2014 Scottish independence referendum

October 15, 2024October 15, 2024

The Eck’s Factor

So it’s farewell to Alex Salmond, former First Minister of Scotland, former leader of the Scottish National Party and the man who gave Scots their first opportunity in 300 years to make their country independent again. The most formidable Scottish politician of his generation – of a couple of generations, surely – Salmond was apparently the victim of a heart attack soon after he’d given a speech in North Macedonia on October 12^th.

To say I had conflicted feelings about Salmond is an understatement. For a quarter-century, from his election to the London parliament in 1987 to his resignation as Scotland’s First Minister in 2014, after the referendum on Scottish independence went against him and 55% of the Scottish electorate voted to remain in the United Kingdom, he was a man who achieved what had previously seemed impossible – he made Scottish politics interesting. His eloquence, wit and energy gave Scottish politics some oomph. He gave it the elusive ‘X’ factor.

And then… It went pear-shaped. I’ll stress the fact that in 2020 Salmond was cleared of the charges of sexual misconduct levelled against him. Also, the Scottish government, which bungled the initial investigation into him, and the Scottish media, which gleefully turned the coverage of Salmond’s trial into a circus, came out of the affair poorly too. But Salmond’s own lawyer admitted his client “could have been a better man.” All too often in Scotland’s top political job, he’d behaved with the decorum of a lewd schoolboy – to the point where staffing procedures around him were changed to prevent women having to work with him on their own. Also, after the trial, which had been a traumatic experience for the women who’d spoken out against him, Salmond displayed zero contrition. He could have shown himself to be ‘a better man’, but didn’t.

Anyway, here’s a slightly revised excerpt from something I wrote about him in 2021. It was just after the Alba party, which he’d formed in the wake of his acquittal, had flopped at that year’s elections to the Scottish parliament. Obviously, since I wrote it, the electoral shine has faded from the SNP too.

From en.wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Government

For the last 35 years, since the dark days when Margaret Thatcher ran Scotland with the imperious disregard one would give a colonial possession, Scottish politics has felt like a rollercoaster with both giddy peaks and despairing troughs. And Salmond has been a constant presence on that rollercoaster. I know plenty of people who detest him but I’ve seen him as a force for both the good and the bad, the good earlier on and bad more recently. It’s the memory of the good things that makes me sad to see him end up like this, even if he brought a lot of it upon himself.

I remember when I first saw him. One afternoon in early 1987, while a fourth-year undergraduate student, I was nursing a pint in the Central Refectory building at Aberdeen University. I noticed from the corner of my eye a group of students whom I knew as members of the campus branch of the SNP – Alan Kennedy, Val Bremner, Gillian Pollock, Nick Goode – enter and wander over to the counter. They were in the company of a young, round-faced bloke in an un-studenty suit, shirt and tie. I identified him as an up-and-coming SNP politician whom Alan Kennedy, a good mate of mine, had told me was standing in the next general election in nearby Banff and Buchan against the incumbent Conservative Party MP Albert McQuarrie. He’d come to the university that day to address the SNP group and this was the SNP students showing their visitor some post-talk hospitality. The politician, I’d been assured, was one to watch. Indeed, Alan said something along the lines of: “He’s going to do great things.”

A few months later, on June 11^th, the general election took place and this rising SNP star wrestled Banff and Buchan away from Albert McQuarrie and became its new MP. I recall McQuarrie, a doughty old-school Scottish Tory MP who revelled in the nickname ‘the Buchan Bulldog’, bursting into tears during a subsequent interview at what he saw as the unfairness and indignity of losing his beloved constituency to an SNP whippersnapper. He was perhaps the first politician, but certainly not the last, to have his nose put out of joint by Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.

