Press Letters from Year 2004
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Press Letters from Year 2004 |
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Alastair McIntosh's Published Letters to the Press
From 2004 onwards - Chronological Order - Most Recent First
Click here for letters prior to 2001 or 2001 - 2003
Published in the Stornoway Gazette, 28 June 2018, under the heading, "We Can Take Back Control". Also on their website, and an expanded version with links to key claims as a guest on Katie Laing's blog of 30 June 2018, as "Imagine Life Without the Interconnector", here. A link I'd like to add is this one from October 2018, that Loganair hope to introduce their first electric passenger plane flights in Orkney in 2021.
Dear Madam Your lead article (21 June) quotes Murdo Maciver as saying that wind turbines on a massive scale are “needed in order to secure the interconnector.” In one way he’s right. The island’s capacity to absorb more renewable energy is currently full. At first sight, the only way to increase financial benefit to the island’s communities is to yield control to multinational corporations. I don’t doubt that many who pursue this line of logic, and especially the Stornoway Trust, have the greater good of the community at heart. However, the technology of renewable energy is fast changing. New options are opening for local initiative at local scales. The interconnector, requiring turbines on a scale that would be ruinous to large areas of the island’s beauty, might have been yesterday’s solution. It might have been a 20th century solution. But consider what is offered by tomorrow’s world. For example, in Norway, the proven success of the world’s first electric vehicle ferry has led to a further 53 orders for the shipbuilder, Fjellstrand. Meanwhile, the Norwegian airport authority expects that all of their short haul flights will be electric by 2040. Indeed, their first commercial route, operated with a 19-seater electric plane, is scheduled to start in 2025. We’re not talking never never land. We’re talking only seven years’ time. This is all made possible by fast-developing battery technology. What’s more, the noise nuisance from such planes and ships is cut by half. Their greenhouse gas emissions is cut by 95%. Imagine an island future built without the interconnector. Where local power is generated for local use from the providence of wind, rain and sun. Where the power produced runs not just lights, the TV, an electric fire and kettle, but heat pumps, ferries, buses, cars and planes. Where pump storage using sea or mountain lochs can even out the fluctuations in supply, and fossil fuels used only for the backup. Where planning consent is granted only to community land trusts. After all, there is a world of psychological difference between a vast wind farm built to export profits to a landlord or to venture capitalists, and a community scale of endeavour based around Iain Crichton Smith’s principle of “real people in a real place”. These emergent 21st century alternatives to an interconnector are fast becoming reality. On Eigg, where I was closely involved with the 1990s land buyout, 90% of the electricity comes from renewable sources. Their “national grid” is run entirely by their own crofters. What goes around comes around locally. Here is a Hebridean community that has enacted a 21st century future that has pulled the community together, not split it apart. I understand why people might think that the interconnector is their only salvation. It was the same on Harris, in the 1990s, with the superquarry proposal. But look at Harris now. Thanks largely to the new-found confidence and opportunities of land reform, a matrix of employment opportunities have sprung up that do not depend on trickle down handouts from corporate and landed power. Lastly, imagine jumping on a plane to Norway to bring the likes of the Fjellstrand electric shipbuilders over to Arnish. We don’t have to be some corporation’s latter day colony. We can take back control, and do so to give life. Yours sincerely Alastair McIntosh
Published in a Letters Special in the West Highland Free Press, 17 July 2015, after Professor Macleod had resigned his column claiming inhibition of his freedom of expression, and Brian Wilson's column was terminated. Dear Sir I was one of the three whose letters you were good enough to publish (29 May) taking issue with Professor Donald Macleod’s column about Islam. I do not know what may or may not have happened behind the scenes - either with the Professor or, subsequently, with Brian Wilson (whose column read as honourable support for an old friend). I would imagine, however, that for all parties confidentiality might now be the better part of valour. Donald is one of those rare theologians of the Highland church who has been prepared to come down from the pulpit and enter the rough and tumble of the marketplace. Christ set much the same example. Usually this has shed light. Sometimes (like with some of my own work), it has generated heat. Donald and I have had occasion to disagree robustly yet, like many of your readers, I have usually felt enriched by his spiritual teaching. Thank you for having given him space down so many years. Perhaps a way might open for his voice to be heard and vigorously debated once again? Not without a little justification have his closest admirers called him “Scotland’s greatest living theologian.” Alastair McIntosh Published in the West Highland Free Press, 29 May 2015, p. 15,as the lead letter under the heading, "British Muslims 'need our solidarity, rather than marginalisation'". Also with other letters on same topic in PDF.
Dear Sir At least Professor Donald Macleod (Footnotes, 22 May) acknowledges that, for centuries, we Europeans have turned up on foreign shores, “killing native inhabitants, destroying their culture and plundering their treasures.” He now fears “radicalised Muslims” coming over here, but fails to connect such militancy with our own recent destabilising interventions in countries like Iraq and Libya. This narrows his vision down to one side of a conspiracy. He thereby fears “a coherent plan to increase the Muslim presence in Europe”, one that might even lead to, “an Islamised France, armed to the hilt and waiting to pounce.” His parallel with the Nazi (read Muslim) treatment of the Jews (read Christians) concludes with the sinister scenario: “in the event of Islamic dominance in Britain our friendly Muslim shopkeepers will have little option but to march behind the radicals.” His remedy is to build up “spiritual barriers” with “a legion of formally-ordained Evangelists committed to the many Scottish communities where Christ is unheard-of, and where a passionate Islam would meet with no counter-faith.” This, because he fears that Highlanders of “a generation that is spiritually spineless” might find Islam more tempting than they have previously found evangelicalism. As such, we might “sleep-walk our way into the loss of all our freedoms.” Leaving aside what indigenous Highlanders might make of such a diagnosis, I wonder how the said friendly Muslim shopkeeper, or the skilled hospital consultant, feels reading this in their local newspaper? To me, its spirit runs tantamount to the incitement of religious hatred. I am an advisor to senior British Muslims including, for the past quarter century, Dr Bashir Maan of Glasgow Central Mosque. Such community leaders feel as bad as we Christians do when they see their faith being blasphemously appropriated by those whose god is not of love, but violence. They need our solidarity, not marginalisation. For me in this new millennium, I yearn to see a deepening understanding of the Cross as God’s supreme transformative symbol of nonviolence. Jesus told Pilate at his trial: “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36). He refused the disciples’ request to bring down fire upon their enemies, saying: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of” (Luke 9:51-56). He met with visiting Greeks (who were “pagans”), he spoke of Heaven’s “many mansions”, and remarked that “other sheep I have, which are not of this fold” (John 10:16). I have learned so much from Donald Macleod and hate having to write this letter. But I plead with you, and pray, dear Donald: don’t push our Muslim fellow humankind into a corner. We have no right to make our Christ too small. Alastair McIntosh
Published in The Herald, 23 June 2014, under the heading, "Lost Lexicon of Piety Recovered" (also as PDF, and see also Foreword to Hunter)
Dear Sir
Having been a referee to the process, I am thrilled that UNESCO have granted “Memory of the World” to the Carmichael Watson Collection (“UNESCO recognition for Gaelic collection”, The Herald, June 19).
