Tag: Kenny Farquharson

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The comeback kid

 

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

 

I’ve always had an unhealthy obsession with politics.  Lately, however, I’ve written less about the subject on this blog because my obsession was becoming literally unhealthy – ruminating on politics and politicians in 2026 was filling my head with dark and depressing thoughts.  Nonetheless, I’ll now make some comments about the election for the Scottish Parliament, which happened on May 7th. That day also saw elections for the Welsh Senedd and for various local authorities in England, but I’ll only mention those in passing.

 

If you’re not a political anorak, you might want to skip this.

 

So: the results were 58 seats for the Scottish National Party (down six from the previous election in 2021); 17 for Scottish Labour (down five); 17 for Reform UK (up 17); 15 for the Scottish Greens (up seven); 12 for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (down 19); and ten for the Scottish Liberal Democrats (up six).

 

Despite securing six seats less than their 2021 total, and seven seats short of a parliamentary majority, the result was impressive for the SNP in that this is the fifth election in a row where they’ve ended up as the biggest, government-forming party.  Keir Starmer’s Labour government at Westminster, which hasn’t been in power for two years yet and is already as popular as a fart in a spacesuit, would kill for such longevity and  durability.

 

It’s also quite a comeback for SNP leader John Swinney.  Originally Swinney served as SNP leader from 2000 to 2004, when his party was in opposition in the Scottish Parliament.  It wasn’t a happy experience for him.  In the 2003 Scottish election his party dropped from 35 to 28 seats and the following year he resigned.  He later described being opposition leader as “the worst, most awful, most sapping, most soul-destroying job in politics…”

 

Having enjoyed spells as a cabinet minister and Deputy First Minister, Swinney was planning to retire at this year’s election.  However,  in May 2024, after the affable but hapless Humza Yousaf resigned as First Minister, Swinney surprised everyone by standing unopposed for – with his famous negotiating skills, he managed to sweet-talk the formidable likes of Kate Forbes into not running against him – and winning the leadership again, 20 years after losing it.  And this time, he became First Minister of Scotland too.  Many assumed he would act as a ‘caretaker’ FM, until someone younger and with more chutzpah came along, but thanks to this election result he’s likely to be around for a while.

 

While I’d never describe Swinney as someone who sets the heather alight, and if he got a fiver every time someone likened his demeanour to that of a bank manager he’d probably be a billionaire by now, I have to say I think he’s a decent guy and I’d rather have him in charge of Scotland than most other Scottish politicians.  I’m biased in this regard.  As I wrote on this blog before, I encountered him a couple of times during my youth, via my old schoolmate Roger Small, who was best friends with him at university, and I liked him.  But it’s not just me.  Most people, political friends and foes alike, seem to like Swinney.

 

Even the world’s most horrible man, Donald Trump, has a soft spot for him.  In 2025, Trump declared, “John Swinney is a terrific guy — and loves golf and loves the people of this country, and we really appreciate it.”  Yes, I know that Trump thinks Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un are the bees’ knees, so being liked by him isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of your character.

 

More recently, when Trump announced the removal of US tariffs on Scotch whisky, Swinney claimed this was due in part to a meeting he had with the US president last September.  He was criticised for saying this by the UK government’s Secretary of State for Scotland Douglas Alexander, who argued that trade agreements weren’t in the remit of a leader of a devolved administration.  But after the election result, Trump messaged, “Congratulations to John Swinney on winning his Re-Election for First Minister of Scotland.  He is a good man, who worked very hard along with the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, with respect to Tariff Relief for Great Scottish Whiskey – and deserves this Big Electoral Victory!”  So now, Dougie Alexander looks a bit of a chump.

 

Trump, being a low IQ individual, misspelt ‘Scottish whisky’ as ‘Scottish whiskey’.  The stuff spelt with an ‘e’ is actually made in Ireland.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Parliament / youtube.com

 

Elsewhere, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives had their worst ever performances in a Scottish parliamentary election.  Labour leader Anas Sawar hit the headlines back in February when he demanded that Keir Starmer resign as British Prime Minister: “The situation in Downing Street is not good enough. There have been too many mistakes.”  Sarwar’s resignation-call distanced him and his branch of the Labour party from the wildly unpopular Starmer and it generated  a lot of publicity at the time.  But when Starmer said no, he wouldn’t be resigning, it looked less like a political earthquake and more like a mild political bowel-movement.  It highlighted Sarwar’s place as Scottish party leader in the great scheme of things – not high.  It also meant Starmer was embarrassingly conspicuous by his absence in Scotland when Labour started campaigning for the election there.