By the early 1990s, Salmond was SNP leader. I lived in London at the time and occasionally I’d drink with a Labour Party spin doctor, also from Scotland. He had no inhibitions about telling me, at every opportunity, what a detestable creep he thought Salmond was. With his smartass manner and habitual smirk, which frequently expanded into a Cheshire-cat grin, and a general arrogance that no doubt came from knowing he was intellectually and rhetorically streets ahead of the numpties making up the majority of Westminster’s Scottish Labour MPs, you could understand how much of an annoyance Salmond was to his opponents. But back then the SNP had just three MPs, so at least he could be dismissed as a minor annoyance.

How long ago that seems now. In those far-off days, the Labour Party controlled much of Scotland at council level, provided the lion’s share of Scottish MPs for Westminster and, when it arrived in 1999, dominated the Scottish parliament too. If their party also happened to be in power at Westminster, which it was occasionally, Scottish Labour-ites surely felt like masters of all they surveyed. If the Conservatives were in power at Westminster, which they were most of the time, those Scottish Labour-ites grumbled a bit, but diplomatically kept their heads down while right-wing Tory policies were imposed on Scotland.

Then in 2007 the sky fell in. Salmond’s SNP won the biggest number of seats in the Scottish parliament and he became Scotland’s First Minister. The SNP have remained in power there during the 14 years and three Scottish parliamentary elections since. They also won the majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats in the UK general elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019. They lost the independence referendum in 2014 – an event that led to Salmond resigning as First Minister and making way for his deputy and supposed protégé Nicola Sturgeon – but the percentage of the vote they got, 45%, was still far more than what anyone had expected at the campaign’s start. They upended the cosy old tradition of Scottish deference to the London-based overlords. Thank God for that, in my opinion.

© William Collins

This stuck in many craws. Not just in those of the Scottish Labour Party, with its historical sense of entitlement, but in those of the majority of Scotland’s newspapers, whose hacks had enjoyed a close relationship with the old political clique and liked to see themselves as part of Scotland’s establishment. It must have horrified them to discover that, no matter how negatively they reported the SNP and its performance in government, a significant proportion of the Scottish public ignored them and kept on voting SNP. Meanwhile, the grin of Alex Salmond, the bastard who seemed emblematic of their good times coming to an end, grew ever wider, his mood grew ever merrier and his girth grew ever more Falstaffian.

However, from 2017 onwards, Salmond’s many foes scented blood. 2017 saw him lose the Westminster seat that, after quitting as Scottish First Minister, he’d been elected to in 2015. That same year, he put on at the Edinburgh Festival a chat-show called Alex Salmond: Unleashed, which from all accounts was a graceless, self-indulgent and ego-driven mess. Soon after, he developed his stage-show into a programme called The Alex Salmond Show, which was broadcast on RT, Russia’s international English-language news channel. Associating himself with Vladimir Putin’s televisual voice to the world was not a wise move. Salmond hadn’t just given his detractors ammunition to use against him. He’d handed them a whole arsenal.

I’d always assumed there was no dirt to dig up on Alex Salmond, for the simple reason that if there had been, his enemies in the old Scottish establishment would have dug it up and used it to wreck his reputation long ago. Thus, it was a surprise in 2018 when the Daily Record newspaper reported that Salmond faced allegations of sexual misconduct while he’d been First Minister. This had lately been the subject of an inquiry by the Scottish government and its findings had been passed on to the police. Although Salmond made sure there was a legal review of this, which resulted in the Scottish government admitting that its investigative procedures had been flawed and paying him half a million pounds in legal expenses, the police still charged him with 14 offences, including two counts of attempted rape, in 2019.

One year later, Salmond was cleared of these charges. The prosecutors dropped one charge, the jury found him not guilty in 12 more and the final charge was deemed ‘not proven’. Nonetheless, Salmond’s defence admitted he’d acted inappropriately, been overly ‘touchy feely’ with female staff and ‘could certainly have been a better man’.