This archive of Hebridean spiritual folklore gathered by Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912) has been described by the Lewis-born Dr John MacInnes as “a lost lexicon of piety” and by the Colonsay-born Professor Donald Mackinnon as containing work “of rare literary beauty as well as of religious value.”
The South Uist-born Canon Angus MacQueen concludes a book of conference proceedings from the Islands Book Trust, saying: “I realise how sensitive his approach to our prayer life was, as if he were eavesdropping on the private life of those old folk who included their God in every passing moment of the day.”
UNESCO’s recognition brings honour on Edinburgh University’s Centre for Research Collections and especially, on this collection’s Principal Researcher, Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, who is acutely aware of the further research opportunities that the resource affords. But above all, this is a world spiritual resource. It reveals the tender beauty of an underlying Hebridean spirituality, one that has increasingly found multi-denominational expression as a recovered lexicon of piety.
Alastair McIntosh Honorary Senior Research Fellow College of Social Sciences University of Glasgow
Published in The Friend, 11 April 2014, p. 11, under the heading, "Copyright Concerns"
Dear Editor
Hayley Gullen’s objection to one of her cartoons being used without permission on a Quaker Facebook page was headed “Copyright Concerns” (letters, 14th March). A visual artist’s work stands complete within itself. It cannot be cited in part as “fair use”. I therefore have a considerable measure of sympathy with her position, namely: “The creator, therefore, maintains the impartial right to have control over where, and how, it is distributed. Not recognising this right has serious implications – for example, potentially reducing the income of hard-working artists.”
However – and if I might use Gullen’s position as a springboard beyond its context - I would be dismayed if Friends started to feel constrained from quoting literary work out of a sense that they ought first procure permission from authors and publishers. Already commercial interests are trying to narrow down time-honoured definitions of “fair use”. This colonises emotional and intellectual territory. It blocks the flow of motifs that only gained their currency in the first place by having traction with the common treasury of the cultural psyche.
I am told that Islam holds knowledge and creativity to be the gift of Allah. Some scholars therefore deem modern notions of “intellectual property” to be a form of theft. Jesus similarly challenged those who hold the keys of learning yet hinder others at the gate (Luke 11:52). Where stand Friends today? Do we still believe that work is worship? Are the fruits of our creativity really “ours”, any more than ministry under the promptings of the Holy Spirit can be said to be “ours”? Consider aquifers when drawing from the well.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in Scotland on Sunday, 30 March 2014, p. 36, under the heading, "Offended by 'Che Lamont' Cartoon"
Dear Sir
While I disagree with Johann Lamont on independence, I do respect her as a conviction politician with a track record on poverty and violence against woman. Your cartoon caricature of her face as “CHE Lamont” (Brian Adcock, 23 March) was violent to the point of obscenity. I do not think that even Alex Salmond has been subjected to quite such an ugly attack.
Scotland can be proud that three of its four leading politicians – Davidson, Lamont and Sturgeon – are women. Is this how any – irrespective of party or position - should be treated in return for public service? Please, raise the level of debate with cartoons of humour that rise above the politics of demonisation.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in the West Highland Free Press, 14 June 2013, p. 23, under the heading, "Reminder of 'true Christian message' in Footnotes"
Dear Sir
Thank God that, in the face of brutalising schadenfreude in some sections of the media, Donald Macleod has the courage to remind us that both Johnathan MacKinnon and Stefan Millar, the killers of Liam Aitchison, are not sub-human, not beyond redemption, but bearers (whether we like the thought or not) of the image of God (Footnotes, 7 June).
I have lived for the past nine years in Govan, drawn by a project that works with broken people. When photographs of MacKinnon and Millar were first published what hit me was the deep wrinkling in both their brows. I don’t know their backgrounds, but in Govan it disturbs me on a daily basis to see boys and girls with their brows prematurely furrowed in this way – usually a product of early fear, violence and alienation.
The reminder in Footnotes that “their humanity has a claim upon us” is the true Christian message. It flows directly from the Jesus of the Four Gospels as distinct from more arguable injunctions that consume much church energy but are found only in Paul or the Old Testament.
“Love thy God” and “love one another”. Such is the Great Commandment of Christ. Thank you, Rev Macleod.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in The Stornoway Gazette, 20 September 2012, p. 4, under the heading, "Wind Farm Reaction".
Dear Madam
Struan Stevenson MEP has a built up a strong track record doing his utmost in Europe to protect the fisheries interests of Scottish coastal communities. He is also President of the Intergroup of the European Parliament on climate change and therefore not ignorant of the environmental threats that beset the Earth. It is therefore significant that he has spoken out on your letters page against huge export-scale wind farms on Lewis (September 13th). As one who has felt divided down the middle by the wind farm debate, it has stirred my growing sense of unease.
The land of Lewis is not just for tourists. It is filled with local people’s memory, meaning and markers of identity. However, to stand close to a large windfarm has the visual effect of taking everything over. It is impossible not to be fixated by the whirring machinery. Graceful, it may be for a while, but soon it feels like being jangled inside the gearbox of some much greater machine.
