Jill Stephenson at Loch Duich
Quintin Jardine in Elie
Iain Macmillan in Gleneagles
Douglas Marr on Skye
Andrew McFadyen in Kilmarnock
R D Kernohan on Arran
David Torrance on Iona
Catherine Czerkawska at Loch Ken
Chris Holligan in Elie
Rose Galt in Girvan
Alex Wood on Arran
Andrew Hook in Glasgow
Alasdair McKillop in St Andrews
Sheila Hetherington on Arran
Anthony Seaton on Ben Nevis
Paul Cockburn at Loch Ness
Jackie Kemp in a taxi
Angus Skinner on Skye
The weekend edition of SR, normally published on Thursday, will be online on Friday. It will include an essay by Sophie Cooke on what it means to be a Scottish writer
Young Scot
Every year, the Scottish Review and its publisher, the Institute of Contemporary Scotland, makes an award to the person selected as Young Scot of the Year.
The award is in memory one of Scotland’s greatest journalists, Arnold Kemp (pictured above), former editor of the Herald, who was a source of inspiration and encouragement to many promising talents.
The title Young Scot of the Year is given in recognition of outstanding work by a man or woman, under the age of 35, living and working in Scotland. In the past, the award has been received by young people who have made a difference in their own community, or in the wider Scottish community. One year it was won by an innovative young businessman; another year by an asylum seeker.
This year we are keen to widen the range of nominations to include young people working in the arts, literature and the media.
If you know of someone who merits such an award – or if you would like to nominate yourself – please email Islay@scottishreview.net with your nomination and the reasons for it.
Nominations should be received no later than Friday 18 November and the result will be announced on St Andrews Day.
King John
and the headstone
in the corner
Kenneth Roy
Both MacCormick and Reid were men of their moments, warm, wildly romantic figures who caught the ear of their country in unique ways
at different times.
This petition, or covenant, was a phenomenon the like of which we have had never seen before and have not seen since – a highly organised, systematic campaign to win the support of the Scottish people for a parliament in Edinburgh. There were two million electors in Scotland and MacCormick’s team succeeded within six months in gaining the signatures of a million of them. The eventual number of supporters was two million: two-thirds of the Scottish electorate. The right-wing Scottish press did its malevolent best to discredit the petition, suggesting that some of the signatures were duplicated or forged and that others were of children. There was probably an element of truth in these claims, but not enough to detract from such a massive endorsement.
MacCormick’s insistence that the movement should transcend party politics was both its strength and its weakness. It enabled him to appeal to voters of all parties and none, enabling the articulation of a genuine national voice, but the movement failed to attract established politicians who could have translated its broad aspirations into practical politics. It was too easily dismissed as a pressure group: an extraordinarily effective one, but a pressure group nevertheless. It lost momentum, as such groups tend to do; it fizzled out. It will not please his supporters in the modern natonalist movement to be reminded that he believed in the United Kingdom.
MacCormick stood several times as a parliamentary candidate – he was still trying two years before his death – but was never elected. Some felt that this signified a larger failure on his part to put his enormous talents to a constructive purpose. The same was said more recently of Jimmy Reid, who shared MacCormick’s oratorical power and vision, who also stood for parliament, who was also rejected.
In both cases, this criticism misses the point. Both MacCormick and Reid were men of their moments, warm, wildly romantic figures who caught the ear of their country in unique ways at different times. They were rebels with a cause; I doubt that either would have been cut out for the tedium of parliamentary life.
His son, Neil, who was professor of public law at Edinburgh University, and for a while an SNP member of the European Parliament, wrote in the Scottish Review in 1999 that, at the time of his death, it appeared to his father as though his life’s work had gone down in futility. Yet, had he lived one more year, he would have seen in Billy Wolfe’s poll in the West Lothian by-election a sign of the times to come; six more years would have allowed him to savour the Winnie Ewing victory at Hamilton.
‘Of this I am sure,’ said Dewar Gibb at his funeral, ‘if in time to come a new and different Scotland comes to be erected, the work of John MacCormick will be on the headstone in the corner’.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