Meanwhile, the Scottish government and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, now totally at odds with Salmond, were subject to both an investigation by a Scottish Parliamentary committee and an independent investigation about how they’d handled, or mishandled, the affair. The committee concluded there’d been both individual and corporate incompetence but these conclusions weren’t enough to topple Sturgeon. The independent investigation judged that Sturgeon hadn’t breached the ministerial code, something that Salmond and his supporters, convinced of a conspiracy against him in high places, maintained she had.

From facebook.com

In 2021 Salmond founded the Alba Party, supposedly more gung-ho in its desire for Scottish independence than the cautious SNP, and claimed this wasn’t an attempt to undermine Sturgeon. But it was generally perceived as an effort to diminish her party’s vote in the Scottish election that year – Salmond’s revenge after his acquittal. Whether Alba’s purpose was malevolent or benevolent, it didn’t work because the SNP ended up with 64 seats in the new parliament, with the Greens bumping up the number of pro-independence MSPs to 72, compared with the Unionist parties’ tally of 57 MSPs and Alba’s tally of zero.

It didn’t help Alba’s cause that it attracted a lot of fringe-dwelling dingbats in the independence movement, dingbats whom I’m sure Sturgeon’s SNP was delighted to see head Salmond’s way. These included conspiracy fantasists (former ambassador Craig Murray, a man who couldn’t pop out to the shops to buy a pint of milk without claiming to have met an MI5 operative and uncovered an evil plot by the British government along the way), frothing social conservatives (Margaret Lynch, who peddled the lie that LGBT organisations were trying to lower the age of consent to ‘ten’) and the generally ‘hard of thinking’ (MSP Ash Regan, whose big idea was to create an ‘independence thermometer’, measuring Scotland’s readiness to leave the UK).

Finally, one thing I will say in Salmond’s defence. The Scottish press was pretty disgraceful in how it reported the case. From columnist Alex Massie declaring at the investigation’s outset that ‘WHATEVER HAPPENS, IT’S OVER FOR SALMOND’, to the Herald previewing the trial with a ‘Big Read’ feature that it illustrated with pictures of the Yorkshire Ripper, Fred and Rosemary West, the Moors Murderers, Dennis Nilsen, Charles Manson and Adolf Eichmann, to a dodgy, nod-and-a-wink post-trial documentary by the BBC’s Kirsty Wark, the tone of the coverage didn’t suggest that a person is ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Rather, it suggested that a person is ‘guilty because we want them to be guilty’.

***

The piece I wrote in 2021 ended with an observation, “the Salmond Rollercoaster has run out of track,” and a plea to him: “Call it a day for Christ’s sake.”

Since then, of course, Nicola Sturgeon’s reign as Scottish First Minister has come to an ignominious end too. These events call to mind the famous quote by that old Conservative politician and racist Enoch Powell: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

If only Alex Salmond had kept his hands to himself whilst First Minister. And if only he’d retired and accepted the role of distinguished ‘elder statesman’ in 2014. He wouldn’t have disproven Powell’s famous edict, because his career would still have ended with the disappointment of the referendum. But at least today I’d be remembering him as ‘a better man’. And it’s as ‘a better man’ that I’d like to remember him.

© Slainte Media / RT / From archive.org

September 18, 2024September 19, 2024

Mither

© Jim Barton / From wikipedia.org

Today, September 18^th, is the tenth anniversary of 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence. Yes, a decade has now passed since the Scottish electorate voted, by a majority of 55% to 45%, in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom.

In the referendum’s aftermath, I was inspired to write a short story entitled Mither. This poked fun at a narrative peddled by the mainstream media that the referendum had turned Scotland into a bitterly divided country – parents, children, siblings who’d previously lived together in harmony suddenly transformed into rabid yes-sers and no-ers who were at each other’s throats, families in turmoil, that sort of thing. It also paid homage to a classic and highly influential movie. Needless to say, the story was too weird and too daft to ever get published.

However, ten years on, I thought I would take advantage of the occasion and post it here. I now give you… Mither.

© Labour for Independence / From wikipedia.org

I must have dozed while I sat in the office and read the literature that’d landed on our porch floor that morning. I hadn’t heard her go out. I only heard the porch door scrape open and shut as she came back.