 

The Scottish Tories have been reduced to a rump, their number of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) barely in double figures.  Their leader Russell Findlay has tried to talk them up in the Tory-friendly pages of the Scottish Daily Mail, describing them as the ‘Dynamic Dozen’.  I wouldn’t describe any dozen that includes such numpties as Murdo Fraser, the man who once asked Donald Trump if he’d consider buying Glasgow Rangers Football Club, as ‘dynamic’.  Maybe ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘dystopian’.

 

Following a near-extinction event caused by their coalition with the Conservatives in Westminster in the early 2010s, the Liberal Democrats have enjoyed something of a revival.  The passing of time has clearly detoxified their reputation a little in folk’s memories.  That said, I don’t know how anyone can stomach their Scottish leader Alexander Cole-Hamilton, who to me comes across as being insufferably arrogant.

 

And the Scottish Greens have almost doubled their representation in the parliament.  Without wishing to downplay this achievement, I suspect they enjoyed the best of both worlds in relation to the English and Welsh Greens – a separate party – south of the border.  They benefited from the wave of enthusiasm, and publicity, that their southern counterparts experienced earlier this year.  Simultaneously, as a separate party, they were distant enough from them to escape the more recent backlash against the English / Welsh party’s leader Zack Polanski, who stupidly retweeted something about the attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green and then suffered an all-out assault from the right-wing media determined to portray him as an antisemite.  (This despite Polanski being Jewish himself and despite some of the media’s caricatures of him being… hideously antisemitic.)

 

The Scottish Greens are co-led by Gillian Mackay and the chirpy Ross Greer.  I know Greer is a ‘Marmite’ politician for many, but I like how he puts the wind up gammons like Piers Morgan.

 

From youtube.com / © ITV

 

With the SNP on 58 MSPs, and the pro-Scottish-independence Greens on 15, 73 MSPs now support Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, as opposed to 56 unionist MSPs who don’t.  It’s the parliament’s biggest ever pro-independence majority.  Of course, you won’t have heard much about that fact from Scotland’s (unionist-owned) mainstream media, who instead have obsessed on a different fact – that the parliament suddenly has 17 far-right Reform MPs.  Nigel Farage’s extremist party had representation there before, thanks to one MSP defecting to them from the Conservatives.  But today, with Labour, they’re the joint-second biggest party.

 

This has prompted journalists like the Times’s Kenny Farquharson to declare ‘the death of Scottish exceptionalism’ – Scottish exceptionalism being the idea that Scottish voters are more community-orientated, more considerate of their fellow citizens, more leftwing and, generally, nicer than voters than those elsewhere in the UK, especially in England.  Reform’s showing proves that, no, the Scots are just as right-wing and awful as everyone else.

 

Well, I find it nauseating that the  parliament contains 17 MSPs who, if their party ever came to power, would enact Trump-style authoritarian and racist policies.  One of them, Senga Beresford, representing the South Scotland region, has already caused controversy by expressing admiration for fascist lout Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on social media.  But I derive some comfort from the fact that none of those MSPs were elected through the parliament’s first-past-the-post, constituency-based voting system, responsible for deciding 73 of the 129 MSPs.  Reform’s 17 sneaked in afterwards, via the additional, regional-based ‘list’ system.  Also, the Conservatives won 31 seats at the previous election, but have been culled to 12, and that number plus Reform’s 17 puts the total number of right-wingers  at 29 – two less than before.

 

I certainly don’t see Scotland as being exceptional, i.e., better than anywhere else.  I’ve met plenty of Scots who’ve been arseholes as much as arsehole-y people from other places.  But Scotland is still different from other parts of the UK.  If it wasn’t different, it wouldn’t have its own languages, literature, music, sports teams, legal system, educational system, etc.  It wouldn’t have been scunnered by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s while people elsewhere were proclaiming her the new, handbag-wielding messiah.  It wouldn’t have voted heavily against Brexit when people in England and Wales voted for it.  It wouldn’t have its own independence movement with, now, a 57% majority in the Scottish parliament.  I know that sticks in the craws of unionist politicians and journalists who’d have you believe that Scotland is absolutely indistinguishable from the rest of the UK, that a punter from Elgin is identical to a punter from Ely.

 

Talking of journalists, the coverage of the election in the Scottish mainstream media was woeful.  The unionist newspapers (i.e., nearly all of them) spent half the time wailing “Everything in Scotland is shite!” and the other half wailing, “How dare anyone suggest doing anything even vaguely radical to improve things!”  Swinney’s proposal that, in an emergency, the Scottish government should put a cap on the price of essential food products so that poor people could still buy them, was met with hoots of derision – and the sneering observation that the UK government would never allow it.  (A Labour government – “For the many, not the few” – denying someone the right to keep essential foodstuffs affordable for the nation’s poorest people?  Not a great look.)

