Of cabbages, and kings
I don't know if you recall King Alexander the First. Personally I don't; he lived a long time ago. I certainly don't know what signal service Walterus Brown, a French mercenary, performed for King Alexander. He may have been his right hand man, his most trusted general; he may have been his enforcer, his personal thug; he may have been his bum boy. I don't know. What I do know is that, by the time Alexander died, eight hundred and ninety one years ago, Walterus Broun had possession of the rich lands of Colstoun in East Lothian. I know this also: his descendants live there still, as their reward for that far-off, unremembered service. They have lived there, and grown fat on the backs of other mens' labour, for almost nine hundred years.
And over that time they've turned off a lot of tenants. They turned off a Mr Walker in 1817; a Mr Brodie in 1838; William Hay in 1872; David Smith in 1880; William Gibson in 1896; and so on. As their present tenant says, 'no one has ever left Colstoun Mains voluntarily, most have been bankrupted or very close to it.' Their present tenant is, of course, Andrew Stoddart, whom you'll all recall as a doughty campaigner for the rights of tenant farmers, and for land reform.
Are we going to allow Andrew Stoddart to be thrown out of his home for activism?
Andrew Stoddart — whom many of my friends will remember from the Birnham workshop — is being evicted from his farm at Coulston Mains just outside Haddington. I think there's no doubt that he's being evicted because of his land reform activism, and because of his activism within the Scottish Tenant Farmers' Association.
It cannot be tolerable that a man can be turned out of his livelihood and his home because of his political views: that has to be an affront against any idea of democracy and freedom of speech, whatever you think of the legitimacy of land ownership.
This is urgent. Andrew is being evicted on the 28th of November. Not only will he and his family lose their home and income, his tractorman's family will be losing theirs too. I'm trying to assess how many people are prepared to how much effort into defending him.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
The subject of this essay is the Labour Party of which Jeremy Corbyn is leader, and its implications for the left in Scotland.
I'm impressed by Corbyn, despite his total failure to understand the situation in Scotland and his schoolboy errors — perhaps passed to him by someone else — about the SNP's alleged 'privatisations'.
He is, I believe, genuinely a person of the left; genuinely a person of peace, of sharing, of consensus building, of honesty and of egalitarianism. I suspect that he would name Ghandi as one of his inspirations; I think that he would mean it.
Breaking young minds
This morning I listened to a radio programme. Before it was half finished I was screaming in anger and anguish at the radio; by the time it was finished I was sobbing. For the rest of the day I've felt headachy and ill.
The programme was called 'mending young minds'. You don't mend young minds, you break them; and once they're broken it's extremely unlikely that there will be any road back. Of the twenty or so kids who were in the Young People's Unit of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital with me forty-five years ago, I'd be extremely surprised if half a dozen are still alive. Those who are will, like me, have suffered a lifetime of mental illness.
Being mad just isn't fun
It isn't fun for anyone
It isn't fun if you are mad
It isn't fun it it's your dad
If it's your child it's just as bad
There is no fun in being mad.
whoseBBC?
This is the whole of my response to the government's consultation on BBC charter renewal. You can find the consultation, and make your own response, here. **** **** **Q1: How can the BBC’s public purposes be improved so there is more clarity about what the BBC should achieve? **
The BBC is intended to be a public broadcaster and not a state broadcaster, but the actions of successive governments have reversed this and we now have the worst of all worlds: a state propaganda arm paid for by the public.