‘Mither,’ I said when she entered the office. ‘You were outside.’

She settled into the armchair with the tartan-patterned cushions that’d been her seat – her throne, we called it – when she ran the business by herself. Now that I was mostly in charge, I had my own seat in the office but I kept the throne there should she want to use it. She smoothed her skirt across her knees. She was a modern-minded woman – at times too modern-minded because she had some ideas you’d expect more in a giddy teenager – but she avoided trousers and stuck to old-fashioned long skirts. ‘Aye, Norrie. I’ve been out and about.’

I didn’t like the sound of that but before I could quiz her she leaned forward from the throne and took the leaflet out of my hand. ‘What’s this you’re reading? Don’t say they’ve shovelled more shite through our door.’

It pained me to hear her genteel voice soiled by coarse language. But I stayed patient. ‘It’s actually interesting, Mither. It’s an interview with a normal young couple, a professional young couple, about what might happen if the referendum result is…’ I searched for a word that’d cause minimum offence. ‘Unexpected.’

Mither sighed and her eyes swivelled up in their sockets.

‘Now I ken you’re sceptical, Mither. But they seem decent. He’s called Kenneth and she’s called Gina. And they’re worried about the effect independence would have on them.’

Mither’s eyes swivelled down again. Then I saw them twitch from side to side while they scanned the text on the leaflet.

I pressed on. ‘It wouldn’t have a good effect, Mither. It’d be bad for them.’ Why did my voice tremble? Why was I afraid? ‘The financial uncertainty. How would decent hardworking people like them – like me – cope if all the business fled south and the prices shot up? And the banks… Why, I read in the paper the other day about an expert who said the bank machines would stop dispensing cash if the vote was yes.’

‘Does,’ asked Mither, ‘this say what Kenneth does for a living?’

‘And even if we still have cash, Mither, what would our currency be? We won’t have the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls down in Westminster won’t allow it. We’ll have to make do with some banana-republic-type currency. Or worse, the euro!’

‘Norrie,’ said Mither, ‘calm down. Does this leaflet actually say what Kenneth’s job is?’

‘Aye, of course it does.’ I faltered. ‘Well, no. Maybe it doesn’t.’

She sighed. ‘It certainly doesn’t, Norrie. And I’ll tell you why.’ She raised the leaflet so that I could see a picture of Kenneth, Gina and their children on it. She placed a fingertip against Kenneth. ‘It’s because he’s Kenneth Braithwaite, who’s one of our local councillors. One of our Conservative Party councillors. But that fact isn’t mentioned here. It pretends that he’s an ordinary unbiased person like you or me.’

I chuckled nervously. ‘Now Mither. I wouldn’t say you were unbiased.’

Mither rose from her throne. ‘I am unbiased. My mind’s open to facts and I form opinions and make decisions based on those facts. Facts, mind you. Not the propaganda, smears and scaremongering that’s poured out of the political, business and media establishments during the last year. Not the drivel that’s clogged and befuddled your impressionable young mind.’

Before I could reply, she tore the leaflet down the middle and returned it to my hands in two pieces. Then she hustled out of the office and shut the door behind her with enough force to make a stuffed owl wobble and almost fall off a nearby shelf. I heard her shoes go clacking up the stairs and then another door slam, presumably the one leading into her room.

I seethed. How I hated, how I loathed this referendum! Setting family members against one another day after day! I looked at the leaflet again and realised that by a creepy coincidence Mither had ripped it down the middle of the family-picture. Now Kenneth and a little boy occupied one half of it while Gina and a little girl were sundered and separate in the other half.

A family literally torn apart.

***

I hated the referendum but I couldn’t wait for the day of it, September 18^th, to come – and take place and be over with. The problem was that the time until then seemed to pass very slowly. And during this time it felt like a war of attrition was being waged against me. I grew more tired and depressed the longer those separatists raved in the media and on the streets and from the literature they popped through the slot in our porch door. A rash of yes stickers and posters spread along the windows in the street-fronts of our neighbourhood. Some of them even appeared on the houses of people I’d thought were decent and sensible.

