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 Midgie once had the pleasure of meeting Frances Crook, the director of the Howard League for Penal Reform. It was a cause for reflection that no one would be better placed to empathise with the needs of prisoners than someone named Crook.
In the challenging few weeks ahead, before the blessed relief of Monday 21 February 2011 when the world returns to normal, it is reassuring to learn that partners (as we must now learn to call them) who are experiencing the tensions of the season will be able to consult Relationships Scotland, whose previous director, Frances Love, has been succeeded by none other than Stuart Valentine.
Christmas Journey
On 19 December 1996, the broadcaster Ian Mackenzie (who died in 2006) embarked on a journey to what he called ‘the heart of dullness’. Between now and Christmas, we will publish short extracts from his account of the journey, which was published in SR.
I took breakfast alone at eight in the large bar-dining room. Surrounded by the debris of previous breakfasters, I observed to the young man that people had started early. With just a touch of briskness, he said: ‘People have work to do’.
I didn’t ask for his name because he was so clearly a symbolic Pictish stone whose atoms had been fired into explosive activity. Talking to him was one way of slowing him down.
‘Do you do everything here?’
‘Yes, and help on my father’s farm once a week and chef here twice a week.’
Yes, he was the hotel owner, previously a farmer from near Memsie in Buchan. I asked if he noticed much difference between Memsie and Inverurie. He hesitated, but the energy crackling in his hesitation was that of Olivier taking breath before Agincourt.
‘They work harder in Buchan. Farmers are farmers, but they don’t work quite so hard here. Mind you in Moray – they’re so laid back it’s manana‘. He rolled his eyes and raised his arms to heaven. Moray was only a few miles up the road. Clearly he had never been to Inverness, let alone the Hebrides, or he would not have allowed himself to exhaust so quickly his repertoire of amazement.
This overnight stay had worked: it had pitchforked me into a different culture, one where visual and verbal plainness exposes a seam of direct communication with an unexpected emotional kick-back.
I went outside, packed the car and sniffed. Ah. I hadn’t smelled this smell for quarter of a century. The word is smell, but the word fails to pack the punch that the smell does. It was the bitter day the weather people had forecast but yet the air was pregnant with earth and sea, turnip and salt, fish and cows.
Strangely elated, I pointed the car at Insch. Where? What? Why?
Ian Mackenzie’s Christmas journey continues on Tuesday
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Here’s how they got you
on the database without
you even knowing
Open Secrets
Part III of a Scottish Review investigation
Kenneth Roy
We’re all in it together
Photograph of Glasgow Central Station by Islay McLeod
The great illusion about Scotland’s citizens’ database – it would not be surprising if many people reading this week’s pieces share it – is that it is about anybody but us. It is about deterring terrorists, catching criminals, keeping an eye on young offenders potential or actual, and helping the extremely vulnerable. The ‘anybody but us’ theory sits nicely with that other mantra of the database society, ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’. New Labour’s assault on civil liberties, eagerly supported by the mainstream press, thrived on such self-deluded populism. The ID card scheme has gone. The database behind it continues to grow.
The Scottish government is keen to foster the great illusion. Indeed it goes very much further. The Scottish government claims that the ultimate purpose of gathering and sharing information about the intimate details of people’s lives – especially young people – is ‘economic recovery’. There is an official document, produced in Edinburgh, which makes this explicit assertion, arguing that the database state will reduce crime and eventually produce a more economically productive society. Is this now the role of social workers – to produce economically productive citizens? Perhaps they too have been labouring under an illusion – that it was their job to give young people a better life. But let that pass.
In practice, the bizarre logic of economic recovery quickly falls apart. In the most notorious case of child abuse in the UK for many years, it was found that one of the causes of Baby P’s death was the obligation placed on staff to underake extensive information-gathering as a pre-requisite of purposeful intervention. By the time all the information had been gathered, the child was dead. Yet it is extensive information-gathering that lies at the heart of current Scottish policy and is being zealously pursued by the e-Care Programme Board, which consists almost solely of civil servants and includes not a single elected representative.
Most of us acquire our own profile without even knowing. Most of us are unwitting agents of a colossal exercise in social engineering.
Meanwhile, the great illusion does not bear serious examination. It is not a case of anybody but us. We’re all in it together – the guilty, the innocent and the not-provens – as the mass profiling of the Scottish population proceeds apace. Most of us acquire our own profile without even knowing. Most of us are unwitting agents of a colossal exercise in social engineering.
Here is an example.
If you are an ‘older’ person and have one of those nice passes entitling you to free bus travel in Scotland, the chances are that you crossed a box giving your local authority permission to share your personal details. Perhaps you did not give the matter very much thought. You would not necessarily have known that the act of putting a cross on an innocent-looking form would qualify you for automatic entry on the citizens’ database.
I have the form in front of me. It is true that there is an alternative box – the one you cross if you are refusing permission to have your details shared – but, such are the persuasive arguments in favour of consent, only fully paid-up subversives would contemplate being awkward about it.
Here is the sweetener that few will be able to resist: ‘If you give your local authority your permission to use your personal details we will not ask you to fill out a form again to get additional applications on the card if you are entitled to receive those services’. The seductive case for reducing bureaucracy is developed at some length and examples are given of the extra entitlements – including membership of the council’s libraries and leisure clubs. In effect, consent is presented as the only reasonable option.
The consequences of putting your cross in the correct box are also explained, but not at the same length. ‘…the council wishes to share your personal details with departments and agencies of the council, other Scottish councils, and the Scottish Executive. The purpose of sharing this information is to ensure that your personal details are correct, wherever these bodies hold them’.
This is how we sleep-walk into a surveillance society – by complacency and default. Isn’t it time we woke up?
[click here] for Part I of Open Secrets
[click here] for Part II of Open Secrets
The fourth and final part of the series will be published in Tuesday’s edition. If you would like to contribute your own thoughts and experiences, confidentially or otherwise, please contact islay@scottishreview.net
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