To keep that in context, however, there is a world of psychological difference between turbines erected by a community trust for the common good, and those put up by a private landowner in league with a multinational company for primarily for private gain. However, the economics of the proposed interconnector cable to the mainland is already placing both of these together in unholy wedlock.
The scale of what happens in the future depends on the interconnector. If it goes ahead, the sheer level of energy production needed to justify its cost would lift restraints and further drive the island to becoming an offshore platform for energy export. Ask the people of Gravir what even a little of that loss of participation and control feels like as plans for their community are currently being laid over their heads.
The big question that faces us is this. What is an island like Lewis and Harris actually for? What is its higher calling in the service of today’s world? Is it to seek the self-reliance of economic sufficiency while getting on with pursuing our Chief End in life, or has that Chief End become for some the pursuit of riches in ways that only stimulate the demand for more energy?
The soul does not live not from bread alone. It needs beauty, and beauty is not a luxury. As John Calvin wrote in the Institutes (Book III:XIV:20): “Meanwhile, being placed in this most beautiful theatre, let us not decline to take a pious delight in the clear and manifest works of God.… Remember … that all which meets the eye is the work of God, and at the same time to meditate with pious care on the end which God had in view in creating it.”
It is good, very good, to produce local energy to meet local need by local people in a community where the level of consumerism is relatively low compared with the rest of the UK. But quite another to become an energy export platform for the less restrained appetites of Babylon and Rome. Scale is the issue, and its balance hangs, like a Damoclean sword, on the interconnector.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in the West Highland Free Press, 2 December 2011, p. 18, under the heading, 'In defence of Reverend Kenneth Macleod."
Dear Sir
Being observant of the use made of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s “Songs of the Hebrides” by contemporary musicians who make their own adjustments and re-interpretations, I was pleased to read John Purser’s and Domhnall Uilleam Stiùart’s defence of her (25 November).
Perhaps, however, that same defence might be extended to the criticisms sometimes made of her collaborator, the Rev Kenneth Macleod of Eigg and laterally, Gigha.
Macleod’s writing embodies qualities that were not just of the Christian era, but also of that which perhaps went before. As such, he sits uncomfortably with both Church and secular modernity, but not, it might be argued, from within his own tradition.
It should be remembered that it was the great Professor MacKinnon, chair of Celtic at Edinburgh University, who persuaded Macleod to collaborate with Mrs Kennedy-Fraser. He agreed to do so in order to preserve the tradition in what ways were possible while it was still there. Neither should be judged by the standards of today’s ethnomusicologists whose methods are more exacting but whose sources are more depleted.
Macleod made no secret that he wove together fragments drawn from tradition with his own redactions, variations and developments. The back of “The Road to the Isles” contains source notes. These, he says, are intended “to make quite clear which poems are wholly or partly old; the other poems are the author’s own work.”
How else, we might ask, is a tradition bearer not only to carry tradition, but also to let it recover, breath and grow from its own roots?
Anything less than such living engagement from such a man as the Rev Kenneth Macleod would have been fossilisation. It may be true that many of his verses sound whimsical to the modern ear, but could it also be true that that same ear requires refinement? Could it be, as Iain Crichton Smith suggested, that we have suffered a decline in “the feeling intelligence”?
Have we forgotten how to allow time to slow down outwardly so that inner presence can deepen? For as an elderly woman on Lewis put it to me: “These days everybody is too busy and too noisy.”
Alastair McIntosh
Published in the West
Highland Free Press, 8 July 2011, pp. 15 & 18, under the heading,
"Nature and authority of the scriptures." The "Professor" in
question was my friend the columnist the Rev Prof Donald Macleod, until
recently Principal of the Free Church College. The Rev MacDonald was
responding to one of his (relatively) liberal columns. A "marag" is a
Stornoway black pudding, made of oatmeal, spices and blood, the most
famous, as everybody knows, being made by the Stornoway butcher, Charlie
Barley. I found this an unusually disturbing letter to write. It was
questioning not just the small matter, of the obsession of some church
figures with sex, but the much larger question of how scriptural
authority is used. One would probably have to be from the Isle of Lewis
or somewhere like it to see why this is such an issue. I just felt I had
to write it even though it is not a matter that affects me or mine
directly, and though I knew, from past experience, that it would not
earn many Brownie points in a social reference group that remains
important to me.
Dear Sir
There is clearly sensitivity and nuance in the Rev Ivor MacDonald’s
letter (WHFP 26/6/11) relating to gay ordination that goes deeper than
he has been able to unpack in a tight space. I value his
thought-provoking public engagement in this way. However, one of his
primary concerns is with the nature and authority of the Scriptures. My
question is: how ought we to select and prioritise Scripture proofs?
Most of us are probably not ‘gay’. I certainly am not. But I know people
who are, and for these it is deeply hurtful and prejudicial to have it
suggested that how they are is somehow contrary to the teachings of
Christ.
Jesus never mentions homosexuality. The basis for considering it to be a
sin is usually drawn from Moses and Paul.
Jesus fulfilled the teaching of Moses, subsuming it with the law of
love. Some, however, argue that the gay injunction still stands. They
interpret that Paul carried it forward into the New Testament.
Leaving aside the question of Paul’s authority over matters never raised
by Christ, I observe in Acts 15 that he was a party to the Council of
Jerusalem. This forbade ‘fornication’. However, in the same breath it
equally bans the consumption of animal blood.
Can anybody explain to me how Scriptural authority can be invoked to
compromise our homosexual brethren while, at the same time, turning a
blind eye to those who strive for European recognition for Charlie
Barley’s Marags?
Is the distinction honestly Scriptural, or is it a matter of personal
feeling? I for one can think of gay Christian vegetarians who would most
certainly consider the Marag to be the greater sin. Personally, I am apt
to call a truce as I like a good Marag.
Jesus never promised us the gospels, or even the teachings of Paul.
Jesus only promised us the guidance of the Paraclete, the ‘advocate’ or
‘helper’, the Holy Ghost or Spirit.
I put it respectfully to the Rev MacDonald: is the living Spirit of God
as love made manifest not our only sure mandate? Is it not the only
filter through which the Scriptures should be selected and prioritised?
