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
Drawings by Bob Smith
Most weeks are bad weeks for the ordinary punter but the past week seems to have provided more evidence than usual of the naked disdain with which he and she are regarded by their betters.
Like pretty well every other economy in the western world the Cypriot economy is up the spout due mainly, as if we couldn’t guess, to bankers, lack of regulation and the same sort of worship of Mammon as we saw revealed in Edinburgh a year or two back. (Wouldn’t RBS have loved the chance to pass off some of the blame on Germans/Russians.)
As we know from experience, the only ‘appropriate’ way to deal with problems of this sort is to share the suffering – that’s only fair, isn’t it? – so along come the heavies from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF and propose a deposit-tax plan (euphemism for theft) that would remove a chunk from every Cypriot’s savings.
That’s like the hire purchase company insisting that I chip in when the chap down the street defaults on the payments on his car – I live in the same street, don’t I? So the woman who made my bed in a holiday hotel and the small farmer who grew the Cyprus earlies I’ve just enjoyed were being told it was their duty to help the Russian oligarchs and other tax exiles by picking up a big piece of the bill. Well, they now seem to have been saved from that though they can probably expect their pensions and healthcare to be cut, their retirement age raised and their employment made insecure by whatever austerity package is to follow.
We may be forgiven for assuming that the bonds might favour the entrepreneurs (that word must surely be losing its gloss by now) rather than the ‘economic migrants’ (a phrase that has never managed to pick up any gloss) who might clean the streets, empty the bedpans and who actually need a job to avoid starvation.
The third example of the week does at least, in a wry sort of way, have a funny side. In a budget that offered no hope and that had the feel that even those who concocted it doubted its efficacy, the chancellor has cut the tax on beer by one penny. If ever there was a move that demonstrates how great the gulf is that separates the posh boys from the punters, this is it. Do our leaders still believe that a penny off the pint will have working-class voters donning their flat caps at a jaunty angle and hurrying off to put their cross against the blue box? After Michael Gove? After Theresa May? After Iain Duncan Smith, for heaven’s sake?
I can’t actually believe that George himself is that unworldly – he did, after all, fold towels in Selfridges for a week after graduating. But I can see his sidekick Danny leaping at the chance to boost the sales of Ginger Rodent.
Elga Graves has worked extensively in skills-related training and education in the UK and abroad
SR is having a short break over Easter and will return
on Tuesday 9 April