I began to panic. God, could it happen? I had visions of the doors padlocked and the windows boarded up on the old family business and Mither and I living in poverty alongside hundreds of thousands of other suddenly-penniless Scots. While around us, food prices and fuel prices skyrocketed, the banks and financial companies whisked all their offices away to London, the housing market disappeared into a giant hole, the hospitals became like those in the developing world, and terrorist cells congregated in Glasgow and Edinburgh and prepared to attack England across the new border.

But worst of all was the madness this referendum campaign inspired in Mither.

She sensed when I was worn out. While I was napping, or nodding off behind the desk in the office, or slumped in a stupor in front of the TV, she’d leave her room and creep down the stairs and do things.

These might be wee things. If I wasn’t in the office, she might use the computer and I’d discover hours later that it was open at frightful separatist websites like Bella Caledonia or National Collective or Wings over Scotland. The day’s Scottish Daily Express might disappear from the kitchen table and turn up, scrunched into a ball, in the recycling bin in the corner. Or if the Express was left on the table, any photographs in it of Alistair Darling or George Osborne might have shocking words like tosser or bampot graffiti-ed across them in Mither’s curly handwriting.

More worrying was her tendency sometimes to sneak outdoors. It would’ve been bad enough in normal times because she was too old and frail to be wandering the streets alone. But in these dangerous times, who knew what she was up to and who she was associating with?

© National Collective / From Stirling Centre of Scottish Studies

The evidence disturbed me. When I visited her room I found a growing collection of things that she could only have acquired during trips outside – little Scottish saltire and lion-rampant flags, booklets of essays and poems written in support of independence, brochures for events with sinister titles like Imagi-Nation and Yestival, posters where the word can’t had the t scrawled out so that they read can instead. She’d amassed badges, stickers and flyers with the word yes emblazoned on them. What a disgusting-sounding word yes had become to me. I’d contemplate Mither and imagine that horrible word spurting from her lips –

‘Yes! Yes! Yes – !’

And she’d argue. Goodness me, what had got into the woman to make her so bloody-minded? In between quoting names of people I’d never heard of, but who were undoubtedly up to no good, like Gerry Hassan, David Greig and Lesley Riddoch, she’d taunt me mercilessly.

‘So go on. Tell me. Explain. Why can we not be independent?’

‘Because… We can’t! We just can’t! We’re too… too…’

‘Too wee?’

‘Aye! Well, no. Not that, not only that. We’re also…’

‘Too poor?’

‘Aye, that’s true, Scotland’s too poor to be independent. But the main reason is that we’re…’

‘Too stupid?’

‘Och stop it, Mither! Stop! You’re putting words in my mouth!’

‘But you agree with that basic proposition? Scotland can’t be independent because it’s too small, its economy’s too weak and its people aren’t educated enough?’ She sighed. ‘That’s what we’re up against. A mass of our fellow Scots, yourself included, brainwashed by the establishment into believing their own inferiority!’

I stormed out of the room at that point. What horrible people had she been talking to?

A few weeks before the referendum-day, her madness reached what I assumed was its peak. After the last guests had left the premises and after I’d washed and put away the breakfast things, I took the vacuum cleaner into the porch and started on the carpet there. It took me a minute to notice something odd about the rack on the porch wall where I stored leaflets about local attractions that our guests might be interested in: Rosslyn Chapel, Abbotsford, Traquair House, Melrose Abbey and so on. The leaflets in the rack had changed. The tourist ones had disappeared. In their place were different ones. Political ones.