On such account: can your columnist, the Professor, be faulted?
Yours faithfully
Alastair McIntosh
Published in The Herald,
11 June 2011, p. 17, under the heading, 'Fight to save threatened
courses...' Where this letter has been edited to say "a major cement
company" the original was worded to say, "...
Lafarge, the world's biggest producer of cement."
Why should such threatened subjects as geography and sociology matter at
Strathclyde University? As a Strathclyde visiting professor linked to
those subjects, let me give an example.
I serve, by choice unpaid to avoid conflict of interest, on a think-tank
panel for a major cement company. We advise on emerging world issues,
helping to raise the level of the playing field on which social and
environmental issues unfold.
In recent years we have helped the group pioneer industry-leading action
on lobbying, anti-corruption, human rights and emissions including
greenhouse gases.
Last month the group stated recognition of the UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is extraordinary for an extractive
industry.
Working directly with the chief executive and his executive, what makes
the difference are not just the “hard” technological skills, but the
“soft” ones drawn from disciplines like geography and sociology.
Such is the power of the Scots generalist tradition. Here specialist
knowledge is recognised as needing the broad context of the democratic
intellect.
I do hope that the Principal of Strathclyde University can find a way to
sustain the teaching of such useful knowledge.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in The Herald, 9 November
2009, p. 12 under the heading, "First-rate Theology". A cut that was
made to the published version of this alters the tone of the letter, so
I have shown it restored in red lettering.
It happens that my wife knows the actress
and playwright Jo Clifford and so, with some trepidation on Saturday
night she took me – a born heterosexual - to see Jesus, Queen of Heaven.
We were challenged by protestors at the
door. I suggested that perhaps the Bible contains the Word of God but is
not necessarily entirely of that Word. And even Paul said that in Christ
there is “neither male nor female” (Galatians 3).
They said the play and my defence of it was “Dragging God through the
sewage of sodomy.” I did,
however, acknowledge the integrity of their witness, to which one
responded in a touchingly spontaneous way that he hoped I’d enjoy the
play.
In the theatre we were seated as
participants at the Last Supper - bread and drink spread on the tables.
Enter Jesus, the transsexual Queen of Heaven, who started accurately and
sensitively to tell Bible stories.
What unfolded was profound and mind-blowing
liberation theology. For who are any of us to say that a human being
born cross-gendered or otherwise “gay” is not equally in the “image of
God”; not equally free to celebrate and enjoy who they are?
Jo Clifford’s play closed with all of us
present choosing to receive from her the sacrament of Holy Communion.
Even the several other Quakers that I saw in the audience participated –
and we Quakers don’t do something like that, even in a conventional
church, unless we really feel inwardly moved.
I am sorry if this letter will sound
blasphemous to some. Yes, Jesus, Queen of Heaven is disturbing, but that
is precisely what makes it is first rate theology. Perhaps it is time
for some of us straights to get used to that … otherwise we’ll never let
Jesus down from the Cross.
Published in The West Highland Free Press, 23 October 2009,
p. 17, as the lead letter under the heading, "Time To Build On What
Crofting Has And Make It Work Properly."
Dear Sir
Four years ago my wife and I holidayed
on Clare Island off the Irish west coast. When our self-catering
landlady discovered my interest in land reform she said, “There’s a
community meeting on tonight about the housing shortage for young
people. Will you tell us about Scotland?”
Once there I acted the daft laddie and
said, “I can see that there’s no shortage of potential housing plots
here, so evidently you have an oppressive system of tenure. Who are
the lairds whose greed blocks the flow of life in your community?”
A stunned silence swept the hall. It
fell to the chair to speak the unpalatable truth. “We don’t have a
system like crofting here,” he said. “Since we kicked the British
out we’ve all been private proprietors. We’re now the cause of our
own troubles.”
At that a young farmer stood up. “I
would give a housing plot from my land to the community,” he said,
“but only if we developed a structure to stop it from being sold on
to the highest bidder or becoming a holiday home.” An English
incomer followed, making the same offer. I never checked on whether
anything came of all this, but that night the community agreed to
explore such options further.
Scottish crofting is already a
structure that, granted we now have land reform and the potential
for full community empowerment, can allow the collective holding of
land tenure alongside private ownership of the “improvements” such
as the house.
Such a system can save young families
from having to spend half a salary just to cover repayments on the
market value on the housing plot. It is better than job creation
because it reduces the pressure on parents to work excessively,
thereby leaving more space in life for children and community.
But most astonishing of all is that
these can no longer be caricatured as yesterday’s worn-out ideas
from a dying way of life. This month the Nobel Prize in economics
was awarded to Elinor Ostrom. Her work shows how community groups
can successfully manage overlapping rights to shared natural
resources. Crofting is precisely such a system!
We need to build on what crofting
already is to make it work properly once more. So,
all power to such thinkers
as feature regularly in this paper - Jim Hunter,
Brian Wilson, Susan
Walker, Iain MacKinnon, Nick
Reiter, Patrick Krause, and the Minister, Roseanna Cunningham
- in seeking to discern a wise way forward.
Ireland's Ryanair-like ethos of privatisation now
lies tangled in negative equity and family bankruptcy. Community-held
crofting tenure is now what's at the cutting edge of Nobel-class
economics.
Yours faithfully
Alastair McIntosh
Published in The West Highland Free Press, 11 Sept 2009, p.
15, under the heading, "Allowing croft land speculation only creates
dying communities." Dear Sir Susan Walker has
done a great service with her spirited defence of crofting against
free market commodification of the land (4 September). Her call for
community resilience – that is, the ability to hold things together
in hard-pressed times – is far more than just a lifestyle option.