 

I thought the recent opinion-piece by Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley in the Spectator, calling on the Labour and Conservative parties to get rid of the UK’s devolved parliaments (“Dr. Frankenstein would understand that it was his duty to put down the hideous creature his foolishness and vanity unleashed on the world”), was bad enough.  But the articles that his fellow Scottish journo Chris Deerin penned about Scottish Reform leader Malcolm Offord, for the supposedly left-wing New Statesman, went to arse-licking extremes where no article has gone before.

 

And now, with Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth the First Minister in Cardiff, and Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill the First Minister in Belfast, all three devolved governments in the United Kingdom are helmed by people who see their nations’ futures as being outside that supposedly united kingdom.  Interesting times indeed…

 

But you won’t ever read about that in the newspapers.

 

From wikipedia.org / © User Colin

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The big Mc

 

From wikipedia.org / © Nonsenseferret

 

It’s exactly a decade since the Scottish writer, poet and columnist William McIlvanney passed away on December 5th, 2015.  Here’s something to mark this melancholy anniversary.

 

For myself and many book-lovers in Scotland in the 1980s, William McIlvanney was both a source of pride and exasperation.  Pride that modern Scottish literature was capable of producing someone as good as he was; but exasperation that the British literary establishment seemed to have little interest in him or his peers (like Alasdair Gray and James Kelman) north of the border.  On their radar, Scottish writers didn’t make much of a blip.

 

Back then, the clique of authors, critics and academics who, through Britain’s highbrow media outlets, decided what was fashionable were a privileged Oxford / Cambridge-educated bunch who lived in London and seemingly lived up their own arses too.  I always find it telling that in 1984, when things felt at their very worst, the Booker Prize – the flagship award for the UK literary establishment – managed to have on its short-list five books that had novelists, biographers, literary critics and literary lecturers as their main characters.  The only shortlisted book that was about people who didn’t make a living out of literature (you know, like 99.999% of the human population) was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.  And it didn’t win, though it should have.

 

The novel that helped put McIlvanney on the map was 1975’s Docherty, which was about a tough west-of-Scotland miner and his family trying to cope with everything that the early decades of the 20th century threw at them.  Thus, McIlvanney was never going to ingratiate himself with the ‘in’ crowd by writing about writers, biographers, critics or lecturers either.

 

I’d read McIlvanney’s 1977 novel Laidlaw as a teenager – more about that in a minute – but it wasn’t until I was at college that one of my tutors (Isobel Murray) urged me to read a book of his that’d just been published, 1986’s The Big Man.  I’m glad I listened to her because The Big Man proved to be one of my favourite books of the 1980s.  It features another miner, called Dan Scoular.  He’s an ex-miner, actually, because this is the post-miners’-strike 1980s, Scoular has lost his job and he and his family are struggling to make ends meet.  The imposing Scoular happens to be good at fighting, though it’s a side of him that he’s suppressed for a long time.  Then he’s approached by a Glaswegian gangster who offers to pay him a small fortune if he takes part in an illegal bare-knuckle fight.  Thus, Scoular faces a dilemma – does he do something that he finds abhorrent if it saves him and his loved ones from penury?  Inevitably, after he ignores his better instincts and agrees to the proposal, he finds out that there are more complicated and even nastier things going on in the background.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

 

The Big Man is the most cinematic of McIlvanney’s books and it was no surprise that it was filmed, in 1990, by David Leland.  The film gets some things right.  The villains, played by Ian Bannen and Maurice Roëves, are good.  However, it gets a lot wrong, including a Hollywood-esque, feel-good ending far removed from the bleak, ambiguous note with which McIlvanney closes the book.  Another problem is that, at the time, there wasn’t a bankable-enough Scottish star for the filmmakers to cast in the role of Scoular.  So they had to search around and the next best thing they could find was a Northern Irishman, Liam Neeson.

 

Now I like Neeson, but every time in The Big Man that he opens his mouth and those dulcet County Antrim tones of his emerge, the sense that you’re in a hard-pressed mining town in the West of Scotland goes out of the window.  It’s a pity that the film wasn’t made during the years since, when some bankable Scottish actors have come to prominence (though it might be difficult to find one with the necessary, hulking physicality that Neeson had).  Incidentally, The Big Man – a movie about Scottish ex-mining communities and ruthless Glasgow criminals – also has Hugh Grant in its cast.  I’ll give you all a minute to pick your jaws up off the floor.

