The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
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
Donald Paton
The Cafe
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
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?
Cairn Energy, which is Edinburgh-based and big in oil and gas, has two women on its nine-strong board: Jann Brown, the chief financial officer, and Jacqueline Sheppard QC, a non-exec. Ms Brown has a Scottish pedigree with her degree from Edinburgh University. She is reported to have a low boredom threshhold and a forthright style. Ms Sheppard is a Canadian businesswoman whose QC was awarded in the name of the Province of Alberta.
Cairn just misses the target.
Perth-based Scottish and Southern Energy, which has links back to the socially conscious North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board, has made a public commitment to the Davies recommendation – it expects to be ‘broadly compliant’ by 2015. At the moment, it has two women on a board of nine, so it narrowly fails to hit target. The two are American-born Lady Rice (Susan the banker, not the one who is married to the well-known lyricist of the same name), a familiar figure on many a committee; and Katie Bickerstaffe, CEO of Dixons Retail, based somewhere south of Berwick upon Tweed.
Two of the six are already compliant. Standard Life boasts three women on its 12-member board: bang on 25%. They are Jackie Hunt, the chief financial officer, a far-travelled woman who qualified as an accountant in Johannesburg and is credited with a measured and rational approach to business; Margaret McDonagh (now Baroness McDonagh), former general secretary of the Labour Party, with no known connection to Scotland; and Sheelagh Whittaker, another of the power women from Canada with a background in information technology. Ms Whittaker is on record as being ‘appalled’ by the few women in executive positions.
And, finally, there’s the taxpayer’s friend, RBS. After the crash of autumn 2008, and the subsequent exposure of the bank’s maschismo culture, it was deemed appropriate to import women into this boys’ own preserve. So onto the board came Penny Hughes, former UK president of Coca Cola; Sheila Noakes (now Baroness Noakes), a former KPMG partner; and Alison Davis, an American-based business superwoman, who combines a ‘plush Caifornia pad with a chateau in France where she chills out and recovers from the stresses of modern life’. None of this trio has any obvious Scottish credentials, although a lot of Coca Cola is consumed up here and we all suffer to some extent from the stresses of modern life.
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