© Women for Independence / From wikipedia.org

I put down the vacuum-hose and approached the rack. Crammed into it now were leaflets I’d seen in her room advertising those sinister-sounding events like Imagi-Nation and Yestival and other ones promoting the unsavoury websites she’d consulted on the computer like National Collective, Bella Caledonia and Wings over Scotland. Also there were leaflets for organisations with different but strangely-repetitive names: Women for Independence, Liberals for Independence, Polish for Independence, Asians for Independence, English for Independence, Farmers for Independence… One organisation, whose leaflets were merely sheets of photocopied and folded-up A4 paper, was even called Hoteliers for Independence.

I couldn’t help reading that Hoteliers for Independence leaflet. It ended with the exhortation, ‘Please contact Hoteliers for Independence for more information at…’ and gave an address. My insides turned cold as I read the address. I found myself pivoting around inside the porch and facing different internal doors that led to different parts of the guesthouse. I half-expected one door to have hanging on it a sign that said HOTELIERS FOR INDEPENDENCE – THIS WAY.

Then I peered up towards the first floor, where a certain bedroom was located, and lamented, ‘Oh, Mither.’

***

One afternoon, close to September 18^th, I woke from an unplanned doze at the desk in the office. I’d been dreaming. A voice in the dream had droned about – what else? – that ghastly referendum. Disconcertingly, back in the conscious world, the voice continued to talk to me. I realised it came from a shelf above me, where the radio was positioned between a stuffed gull and a stuffed pheasant. The radio was tuned in to a local station and the voice belonged to a newsreader. He was explaining that a politician, a Labour Party MP, was visiting our region today.

This MP had toured the high streets and town centres of Scotland lately. To get people’s attention he’d place a crate on the pavement, stand on top of the crate and deliver a speech from it. He’d speak bravely in favour of Great Britain and the Union of Parliaments and denounce the separatists and their vile foolish notions of independence. And I’d heard from recent news reports that the separatists hadn’t taken kindly to his tour. Well, as bullies, they wouldn’t. They’d gone to his speaking appearances with the purpose of heckling him and shouting him down.

Then the newsreader named the town the MP was due to speak in this afternoon. It was our town.

And immediately I felt uneasy because I realised I hadn’t seen or heard anything of Mither for the past while. I went upstairs and knocked on her door. There was no reply. The guesthouse was empty that afternoon and so I hung the BACK SOON sign in the porch-window, went out and locked the door after me. Then I headed for the middle of town.

It wasn’t hard to find where the Labour MP was speaking because of the hubbub. The MP seemed to have turned his microphone’s volume to maximum so that he could drown out the heckling and shouting from the separatists in his audience. I emerged from a vennel, onto the high street, and saw the crowd ahead of me. It contained fewer people than I’d expected. Some of them wore no badges and carried no placards – among them, I thought I glimpsed Kenneth and Gina from the brochure that Mither had ripped up – and some had badges and placards saying yes. Looming above everyone was the MP on his crate.

© Thomas Nugent / From wikipedia.org

The separatists present were trying to make themselves heard – without success, thanks to the MP’s bellowing voice and the amplification provided by the microphone. It wasn’t until I reached the edge of the small crowd that I could understand what they were saying.

‘Answer the question, Murphy!’

‘He won’t answer the question!’

‘Quit shouting, man, and answer the question for God’s sake!’

Then I saw a figure standing at the back of the crowd a few yards along from me. The figure wore a long flowing skirt, a woollen cardigan and a lacy Sunday bonnet that obscured its face. A handbag dangled from one of its elbows and a small egg carton was clasped in its hands. As I watched, the figure prised the lid off the carton, lifted one of the six eggs inside and stretched back an arm in readiness to throw it –

I rushed at her and shouted, ‘Mither! Oh my God!’

What happened next is confusing. I remember reaching her and knocking the carton from her hands so that eggs flew in all directions. I remember not being able to halt myself in time and crashing into her so that she fell and I fell too, on top of her. But then, somehow, I found myself lying alone on the ground. Mither had disappeared. She must’ve been sprightlier than I’d thought. She’d gathered herself up and hurried away and left me there.