 

A later novel by McIlvanney, 1996’s The Kiln, received a lot of acclaim.  It even had a recommendation on its cover from Sean Connery.  I’ve just praised McIlvanney for not writing books about writers, but The Kiln actually has a writer as its central character, one in the throes of a mid-life crisis.  However, the novel is more a coming-of-age novel because its hero spends much of it looking back on his working-class youth, especially on a period he spent toiling in a local brickworks.

 

When The Kiln appeared, it seemed to cement – an appropriate verb for a book about bricks – McIlvanney’s status as a major figure in Scottish letters.  But it seemed the last time that he commanded such attention.  Recently, I was thinking about The Kiln and I remembered reading it while I was making a long-distance bus trip during the only occasion I was in Australia – which was in 1997, almost thirty years ago and almost twenty years before McIlvanney’s death.  What on earth happened to him after that?  I’d come across an occasional interview with him or article by him in the Scottish press, but that was about it.  In 2006 he published one more novel, Weekend, though it arrived with little fanfare – the antithesis of the reception The Kiln got a decade earlier.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

 

Though as far as mainstream literature was concerned McIlvanney seemed to disappear from view after The Kiln, he did in recent years win belated acknowledgement for his work as a crime writer – specifically, for his 1977 novel Laidlaw, which was republished in 2013, and its sequels The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991).  (The latter book also serves as a grim semi-sequel to The Big Man.)  All are about a tough but intellectual and philosophical Glasgow detective called Jack Laidlaw.  Since then, crime novels set in Scotland have sold by the barrow-load and Scottish crime writers like Iain Rankin, Val McDiarmid, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre and Stuart MacBride have enjoyed lucrative careers, so McIlvanney can be seen as the man who started it all.  His Jack Laidlaw was the prototype for Inspector Rebus and the rest.  In effect, McIlvanney created ‘Tartan Noir’.

 

Even when I read Laidlaw at a young age, I found it a bit uneven (as prototypes usually are), its prose shifting slightly uncomfortably between Glasgow-speak and Raymond Chandler-isms.  It wasn’t helped by the way it was marketed, either – “Turn down a Glaswegian when he offers you a drink,” intoned the blurb on the back, “And he’ll break your legs,” which wasn’t what the book was about.  Laidlaw focuses more on psychology than on violence, and I found it disconcerting that in its final pages the hero isn’t rushing to catch the murderer so much as he’s rushing to save the murderer from gangland-backed vigilante justice.  But all power to McIlvanney for inventing what would become Scotland’s biggest literary export.  Iain Rankin, in particular, has always admitted his debt to him.

 

McIlvanney was a political thinker too and during the 1990s – back in those long-ago days when Scotsman Publications produced material that was worth reading – he was a perceptive columnist in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper.  I also remember him delivering a speech in Edinburgh’s Meadows during the March for Scottish Democracy rally held on December 12th, 1992, demanding the creation of a Scottish parliament.  On stage, in front a crowd of 30,000 people, he performed far better than any of the politicians in attendance.  He memorably summed up the case for a parliament saying: “We gather here like refugees in the capital of our own country, wondering what we want to be when we grow up.  Scotland – the oldest teenager amongst nations.”

 

But at the same time he pleaded for racial tolerance.  “Scottishness,” he pointed out, “isn’t some pedigree lineage.  It’s a mongrel tradition.”  I suspect that with McIlvanney’s speech that day began the emphasis on ‘civic nationalism’ that Scottish nationalists – at least, the decent, mainstream ones, not the fringe, far-right heidbangers – have been at pains to cultivate ever since.

 

Finally, William McIlvanney played an indirect role in the start of my writing career.  My very first short story to see publication, a slice-of-life piece set on a Scottish farm with the self-explanatory title Lambing Time, appeared in a magazine called Scratchings, then produced annually by Aberdeen University’s Creative Writing Society.  Scratchings had been launched in the early 1980s with the help of a financial contribution from McIlvanney.  At the time he was Aberdeen University’s writer-in-residence and he was approached by two young students who “wanted to borrow 40 pounds to start a poetry magazine.  Would he be able to lend them the money?”  He did, Scratchings was born, and it provided a home for Lambing Time a few years later.

 

Incidentally, the two students who successfully tapped McIlvanney for 40 pounds were Dundonian Kenny Farquharson, now a columnist with the Times newspaper; and Invernessian Alison Smith, now better known as the novelist Ali Smith, who’s been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize – yes, the award whose shortlist bugged me so much back in 1984.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

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Tears of an ermine gown

 

From the Daily Record

 

For reasons of preserving my sanity, I’ve avoided writing about politics lately.  That includes the politics of my old homeland, Scotland.  However, I feel compelled to type a few words on the topic thanks to the coverage given to a recent interview with Jack McConnell.  Oops, sorry, I’ve misnamed him.  It should be Baron Jack McConnell of Glenscorrodale.  The twitter handle he’s given himself is @LordMcConnell, so evidently these titles are important to him.  Baron McConnell was First Minister of Scotland from 2001 to 2007 and the last First Minister to belong to the Scottish Labour Party.

