The hurly burly of term and teaching has suppressed my blogging mojo this last week, but Kenny Farquharson asked me to step in to fill in the gap left by a weary Andrew Wilson in the Scotland on Sunday this morning. Unoriginally, for my topic, I took the general election, and the charms and perils of the SNP advancing in Westminster, potentially entering the mainstream of British politics. I begin by rehearsing a tale which may be familiar to my longterm readers, but it seemed an apposite way of introducing the challenges which face the party, in having its voice heard across the United Kingdom. An excerpt:"‘GOOD grief, you aren’t a Scottish Nationalist, are you?” The massive, tweedy don inspected me, eyes twinkling with surprise and a kind of benevolent contempt. Determined to skewer this odd specimen of humanity, after a fortifying slurp of claret, he patiently explained to me that I was wrongheaded and mistaken. Like a dim undergraduate in a tricky tutorial, he said, if I thought matters through, I would soon realise the absurdity of the Nationalists and my position."
You can read the whole thing here.
Slouching towards Westminster.... What a fantastic title!
ReplyDeleteAll credit [and blame] to be directed at the responsible sub editor...
DeleteExcellent piece Andrew - I liked the point about the SNP now engaging in Westminster on behalf of those who voted for the union as well, a complex matter that - many of those who will have voted No will doubtless find Tory policies more sympatico than those offered by the SNP, while one of the oddest recent poll assertions was that 1 in 5 SNP voters fancy a coalition with the Tories - one's instinct is to cry yet again aberration, but perhaps that 20% is a fair reflection of our muddied reality.
ReplyDeleteYour eyebrow-raised top table figure is familiar to me from his looking glass image on the Yes side. I was at several events at which I seemed to be the only No person present and got just the same disbelief, in particular at an exhibition of indy cartoons, which I noted at the time was like being trapped in a lift with Jehovah’s Witnesses on speed.
My counterpart to your Chesterbelloc figure would be a thin-faced arty person, one convinced that indy will bring print runs for their unreadable poems or stagings of their unwatchable plays - the art world's equivalent of the traditional pork barrel.
The Yes camp's disbelief of sceptics is based on evangelical certainty of a type common in Scottish history - the No camp's disbelief is based on an unwillingness to realise that like it or lump it, the border has been 'shaken loose.'
The great riding families were of course cross-border and put their joint interests above any puny national considerations - the English and Scots Grahams were alleged to join forces after a battle to plunder the dead.
I wonder who the equivalents to the riding families are in our modern polity.
Oh loved the Churchill tweak - clever.
Ha! Excellent.
DeleteAn important reminder that one should always meet folk who fundamentally disagree with you, and if possible, befriend one or two of them. Talking past one another: I said it at the time, still a problem.
Lallands writing in the Hootsmon on Sunday!?
ReplyDelete"All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born."
I was once tempted to post a sarky Tripadvisor review of a rude baker - 'A terrible buttery is born'
DeleteOne for the Aberdonians, there.
DeleteOn a more personal matter, whilst in uniform in the streets of Auld Reekie, I passed a hirsute, portly, gentleman hipster; we both shared a double-take...
ReplyDeleteIt has been a season of Yeats, and of hipsters, portly or otherwise, zesty or otherwise.
DeleteAh. When I say 'portly'...
ReplyDelete...so not you then?
Oi. However much the waistcoat strains about my girdle, I am not yet portly. Well filled out, perhaps. Robust. Not in danger of being invited to be a swimwear model, I would accept. But portly? Give us a decade.
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