Consider what might
have happened had the banks been allowed to completely collapse last
October. Suppliers would have been thrown into limbo. What then for
those living at the end of a global food supply chain? That’s only one
reason why a vibrant crofting sector is vital for local food
security in remote areas. Recently I
encouraged a bright young Canadian student under my supervision,
Lauren Eden, to undertake her thesis research in Stornoway. She compared what
happens today when the ferry fails to sail for a day or two with how
it was during the six week long seaman’s strike in 1966, when Harold
Wilson declared a national state of emergency. Most people got by
OK because crofting, and its ethos of sharing, was still vibrant. In
contrast, today the supermarket shelves start emptying within hours. But the lynchpin of
crofting is more than just being a system of agriculture. It is also
an network of relationships between people and place. At its deepest
level, this is about the spirituality of community as something that
transcends individualism. That is what makes
the idea of privatising the land so offensive. Crofting should be
about living with, if not necessarily entirely from, the land. In
this day and age it should be the community that holds the land
base, with heritably secure resident tenants accountable unto their
democratically elected selves. To have allowed and
further to allow croft land to become the subject of speculation,
excessive holiday homes or long-term absenteeism only creates dying
communities pockmarked with holes. Such is the human equivalent of
the neutron bomb effect – the military ideal of killing the
personnel whilst leaving the outer equipment and infrastructure
intact for capture. Many years ago I
declined the inheritance of a croft because I knew that my work and
family circumstances would have relegated it to becoming a holiday
home. The position from which I write is therefore not a
hypothetical one. Yours faithfully Alastair McIntosh
Published in the Stornoway Gazette, 2 July 2009, p. 11, under the
heading, "Decay in the Hebrides." It may interest your readers that this study is now available,
free of charge, as an internet version of a book that was originally
published in 1939. Written by Dr Weston A. Price of the American
Dental Association, it is called, Nutrition and Physical
Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their
Effects, and is evidently considered a classic amongst
nutritionists. Chapters address
the indigenous Swiss, Eskimos, Africans, Pacific Islanders and
Native Americans, but the one of interest here is Chapter 4,
entitled “Isolated and Modernized Gaelics.” It starts: “Stories
have long been told of the superb health of the people living in the
Islands of the Outer Hebrides.” Dr Price corroborated this. He found
that in villages where the diet remained primarily oats, seafood,
meat and dairy, physical development was “characterized by excellent
teeth and well formed faces and dental arches.”
He was particularly struck by islands where the diet was primarily
seafood and oats. On Scalpay, “only one tooth out of every hundred
examined had ever been attacked by tooth decay.” In contrast, a
nearby settlement with access to modern sweet and processed foods
revealed that “children had an incidence of 32.4 carious teeth out
of every hundred teeth examined”
Dr Price remarks in
glowing terms upon the culture and spirituality of the islands. Here
were a people who “possess a physique that rivals that found in
almost any place in the world.” Clearly moved by the industriousness
and piety of Stornoway’s herring girls, he said: “It would be
difficult to find examples of womanhood combining a higher degree of
physical perfection and more exalted ideals than these
weather-hardened toilers.” He concludes: “Life
is full of meaning for characters that are developed to accept as
everyday routine raging seas and piercing blizzards representing the
accumulated fury of the treacherous north Atlantic. One marvels at
their gentleness, refinement and sweetness of character.” Alastair
McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Drumoyne, Glasgow, G51 3YD. [The full text of Dr
Price’s study can be accessed
online at:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html#ch4]
Published in the Stornoway Gazette, 28 February 2008, p. 6, under
the heading, "Community is about belonging" Some time has
passed since 31 January when you carried an article headed Vice
Convener defends criticism over radio interview. I wonder if it
might not be too late still to comment. According to your report,
Vice Convener Angus Campbell had been “forced” to issue an
explanation that his use of the term “indigenous people” meant “all
of the people who live in the Western Isles.” This followed a
complaint to CnES from a Mr Paul Blake who, apparently, had been
“astounded” to hear reference to indigenous people in a context that
spoke about “the future of the people of the Western Isles.” I have not read Mr
Blake’s letter of complaint and I did not hear Mr Campbell’s
original broadcast. I will therefore not directly address this case
but reflect, instead, on the wider issues that it touches on. These
have become a burning question in many parts of the world where
indigenous or traditional cultures have come face to face with the
consequences of cheap travel and high mobility that alters their
social structure. The root issue is
this: does the fact that somebody can up sticks elsewhere and buy
what they perceive to be “a property” on the Isle of Lewis mean that
they have also bought their way into instantly becoming full members
of the community? At a legal level they probably have. They have a
right to vote and all the rest of it. But there is much more to
community than just the outward legal structures. There are
psychological, cultural and spiritual considerations too. Community
is about belonging, and belonging, as Iain Crichton Smith put it in
a celebrated essay (soon to be available on the web), is about “real
people in a real place”. That is a connection that deepens over
time. It has to be earned and gifted rather than grasped at or
bought. In recent years I
have had often had cause to feel outraged at the manner in which a
certain type of incomer – typically the sort that comes to buy the
view rather than to belong in a community – tramples wilfully over
the gentle and accommodating culture that is already found there. I
can say this, because I myself came to Lewis as an incomer at the
age of four in 1960, having been born in England of an English
mother and a Scottish father (with two Gaelic-speaking
grandparents). I therefore describe myself as being “raised” in
Lewis, but not as native. Any degree to which I may have become at
least partly “indigenous” is due less to blood lineage than to
having been profoundly fostered as a child into the community of
North Lochs. Today I live away, but as Iain Crichton Smith implies,
you may leave the island but you never leave the community. This is
a connection that I feel at a visceral level and for which I am
profoundly grateful. It influences much of my work. It has been my
experience that a person belongs inasmuch as they are willing to
cherish, and be cherished, by a place and its peoples. As Maoilios
Caimbeul has translated those words for me: Alba:
Buinidh neach an seo/ fhad ’s a tha iad deònach/ tasgadh is a bhith
air an tasgadh/ leis an àite/ agus a mhuinntir. This is what
creates an authentic sense of belonging and which, perhaps, can
graduate all residents of a community in the direction of becoming
indigenous over time. Such a gift starts as hospitality in the short
term and melds into the deeper gift of fostership for permanence. In
Gaelic tradition fostership can count for even more than blood
lineage: “The bonds of milk are stronger than the bonds of blood.”