 

Last week, Baron McConnell was interviewed in the Scottish current affairs magazine Holyrood and had plenty to say about the current state of Scottish politics which, since he was nudged out of power by Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party in 2007, have been dominated by the SNP.  The Baron is not happy at what he sees.  He laments that nothing has changed in Scotland since the 2014 referendum on independence (which, of course, his side won), laments that modern Scottish politics has ‘no public debate and no public accountability’, and pines for the good old days ‘of ministers doing their jobs well’.

 

Indeed, so strongly does he feel that at one point the interviewer notes, “McConnell’s voice starts to break and his eyes well up.”  “Sorry,” he says, “I’m feeling quite emotional about it right now…  I genuinely feel like we are stuck in treacle and I don’t know how we get out of it.”

 

Commentators in Scotland’s (heavily unionist) mainstream media have seized upon the article as both an articulation and confirmation of all that’s ghastly about modern-day Scotland, which has had the SNP in power for the past 14 years now and is currently under the First Ministership of Nicola Sturgeon.  In the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times, for instance, pundit Kenny Farquharson wrote, “I challenge anyone, of any political stripe, to read this interview with Jack McConnell and not find themselves agreeing with at least some of his analysis of where Scotland finds itself right now.”  And in the New Statesman, Chris Deerin opined about Jack – sorry, Baron! – McConnell’s outpouring, “Coming from a politician who is known for his optimism and problem-solving approach, and who rarely lacks a twinkle in his eye, the anguish is all the more powerful.  And it is very hard to disagree with anything.”

 

Incidentally, Deerin has form in lambasting Scotland’s prevailing political orthodoxy.  In 2015, in the right-wing online news outlet CapX, he wrote that the place “has become a soft and sappy nation, intellectually listless, coddled, a land of received wisdom and one-track minds, narrow parameters and mass groupthink…  It is certainly the viewpoint that dominates our polity and media – an unholy alliance of Nationalists, Greens and socialists. I’m sure many consider themselves to be all three.”  I find it mind-melting that the left-leaning New Statesman saw fit to make him its Scotland Editor.

 

Baron McConnell apparently bewails a lack of vision in modern Scottish politics, though I’m surprised that someone with his broad vision doesn’t acknowledge the fact that in the last decade, by way of being part of the United Kingdom, Scotland has had to deal with the austerity cuts imposed by David Cameron and George Osborne, and then the vote to leave the European Union (powered by anti-European votes in England – every part of Scotland voted to remain in the EU) and its ongoing, toxic legacy, and the Covid-19 epidemic.  Not to mention that the UK as a whole is currently governed by a set of Conservative politicians whose moral compass seems to be the same one that Al Capone referred to in the 1920s.  I doubt even a Scottish government with impeccable Unionist / Labour credentials headed by the noble Baron himself would appear particularly dynamic having all that to contend with.  So, it seems a bit myopic of him to overlook it.  Unless, of course, he’s just being disingenuous.

 

From angelfire.com

 

Also, when I think back to the supposed golden age of public debate, and public accountability, and ministers doing their jobs well, and not being stuck in treacle – i.e., Baron McConnell’s tenure as First Minister – I can’t remember much that was outstanding.  Well, apart from the ban on smoking in public places, the first such ban implemented in one of the constituent nations of the UK, which made life pleasanter and healthier for non-smokers like myself who liked to visit the pub sometimes.  But otherwise, I just remember him making an arse of himself by wearing a pinstriped kilt to a charity fashion show in New York in 2004.  (Even my old Dad, not normally one to get worked up about Scottish politics, exclaimed, “Christ, what an embarrassment!”).  Oh, and a stushie about him and his family holidaying in Majorca with Kirsty Wark, a senior journalist at the supposedly impartial BBC.  And his enthusiasm for promoting Public Finance Initiatives which, by 2016, were projected to cost Scottish taxpayers some 30 billion pounds during the decades to come.  And the fact that one year he returned 1.5 billion pounds of devolved money to the London treasury, when there were clearly things in Scotland he could have spent it on.

