Kenneth Roy Eck’s literary luvvies Jim Swire An…

21.03.12
No. 529

The Cafe

We asked readers to nominate a town in Scotland, other than Perth, for city status. Here are the winning entries:

It may surprise you to know that I am not proposing that Biggar, or even Coulter, be nominated as a city.
     However, there is already one other Scottish city. That is the jewel of the South Esk, Angus’s very own second city, namely Brechin. Population according to ‘The Complete Scotland’ 2004 is 7,655. But then someone was murdered and her head found on a beach at Arbroath, and two blokes then went aff to Peterhead (sick joke). So that makes it 7,652.
     Now it has a cathedral, as well as its Pictish round tower, and of course the famous football team, Brechin City. Not Brechin ‘Town’, but ‘City’. 
Keen listeners to football results on the radio take a lot of convincing that the name of the place isn’t ‘Brechin City Nil’.

Arthur Bell

St Andrews: I think that it would be appropriate for the county of Fife to have a city. My choice here lay between St Andrews and Dunfermline. However, on account of its ancient university, its history, its cathedral, its scenic situation and being known world-wide as the home of golf, St Andrews gets my first vote. However, ‘the auld grey city’ wouldn’t sound quite as good as its current title of ‘the auld grey toun’.
     Dumfries: Again, as with Fife, I feel that there should be a designated city in south-west Scotland, hence my choice of Dumfries. Again, it is a historical town and is the resting place of Scotland’s national bard.
     Ayr: This is my choice for a city on the west coast of Scotland. The birthplace of Robert Burns.
     However, as size does not appear to matter in creating a new city (St Asaph in Wales has a population of 3,600), what about creating a second city in another small ancient cathedral town? The City of Dunkeld sounds good to me.

Donald Paton

The Cafe

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Scotland’s gender scandal: Part 2

If you’re a woman in

Scottish business, it

pays not to be Scottish

Kenneth Roy

The UK government wants to achieve 25% female representation in corporate boardrooms by 2015. But is the public sector setting an example which the private sector might feel inclined to follow? We showed yesterday how, in Scotland, it is not.

     We named a couple of dozen major public bodies – including such institutions as Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Water, VisitScotland, Creative Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Law Commission – which fail to meet the modest 25% target. We named three organisations – Quality Meat, the Lands Tribunal, the Water Industry Commission – which are female-free zones.
     We suggested that the equality record of Scottish public life smacks of tokenism at best.
     Today, in part 2 of this Scottish Review survey, we look at the performance of the private sector. It is being invited to achieve a target which swathes of the public sector ignore. Is there any evidence that our top companies are taking this challenge seriously?

The Davies inquiry established by the coalition government, while rejecting the mandatory quota now being considered by the EU as a way of tackling gender inequality at the top, recommended FTSE 100 companies to aim for 25%.
     We identified six FTSE 100 companies headquartered in Scotland.
     The least impressive, from the point of view of equality, is the Glasgow-based power generator Aggreko

     Next worst is the Weir Group

     Aggreko and Weir comprehensively miss the target.

Cairn Energy

     Cairn just misses the target.
     Perth-based Scottish and Southern Energy

Two of the six are already compliant. Standard Life

     And, finally, there’s the taxpayer’s friend, RBS

     A fourth woman on the RBS board is group secretary Aileen Taylor. Although her public profile is almost invisible, she is believed to be Scottish. In which case, she and Jann Brown are the only locals on the boards of FTSE 100 companies headquartered in Scotland. The number of directors of these companies is 66, of whom 12 are women: 18%. This is slightly better than the UK as a whole (16%), although markedly worse than France (22%), Finland (27%) and Norway (42%). But just as interesting as the stats is the revelation that a woman’s chances of rising to the top in Scotland’s private sector are considerably enhanced if she has somehow managed to be born somewhere else.

Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review