But it can never be bought, demanded, or forced by statute. It can
never be grabbed at by making the people who really are native to a
place feel that their indigenous roots and heritage count for
nothing or are, at best, a commodity that comes free when buying
“property”. Like all things sacred, community can only be approached
as one might approach one who is dearly beloved - with the most
profound respect, even veneration. Alastair
McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Drumoyne, Glasgow, G51 3YD.
Published in The Scotsman, 7 November 2007, under the heading,
"Flying Flag for Feminism." According to the various acts of Andrew, the Roman proconsul,
Aegeates, was in the habit of coming home drunk each night and
imposing his rooster-like advances upon his Christian wife,
Maximilla. Andrew persuaded her to go on sex strike, and the rest is
history. As such, if Scotland's Saltire stands for anything, it
symbolises a man who, among other things, gave his all for peace and
feminism.
But it is Ms Riddoch's important suggestion about Bhrighde, or
Saint Bride, that needs taking further. The Scottish Government has
announced a winter festival with celebrations from St Andrew's Day
"to Burns Season at the end of January". The end of January also
marks St Bride's Eve - a sacred time in the Celtic calendar because
it symbolises light returning after winter. It would take only a minor announcement to integrate St Bride
with the winter festival, thus starting it with a man, closing with
a woman, and pleasing even the iconically feisty Lesley Riddoch. Alastair McIntosh [See Theology in Scotland paper on this
at this link] Reply published Nov 9th under the heading, St Bride's Day
Festival: I would endorse the idea of a St Bride's day national
festival marking the end of the winter season, as suggested by
Alastair McIntosh (Letters, 7 November). I understand St Andrew was adopted as patron saint as part of
the process of deposing the saints of the Celtic church, such as
Columba and Bride. Patrick Geddes wanted to reclaim them by
having a statue of St Columba in Edinburgh's Lawnmarket. In returning to Celtic roots symbolised in Columba and Bride,
goddess of fire and light, children and family, we would also be
choosing a more green, integrative consciousness - restoring
value to the dark, the feminine, the peaceful and poetic. To recognise St Andrew at the end of November and to conclude
with a celebration of Bride as the light returns at Imbolc, the
church's Candlemas, would be to turn to a meaningful and
inspiring symbolism. TESSA RANSFORD, Royal Park Terrace, Edinburgh
Published in The Herald, 20 August 2007, under the heading,
"Crofting Reform." For once I am
in partial agreement with the lairds’ trade union, the Scottish
Rural Property and Business Association (SRPBA) (your report, 16
August). Their suggestion to revoke the rights of crofters
individually to buy their land is sound. Land ownership by
individuals in a free market never sat comfortably with the
crofting ethos. The 1976 Act that opened the doors to this
always had slow take-up amongst indigenous crofters. For many,
it never felt right for land to be treated as a private
commodity. Instead, it was a blessing: one that allowed for
individual freedom and livelihood, but in a context that had a
measure of community accountable through such structures as
grazings committees.
It is important to grasp this point as Professor Schucksmith’s
Committee of Inquiry on Crofting examines the future. But
that does not mean a return to traditional landlordism like the
SRPBA seems to want. Here I must part company with the lairds.
Instead, we need a stronger framework by which communities, not
lairds, can own the land – and do so especially to address
issues of environmental sustainability, local entrepreneurship
and affordable housing.
Embedded in crofting law going back to 1886 is the principle
that a crofter owns the ‘improvements’ to the land – the house,
fences, etc. – but never the land itself. Under feudal
landlordism that was deeply problematic. It gave
disproportionate power to lairds whose sole qualification was
their wealth. But today, under land reform, crofting communities
can be democratically accountable landholders unto themselves.
It is therefore essential to block the leakage of community
assets onto speculative private markets. This can be achieved in
various ways. Burdens on title deeds are one. Joint ownership
(or shared equity) is another, where the community retains a
controlling interest. And a third is to develop existing
crofting tenure so that communities retain inalienable control
of the land upon which private properties are built.
Crofting matters for the future of Scotland. It matters as a
pattern of tenure by which people can live with the land
even if not necessarily from the land. This generates a
cycle of belonging: a sense of belonging, identity, values and
therefore, responsibility that sustains both people and
place. It thereby contributes to the strength of Scotland as a
whole. That is why crofting matters and why the present review
by the Schucksmith Committee is so important.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in the The Herald, 23 July 2007, p. 10, under the
heading, "Action for the Prime Minister to consider." As the nation is deluged the government has much to say about flood
protection but very little about its underlying causes. I would like to
volunteer as Gordon Brown's speech-writer. Confidentially, within the
columns of your newspaper, I propose to him the following emergency
address to the nation. "The evidence suggests that climate change is now the most pressing
problem of our times. England's floods are but a symptom of the
turbulent future we face. The root causes are greenhouse gases produced
by our appetite for carbon-based energy. Action is called for on a scale
unprecedented outside wartime. Therefore, I wish to reintroduce and
escalate those carbon taxes that the fuel protesters thwarted in 2000.
Climate change demands a greater patriotism than that of economic
self-interest. "With due protection for the poor, we must tax carbon-based energy
profligacy until Britain's share of greenhouse gas emissions is
consistent with the best scientific advice. The proceeds from these
taxes will, first, provide relief for uninsured flood victims. Secondly,
they will institute a massive programme of public works for flood
protection. And, thirdly, they will be used internationally to mitigate
climate change and to compensate those who suffer most: the poor. "With other European heads of state, I will require the World Trade
Organisation to introduce discriminatory tariffs on trade with nations
that would otherwise seek competitive advantage by shirking their
responsibilities. And starting with the elimination of nuclear weapons
and the recall of our troops from abroad, we will shift resources from
the war on terror towards true security - environmental security -
within a new framework of life-giving international relations. "These are grave measures that must be put to the country. Therefore,
I request Her Majesty to dissolve parliament and call a general
election." Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow. Published in the Stornoway
Gazette, 1 February 2007, p. 8, under the heading, "Coming off
the fence." Throughout the
Lewis windfarm debate I have felt unable to voice objection to any but the
Eisken proposal (which is for the enrichment of a private landowner and
fringes a National Scenic Area). With respect to the larger AMEC/British
Energy proposal for north Lewis, I’ve been utterly divided within
myself. On the one
hand, humankind must cut emissions of greenhouse gases, and I have the
greatest respect for the integrity of some of the people, especially in
the Stornoway Trust, who have been pushing the AMEC contribution forward. On the other
hand, the massive scale, even of AMEC’s revised proposal, will destroy
the tranquillity of much of Lewis. I happened to see the computer
representation shown on the BBC Coasts programme. The scheme would turn large areas of Lewis into a massive
machine. To live there would be like having one’s head inside the
gearbox. However, given
the importance of the wider health of the planet, I have found my tongue
tied. As the author of Soil and
Soul, many islanders have written to me asking that I help oppose the
development, like with the Harris superquarry in the 1990’s. The most
that I could offer was my position piece published in The
Hebridean of 21 August 2003. There I said: “A wind farm at least
makes visible the environmental cost of the energy that we already
consume,” but added, “The first principle of acceptable wind farms is
that communities must give their consent, they must collect much of the
benefit, and they must remain in control of future developments.”