 

Still, Baron McConnell must have fond memories of those years.  A staunch Blairite, he had the satisfaction of knowing his smiley, warmongering hero was ensconced in Number Ten, Downing Street.  Also, the Labour Party was massively powerful in Scottish local politics, and it held the lion’s share of Scottish seats in the Westminster Parliament too.  Labour were the top dogs in Scotland.  This was their territory.  No wonder political commentators joked that Labour votes in Scotland were weighed rather than counted; and in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster.

 

Actually, looking at the evidence, the red rosette / monkey scenario must have actually happened in a number of cases.  I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show.  And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as “the wee lassie with a tin helmet on”.  And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only “in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted”.  This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs.  And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.

 

Yes, I know, in 1999, early in Blair’s premiership, Labour did set up the devolved Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.  But I’m sure it was seen as a means of keeping additional numbers of loyal Scottish Labour Party hacks in lucrative employment and was designed not to rock the boat in any way for London.  The Scottish parliament was organised so that no party (i.e., the SNP) could never win an outright majority in it and its ruling executive would always have to be a coalition.  And the biggest party in any coalition, Blair and co. assumed, would always be the Scottish Labour Party.

 

It was a shock for Labour when in 2007 the SNP won the biggest number of seats in the Scottish parliament, eschewed coalitions and ran Scotland for the next four years as a minority administration.  It was an even bigger shock for them when in 2011 the SNP achieved the impossible and managed to win an overall majority of seats there.  Hadn’t Labour’s finest minds arranged things so that this would never happen?  And things got even worse in 2015 when, with the Scottish party led by the hapless Jim Murphy, Labour lost 40 of its 41 MPs to the SNP in a Westminster election.  Yes, it must’ve been tough for poor old Labour to witness all that.  There’s nothing worse than having a sense of entitlement and then not getting what you believe you’re entitled to.

 

From unsplash.com / © Serena Repice Lentini

 

Baron McConnell is a good example of a particularly rotten aspect of the Scottish Labour experience.  Secure a seat in the London or Edinburgh parliaments, follow orders, doff your cap to your masters, and after a few decades of loyal service you’ll get the ultimate reward – a peerage.  Scotland was meant to be not only Labour’s stomping ground, its fiefdom, but also its station of departure for a gravy train running all the way to the House of Lords.  These days, in the Lords, the second largest legislative chamber in the world after the Chinese National People’s Congress – which is about as democratic – the good Baron of Glenscorrodale gets to rub ermine-clad shoulders with such other Scottish Labour luminaries as Baron George Foulkes of Cumnock, Baron George Robertson of Port Ellon and Baron Alastair Darling of Roulanish.

 

No doubt he also enjoys a chinwag with the Margaret Thatcher-worshipping former Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Forsyth, who was supposedly booted out of power in 1997 – I can’t remember his title, but I assume it’s something like Lord Freddy of Krueger – and another of Chris Deerin’s heroes, the former Scottish Conservative Party leader Ruth Davidson, whom I believe nowadays calls herself Baroness Colonel Davidson of Jar-Jar Binks.  Obviously, there are plenty of former Conservative Party treasurers to fraternise with as well.  Accountability, eh?

 

In the Holyrood interview Baron McConnell talks about how in the Labour party “there was an absolute commitment to the redistributive nature of the UK.”  But isn’t that the real reason for mediocrity and poverty of imagination in Scotland?  Isn’t it the message that Scots have to stay in the UK because their country is a basket case and their wealthy neighbour – well, part of it, London – has to continually redistribute money to them?  Wouldn’t it be wiser in the long run to remove the dependency set-up, through independence, and give Scots the powers to make their own decisions, implement their own courses of action, make their own mistakes and hopefully learn from them?  But that would necessitate dismantling the cosy British constitutional system that the Baron and his friends currently do so well out of.

 

Ironically, there is a part of the UK where the local Labour Party doesn’t feel obligated to kowtow to London and is prepared to do its own thing.  I refer to the Labour Party in Wales, whose leader Mark Drakeford bucked the dismal losing trend set by Labour in England and Scotland and won the biggest number of seats in the Welsh Senedd election earlier this year.  During the Covid-19 pandemic, Drakeford has won plaudits by refusing to work in lockstep with London – which I suspect Baron McConnell would have done, had he still been Scottish First Minister.  Instead, Drakeford has followed his own instincts and implemented health measures he thinks are appropriate for Wales.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions

 

Just the other day, it was announced that Drakeford’s party has come to an agreement with Plaid Cymru, the Welsh pro-independence party, so that legislation can be passed smoothly in almost 50 policy areas.  Could you imagine a similar agreement being reached in Edinburgh?  No way.  Not with the idiotic ‘Bain Principle’ still holding sway, and Scottish Labour being so obsequious to their head office in London, who would frown on any moves by Labour in Scotland that might not play well with voters in England.   Plus, some Scottish Labour members would sooner chainsaw off their legs at the knees than have anything to do with the hated SNP, those frustraters of their sense of entitlement, those derailers of their gravy train.

