
and she will send you further details.
The banner
A season of protest
and uprising
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Arthur Bell
on the persecution
of his father
Robin McMillan
on a remarkable
pilgrimage to Scotland
Yes, it’s them
Reading Gerry Hassan’s article (21 March) in which Ruth Wishart is viewed as a metaphor of a ‘complacent liberal elite’, I wondered if he was being ironic. Probably not. Irony is on the long list of things that the Scottish left does not do.
Ms Wishart is a long time Labour supporter, like Gerry Hassan; a convert to supporting independence, like Gerry Hassan; a supporter of secular, socially liberal values, like Gerry Hassan; a well-kent face and voice on the BBC and Scotsman, like Gerry Hassan; a member of the well-connected, unelected Scottish elite, like Gerry Hassan.
She is also part of a Scotland which ‘prefers talk to action’. Up to a point, Mr Hassan. As part of the McCluskey expert group, Ruth Wishart has come up with proposals which, if implemented, will constitute ‘taking action’ in a very serious way. I, for one, would prefer that, on this occasion, she stuck to talking.
I find it strange to read a journalist/commentator taking this line of attack. Talk and writing are their stock in trade. You do not expect them to put your car through its MOT. Where Scotland’s commentariat falls down is not in its talk but in the paucity and narrow band width of ideas. It is not just Ruth Wishart and Gerry Hassan who sing from a near identical hymn sheet, so do Joyce McMillan, Ian Bell and a host of others. There are slight variations. Only Gerry Hassan got so carried away that he was talking of a ‘Scottish spring’ when the SNP won in the Scottish parliamentary elections of 2011.
In the Scotsman, Gerry Hassan said that: ‘What is urgently required is a debate on the detail, potential and vision of what self-government is and what it can achieve’. It is not stretching things too much to say that holding such a debate has been the Scotsman’s raison d’etre for the past 35 years.
For 20 years, till the late 1990s, we were told that devolution would allow ‘Scottish solutions to Scottish problems’ and then that devolution was the ‘settled will of the Scottish people’. Unhappily, half of them do not care enough to vote in the elections for the Scottish Parliament. As it became clear that the Scottish Parliament wasn’t amounting to much, the solution became – according to taste – devo-max or independence. The last mentioned being a pseudo-independence where we keep the pound sterling, the Queen, the BBC and who knows what else?
Living in a working-class area, I have always felt that the talking heads who dominate Newsnight Scotland are almost entirely detached from the concerns of those in the area where I live. Almost as disconnected as the Free Kirk General Assembly, with the difference that the Free Kirk is sufficiently self-aware to know that most Scots do not subscribe to its views.
Ironically, this point was made on Newsnight Scotland a few weeks back by Professor John Haldane. He noted that although only 2% of Scots adults read the Scotsman and Herald, Newsnight Scotland works on the basis that this group is representative of Scotland. He went on to suggest that this group – himself included – put people off politics. Ironically, his fellow guest did not disagree; that was Gerry Hassan.
SR is having a short break over Easter and will return
on Tuesday 9 April