Neither the
North nor the South Lewis proposals meet that condition. Furthermore, as
regards the wider wellbeing of the world, I observe that several prominent
environmental organisations that otherwise support windfarms have
concluded that Lewis is too unique for world heritage to allow it to be
sacrificed in this way. This is hugely important. It is not just local
residents who do not want the windfarms in their back yard: it is the
wider world also. Consider for a
moment what the true exports of our islands are. Nan MacKinnon,
tradition-bearer of Vatersay, spoke truthfully when she told Tocher
magazine in 1983 that, “If all the music of the world was cut off, the
music of the Western Isles would serve the whole world.”
That music is
just one form “export” of a community that has been able to find its
“rest” in the land. And I use that expression Biblically, where the
divine gift of land is understood as meaning nothing less than the finding
of “rest” with God (Psalms 95:11). Thanks to our
Scottish Parliament, Hebridean communities are today in a very different
position than they were ten years ago. Then, windfarm income was seen as a
way of financing community land buyouts. But today, some two-thirds of the
people of the Western Isles live on community owned land. Windfarm revenue
could still be one way to finance future community development, for sure.
But another is simply the freeing up of land that will make socially
affordable housing a reality, and thereby reduce the necessity for
families to have to earn so much to pay off usury in the form of
mortgages. I have weighed
up the changing arguments about the Lewis windfarms, and with the greatest
of respect to those who have advanced the proposal, but with an ear to
both local communities and the wider world, I find myself forced to come
off the fence. I shall be writing to the Scottish Executive before the 5th
February deadline adding my voice of opposition whilst still maintaining
the strongest support for community-scale renewable energy developments
that meet the condition defined above. Alastair
McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Drumoyne, Glasgow, G51 3YD Published in The Herald, 31
January 2007, p. 14, under the heading, "Most people in Lewis want
wind power, but on a community, not an industrial, scale." (See also
earlier
article on this matter ... I have become less sympathetic to
corporate involvement as the imperative of community control and consent
appears to be being disregarded.) THE massive scale of the proposed Lewis wind farm not only divides
the community (January 29), it has also left many of us divided within
ourselves. On the one hand, we, in the industrialised west, must face
the music of our energy profligacy. On the other, it seems a bit rich
that Lewis has been targeted for an industrial operation that will dwarf
most other features of the landscape and leave both residents and
visitors alike feeling as if their heads have been thrust inside a
massive gearbox. For several years I have resisted speaking out about this. To have
done so as a Lewis-raised environmentalist who is in favour of renewable
energy would have felt like special pleading. But now a growing chorus
of outside bodies seems to be contributing its voice to the perception
that Hebridean cultural and environmental heritage is just too important
to the wider world to allow it to be messed with. Added to that, more than two-thirds of the population of the Western
Isles now live on community-owned land, representing over half of the
islands' landmass. The original idea that wind farms could finance land
reform is, therefore, becoming redundant except at a community scale, as
on Gigha. Instead, the most important new economic stimulus for
communities will be the freeing-up of land for affordable social
housing, thereby reducing the usurious costs of mortgages. This means
that families will not need to earn so much cash in the first place to
achieve dignified living standards. Up to 90% of local people living on Lewis do want wind power at a
community
scale, but not as an operation of advanced capitalism. Should
we not, therefore, be putting our efforts into options for low-impact
rural livelihood rather than shunting the power from desecrated
beautiful landscapes down to desolate city high-rises? Should we not be
learning better how to "be" so there's no longer such
profligate pressure to "have"? Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow. Published in The Herald,
26 December 2006, under the heading, "Memorable Donation." I have just read your feature on Tunnock’s teacakes and its mention
of Boyd Tunnock’s charitable giving (Business, 22 December). It
reminded me of how, some twenty-five years ago when working as a young
fundraiser for a leprosy relief charity, I wrote to Mr Tunnock, and he
sent back £100. It was just about the only appeal I made to business
that ever bore fruit, and to this day, in what is perhaps a fitting
thought for Christmas time, I cannot eat a Tunnock’s caramel log
without, at the same time, savouring the lingering sweetness of that
company’s very Scottish calibre of generosity. Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow. Published in The Herald, 24
July 2006, p. 14, under the heading, "Christians, Muslims and Jews
should not be boxed into straitjacketed interpretations of
scripture". (The co-author, Dr Maan, represents Scotland on the
Muslim Council of Britain. Please click this
link to read an interview that he and I conducted with the leading
Christian scholar of Islam, the Rev Prof William Montgomery Watt). We
write as a Christian and a Muslim with a shared love of interfaith
dialogue. This can take place only where differing faiths approach one
another with respect. It is fitting that we critique one another’s
faiths from the “outside”, so to speak, but equally, we must strive
to understand the other from “within” their own frame of reference. Unfortunately,
David Forrester’s letter falls short in this respect (22 July). On the
surface, his critique is reasoned. However, Mr Forrester fails to
consider these texts in the light of accepted Islamic commentary. For
example, the authoritative work of Abdullah Yusuf Ali is resolute in its
treatment of the passage that Mr Forrester perceives as a “mandate for
wife-beating” (Surah 4.34). Citing one of the foremost authorities on
Islam, Yusuf Ali says of wife-beating, “… Imām Shafi’i
considers this inadvisable … and all authorities are unanimous in
depreciating any sort of cruelty.” Most
decent Christians and Jews take a similar approach to those passages in
the Bible that, for example, urge the beating of children (Proverbs 22
–23) and the cutting off “without pity” of the hands of
interfering women (Deuteronomy 25). Can Christians, Muslims and Jews
alike not allow one another space to review such ancient scripture
passages in the light of scholarship, custom and revelation, and not
necessarily be boxed into a straitjacketed interpretation by those who
lack empathy? In
his other Qur’anic reference, Mr Forrester focuses on “dhimmitude”
as in Surah 9.29. However, this particular word is a neologism
associated with American neoconservative thinkers like Robert Spencer,
author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and webmaster
of Dhimmi Watch. Many Muslims consider the term “dhimmitude”
to be abusive and indicative of Islamophobia. Properly used,
“Dhimmi” refers to the rights and obligations of non-Muslims living
under Muslim regimes, much as in Britain there is a fitting debate about
the rights and obligations of Muslims in a non-Muslim state. In
his unsurpassed History of the Crusades (which was partly written
in Eigg Lodge), Sir Steven Runciman remarks how “It was bloodthirsty
proof of Christian fanaticism that created the fanaticism of Islam.”