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The big Gray man

 

From pinterest.co.uk

 

Today, January 25th, 2021, has been designated ‘Gray Day’ on Scottish social media in honour of the celebrated Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray, who died in December 2019.  As my way of marking the occasion, here’s a reposting of a blog entry I wrote shortly after the great man’s death.

 

Much has been written about Alasdair Gray, the Scottish novelist, poet, playwright, artist, illustrator, academic and polemicist who passed away on December 29th, 2019.  I doubt if my own reflections on Gray will offer any new insights on the man or his works.  But he was a huge influence on me, so I’m going to give my tuppence-worth anyway.

 

In 1980s Scotland, to a youth like myself, in love with books and writing, Gray seemed a titanic cultural presence.  Actually, ‘titanic’ is an ironic adjective to use to describe Gray as physically he was anything but.  Bearded and often dishevelled, Gray resembled an eccentric scientist from the supporting cast of a 1950s sci-fi ‘B’ movie.  He once memorably described himself as ‘a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian’.

 

He was also a presence that seemed to suddenly loom out of nowhere.  The moment when Gray became famous was in 1981 when his first novel Lanark was published.  I remember being in high school that year when my English teacher Iain Jenkins urged me to get hold of a copy and read it.  I still hadn’t read Lanark by 1983 when I started college in Aberdeen, but I remember joining the campus Creative Writing Society and hearing its members enthuse about it.  These included a young Kenny Farquharson (now a columnist with the Scottish edition of the Times) explaining to someone the novel’s admirably weird structure, whereby it consisted of four ‘books’ but with Book Three coming first, then Books One and Two and finally Book Four.  And an equally young Ali Smith recalling meeting Gray and speaking fondly of how eccentric he was.

 

In fact, I didn’t read Lanark until the following summer when I’d secured a three-month job as a night-porter in a hotel high up in the Swiss Alps.  In the early hours of the morning, after I’d done my rounds and finished my chores and all the guests had gone to bed, I’d sit behind the reception desk and read.  It took me about a week of those nightshifts to get through Lanark.  I lapped up its tale of Duncan Thaw, the young, doomed protagonist of what was basically a 1950s Glaswegian version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which constituted Books One and Two; and I similarly lapped up its alternating tale of the title character (mysteriously linked to Thaw) in the grimly fabulist city of Unthank, which constituted Books Three and Four.  A quote by sci-fi author Brian Aldiss on the cover neatly described Unthank as ‘a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch’.

 

© Canongate

 

That same summer I read The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka (1983) and the fantastical half of Lanark struck me as reminiscent of the great Bohemian writer.  Gray himself acknowledged that Kafka’s The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) had inspired him: “The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night.”

 

The result was an astonishing book that combines gritty autobiographical realism with fanciful magical realism.  Fanciful and magical in a sombre, Scottish sense, obviously.

 

With hindsight, Lanark was the most important book in Scottish literature since Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trilogy (1932-34).  By an odd coincidence I read A Scots Quair four years later when I was working – again – as a night-porter in a hotel in the Swiss Alps.  So my encounters with the greatest two works of 20th century Scottish literature are indelibly linked in my mind with nightshifts in hotels decorated with Alpine horns and antique ski equipment and surrounded by soaring, jagged mountains.

 

Lanark also appeared at a significant time.  Three years before its publication, the referendum on establishing a devolved Scottish parliament had ended in an undemocratic farce.  Two years before it, Margaret Thatcher had started her reign as British prime minister.  During this reign, Scotland would be governed unsympathetically, like a colonial property, a testing ground, an afterthought.  So Lanark was important in that it helped give Scotland a cultural identity at a time when politically it was allowed no identity at all.

 

Whilst telling me about Lanark, Iain Jenkins mentioned ruefully that he didn’t think Gray would ever produce anything as spectacular again.  Not only did it seem a once-in-a-lifetime achievement but it’d taken up half of a lifetime, for Gray had been beavering away at it since the 1950s.  He once mused of the undertaking: “Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live… but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer.”

 

© Canongate

 

However, two books he produced afterwards, 1982, Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), are excellent works in their own rights even if they didn’t create the buzz that Lanark did.