One of the eggs had made its way into my right hand. Now it was a ruin of broken shell. Meanwhile, the yolks, whites and shell-pieces of other eggs formed a gelatinous mess on the front of my woollen cardigan.

Then I was being helped to my feet. Around me, I heard voices:

‘Who is it?’

‘Some auld lady.’

‘No, wait… Christ! It’s a man!’

‘It’s young Bates. You ken, Norrie Bates? Him that runs the Bates Bed and Breakfast?’

‘Why’s he togged out like that?’

Someone took my arm and led me away. Behind us, the MP, who seemed not to have noticed the commotion with Mither and me, kept roaring into his microphone. We turned a corner into a side-street and paused there. I identified the man steering me as Dougie Bremner, who was the proprietor of another B and B in the town, a few streets away from ours. He’d always seemed a gentle friendly type and it surprised me to see a yes badge stuck to his jacket lapel.

Dougie looked perplexed. He scanned me up and down as if my appearance was a puzzle he wanted to solve. ‘Norrie,’ he said at last. ‘I think you need to go home. As fast as you can manage.’

My head ached. Something was squeezing my skull, which in turn was squeezing my brain. I raised a hand and found my head enclosed in a lady’s bonnet. It exuded two ribbons that were knotted under my chin. In a final gesture of spite Mither must’ve fastened it on my head before she’d escaped. ‘Aye,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll go home.’

‘By the way,’ added Dougie, who seemed greatly troubled now. ‘How’s your mither? I haven’t seen her for a while.’

***

It was the morning of September 19^th. The radio had disappeared from the office and I guessed it’d travelled upstairs to Mither’s room and informed her of the result. Still, in case she hadn’t heard, I felt obliged to go to her room and let her know.

She looked very small, thin and frail as she huddled there amid the paraphernalia she’d acquired, the flags, placards, badges, posters, leaflets and booklets. On the floor around her, in a serpentine coil, there even lay a blue-and-white woollen scarf with a pair of knitting needles embedded in one unfinished end of it. That was another lark she’d been up to. Knitting for independence.

Because she looked so weak and unwell now, I understood that she knew. The result seemed to have drained the life from her, leaving her a husk.

But I repeated the news. ‘Mither. It’s a no.’

She didn’t answer. No sound came from her mouth, which was stretched back in a rictus – if I hadn’t known she was grimacing in pain and dismay, I’d have thought she was grinning. I looked into her eyes, trying to find a glimmer of acknowledgement for me, a spark of recognition that I was standing before her. But the eyes were blank and gaping, almost like they weren’t eyes at all but two dark holes.

And although I was relieved and delighted about the result, I suddenly and inexplicably felt as though a part of me was dead.

With apologies to Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins. No apologies to Jim Murphy.

And tomorrow, on September 19^th, I’ll raise a glass to the memory of the late Charlie Massie, who cheered me up after the result ten years ago by taking me on a pub crawl in Delhi. Though it probably wasn’t wise to go into the bar in the British High Commission, where we ended up stuck at a table in front of a giant TV screen, showing the news, with a lengthy interview in progress with Boris Johnson. Bojo was spewing shite about how great it was that the Jocks had embraced the Union and all the benefits that went with it. Those future Union benefits would include Brexit and having him as Prime Minister.

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024

Cultural Alasdair-isation

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023). This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992. Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector. But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out. So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel. A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s. It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow. The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature. What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do. McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films. I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too. For me, it’s his most engaging work so far. However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

Firstly, it has many good performances. Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago. I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands. Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character. They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly. But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined. Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her. Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her. While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella. Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96^th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength. Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque. One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies. I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though. Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments. Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence. They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature. Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long. And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband. At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella. He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist. Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him. Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part. (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film. As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it. One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end. This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller. She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional. She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice. What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication. Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’. However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland. Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one. And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names. This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England. When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19^th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on. When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation. Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things. I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’. Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out. (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision. Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie. Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all. How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it? It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia. Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book. That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.