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Scottish Review : Kenneth Roy

6 January 2009 · Kenneth Roy

The road to Glenrothes

Unsavoury incidents

Kenneth Roy

A local MP’s decision to campaign in the Glenrothes by-election, in defiance of the convention that Prime Ministers should not participate in such unseemly brawls, takes second place in the current edition of the Fife Free Press to an unseemly brawl more shocking to the sensibilities of local readers. Splashed across the front page, over a three-deck headline, is the news that a ‘large-scale fight’ broke out at a funeral in Hayfield Cemetery, Kirkcaldy, as a result of which ‘a number of people sustained injuries, fortunately none of them life-threatening’. The police are appealing for witnesses to this ‘particularly unsavoury incident’, although one supposes they need look no further than the funeral ‘party’, as these volatile gatherings are often politely known. Meanwhile it is reassuring to learn that no one is dead (with one obvious exception) and that the staff of ‘Cooperative Funeralcare’, the undertakers officiating, were unharmed.
     Pick up any local paper serving an urban area and you will find that it tends to be dominated by ‘particularly unsavoury incidents’ or by the fear of them. Under the heading ‘Afraid to walk in the dark’, the same edition of the Free Press reports that, according to a survey by Fife Council, 58% of secondary school pupils are frightened to be out in the streets at night and that a third are afraid of being sexually harassed or assaulted. Page 5 provides apparent confirmation of these fears: ‘23% rise in reported sex crimes’.
      A neighbouring local paper at the heart of the by-election campaign, the Glenrothes Gazette, relegates the campaign to an inside page, preferring to lead this week’s issue with a tabloid-style presentation headed: ’13-YEAR-OLD GIRL ASSAULTED IN STREET’. So much space is taken up by the striking visuals that the report itself stretches to all of 46 words before the reader is invited to turn to page 2 for further details. Even there, information is sparse. ‘A completely random attack on a lone girl on a main thoroughfare’, according to the ubiquitous police spokesperson; the attack indecent in nature; the unknown assailant, a man of about 40, medium-built, wearing dark hooded jacket, dark trousers and white trainers. ‘The person responsible,’ says Detective Inspector McPherson, ‘needs to be caught as soon as possible and every effort is being made in this regard.’
     Page 2 offers a little respite. ‘Bus driver Gordon over the moon as he wheels off top award’ (Bus Driver of the Year) and ‘Lisa spot on target at Youth Games’ remind us, not only that the pun is hanging on in intensive care, but that humanity is not all bad, even in Fife. But by page 3 we are back to the familiar disturbing narrative, an account of a sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl in Glenrothes and her father’s relief that the attacker, a 21-year-old man, had been sent to prison.
     Neither of these newspapers is exceptionally lurid; indeed they are a model of restraint compared to the one serving my own area, which printed the words ‘SEX BEAST’ in sinister black letters across its front page a couple of weeks ago. But although the journalistic techniques vary, the effect is broadly similar. It is to give the impression, the powerful if not overwhelming impression, that provincial Scotland is an extremely scary place, that you would be a fool to venture into it after a certain hour, and that Detective Inspector McPherson would be failing in his duty if he did not cancel all overtime this side of Christmas. Indeed, the Free Press informs us that the police are already gearing up for ‘the festive season’ (a term almost as deceptively jolly as the ‘funeral party’) and that Trouble is confidently expected among revellers in the streets of Kirkcaldy. Scarcely surprising, given the many dangers of life in the Kingdom of Fife, that the fragrant Sarah broke off her doorstep canvassing yesterday after 12 dodgy minutes in Cardenden.
     But how accurate is the view of provincial Scotland depicted by its press? You have to read the small print to discover that, although there has been a 23% rise in reported sex crimes in the Prime Minister’s constituency, Fife Police attribute the increase to new measures for reporting such crimes, including childhood abuse carried out years or even decades ago. You have to read the even smaller print to see revealed that, in Fife, the incidence of violent crime as a whole declined by 14% last year, a reduction mirrored in Scotland as a whole. Although this is comforting news for most of us, it is bad news for Scotland’s local newspapers, many of which have surrendered their former role of reporting and commenting on public affairs, a less than exciting duty admittedly, in favour of a diet of ‘particularly unsavoury incidents’, incongruously interspersed with bonnie babies, women undressing for breast cancer, and award-winning bus drivers. I wonder how the moral health of communities is affected by such a drip-feed of anxiety and depression.

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