 

Janine takes place inside the head of a lonely middle-aged man while he reflects on a life of emotional, professional and political disappointments, and masturbates, and finally attempts suicide whilst staying in a hotel room in a Scottish country town that’s either Selkirk or my hometown, Peebles.  (Yes, Peebles’ two claims to literary fame are that John Buchan once practised law there and the guy in 1982, Janine might have had a wank there.)  The protagonist’s musings include some elaborate sadomasochistic fantasies, which put many people off, including Anthony Burgess, who’d thought highly of Lanark but was less enthusiastic about Janine.  However, it seems to me a bold meditation on Scotland in general and on the strained, often hopeless relationship between traditional, Presbyterian-conditioned Scottish males and the opposite sex in particular.

 

Poor Things, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow, initially seems very different from Janine but in fact it tackles similar themes.  The narrator, Archibald McCandless, relates how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature.  McCandless soon falls in love with her.  There follows a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy, but near the end things are turned on their heads because Bella takes over as storyteller.  She denounces McCandless’s version of events as a witless fantasy and portrays herself not as Frankenstein-type creation but a normal woman, albeit one ahead of her time in her views about feminism and social justice.  Again, the book is a rebuke of male attitudes towards women, especially insecure Scottish ones that are partly possessive and partly, madly over-romanticised.

 

© Canongate

 

Gray’s other post-Lanark novels are entertaining, if less ambitious, and they’re never about what you expect them to be about.  The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) looks like it’s going to be a comic tale of a Scottish lad-o’-pairts on his way up and then on his way down in London, but it turns into a caustic commentary on the loveless nature of Scottish Calvinism.  Something Leather (1990), which is really a series of connected short stories and again features much sadomasochism, isn’t so much about kinkiness as about Gray’s disgust at the politicians and officials who oversaw Glasgow being European City of Culture 1990, something he regarded as a huge, missed opportunity.  A History Maker (1994), a science-fiction novel described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘Sir Walter Scott meets Rollerball’, isn’t an absurdist sci-fi romp at all but a pessimistic account of how humanity can never achieve peaceful harmony with nature.  And Old Men in Love (2007) promises to be a geriatric version of 1982, Janine, but is really an oddity whose ingredients include, among other things, ancient Athens, Fra Lippo Lippi and the Agapemonites.

 

Gray was also a prolific short-story writer.  He produced three collections of them, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall and True (1993) and The Ends of out Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories and had several more stories published in Lean Tales (1985), alongside contributions from James Kelman and Agnes Owens.  I find the quality of his short fiction variable, with some items a bit too anecdotal or oblique for my tastes.  But many are excellent and Ten Tales Tall and True is one of my favourite short-story collections ever.

 

The fact that Gray was also an artist meant that his books, with their handsome covers and finely detailed illustrations, made decorous additions to anyone’s bookcases.  The illustration by Gray I like best is probably the one he provided for his story The Star in Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

 

© Canongate

 

He also liked to make mischief with the conventions of how books are organised, with their back-cover blurbs, review quotes, prefaces, dedications, footnotes, appendices and so on.  For example, he wasn’t averse to adorning his books with negative reviews (Victoria Glendinning describing Something Leather as ‘a confection of self-indulgent tripe’) or imaginary ones (an organ called Private Nose applauding Poor Things for its ‘gallery of believably grotesque foreigners – Scottish, Russian, American and French.’)

 

As an artist, Gray was good enough to be made Glasgow’s official artist-recorder in the late 1970s and to enjoy a retrospective exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 2014-15.  His artwork included a number of murals on the walls of Glasgow and it’s a tragedy that some have been lost over the years.  Among those that survive, perhaps the most famous is at Hillhead Underground Station.  It contains the memorable and salient verse: “Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing / To earn what we need to keep going / Prevent what you once felt when wee / Hopeful and free.”  Also worth seeing is the mural he painted, Michelangelo-style, on the ceiling of the Òran Mór restaurant, bar and music venue on Glasgow’s Byres Road.  It looks gorgeous in the photos I’ve seen of it, although regrettably when I went there with my brother a few years ago to attend a Bob Mould gig, I was already well-refreshed with several pints of beer… and forgot to look upwards.

 

I never got to meet the great man, though I’m pretty sure I saw him one night in the late 1980s in Edinburgh’s Hebrides Bar, talking with huge animation to a group of friends and admirers.  I was, however, too shy to go over and introduce myself.

 

One writer in whose company I did end up during the late 1980s, though, was Iain Banks, whom I got to interview for a student publication and who then invited me on an afternoon pub crawl across central Edinburgh.  Banks was delighted when I told him that his recently published novel The Bridge (1986) reminded me a wee bit of Lanark.  “I think Lanark’s the best thing published in Scotland in years!” he gushed.  Come to think of it, it was probably the favourable comparison to Gray that prompted Banks to take me on a session.

 

From austinkleon.com