Such is the spiral of violence that all our faiths must avoid. How
instructive, then, the Christian teaching that we should pluck out the
log in our own eye before worrying too much about our neighbour’s mote
(Luke 6.42)! 26
Luss Rd., Glasgow 8
Riverview Gardens, Glasgow Published in the Stornoway
Gazette, 15 June 2006, p. 8, under the heading, "Criticism
Addressed." Joanne
Telfer ‘s letter of 8th June seriously misrepresents mine
of 1st June. She
starts by trying to point score over a typographical error that I made
where “Eaglesham” appeared as “Ealgesham”. She feigns confusion,
but disingenuously so given that “Eaglesham” appeared correctly
further down in the letter. She
then suggests that the story I told about the Eaglesham plumber whose
people are from Point must be misinformed, as the “windfarm”
proposed for Eaglesham Moor has not yet been built. However, if she had
read my letter correctly, she would have seen that it referred not to
the proposed windfarm, but to the existing “giant wind turbines”
some half a mile from the said gentleman’s house. Specifically,
there are two such turbines and they are located on Myres Hill. If Ms
Telfer still doubts the truth of this report, I suggest she searches
under “Eaglesham” on the BBC website where she will hear a BBC
reporter describing the turbines as being “a few hundred yards from
the back of the house.” Next,
Ms Telfer describes me as being someone “who opposes windfarms.”
Again, if she had read my letter properly, she would have read me
saying, “I am strongly in favour of wind energy in areas where
communities control their land….” Indeed, I buy all my electricity
not from the cheapest supplier, but from Scottish Hydro Electric RSPB
Energy, which is generated from renewable sources and endorsed by the
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Ms
Telfer then suggests that I may have confused nuclear fusion with
nuclear fission. I would have her know that I studied physics at both
the Nicolson Institute and Aberdeen University. My teachers would
confirm that I was not the most diligent student in this subject, but I
do know the difference between fission and fusion. Fission creates dirty
and potentially unsafe nuclear energy, while fusion has the potential to
be relatively clean and safe. The problem is that fusion needs a massive
research effort to see if it can be made technically and commercially
feasible. Ms Telfer, however, takes me to task for suggesting that such research is
massively underfunded. She counters that “billions of pounds are being
invested.” It is true that £6.6 billion has been allocated for the International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor to be built at Cadarache in
France. But this funding is for a world-scale collaborative project
pooling the resources of the EU, the US, Japan, Russia, China, South
Korea and India. In comparison, the lifetime cost including deployment
to Britain alone of the Trident nuclear submarine weapons programme has
been estimated at £30 billion. The £6.6 billion for the world’s
first fusion reactor is, as I said in my letter, “piddling”, being
little more than £1 per person on the planet. Lastly,
Ms Telfer lampoons me for urging what she caricatures as “a return to
the days” of the means of
Providence. My cautious support for windfarms is precisely because the
wind is a "Providential" renewable resource. The main
constraints are that they should be community controlled, there should
be fair compensation for any who lose out, and they should not be sited
in areas that are socially or environmentally highly sensitive. That
said, I can well understand why Ms Telfer might dismiss my spiritual
references as “a last resort”. I have every respect for honest
agnosticism. And yet, I would beg her to consider whether the secular
materialistic worldview adequately holds up against the abundant
evidence, especially from within Hebridean communities, that some
people really do experience a reality that they call "God". By
analogy, Ms Telfer may never have been to Timbuktu, but if she talks to
some of her neighbours who have gone there, she might find reasonable
grounds for thinking that such a place really exists.The same is true
with life's spiritual journey. Indeed, perhaps when it comes to
considering Providence and its origins, we humans are like the story of
two flees that were buried in thick fur and feasting on the back of a
collie. Unable to see the wood for the trees, one turned to the other
and said, “You know, I’m not sure whether I still believe in the
dog.” Published in the Stornoway
Gazette, 1June 2006, p. 8, under the heading, "Living within
energy means" (see also full exposition of my position on wind
energy in earlier
article). On
Saturday we had a plumber come to do a job at the house. It turned out
that his people were from Point on Lewis, so we sat down for half the
morning, and I was disturbed by what I heard. He
said that he lives up in the moors above Ealgesham. In recent years the
positioning of giant wind turbines, just half a mile from his house,
have made life hell. He described the effects as follows. I
put it to him that the polar ice caps appear to be melting, probably
because of greenhouse gases being released by burning fossil fuels. As
this happens, seawater will absorb the sun’s heat that would otherwise
have been reflected back to space by the ice. In consequence, even more
ice will melt, and that is just one of the frightening feedback
mechanisms by which sea levels are likely to rise. The consequence for
future generations is that our coastal villages and low-lying towns like
Stornoway may get washed away. He
replied that if the political will was really there, solutions could be
found that do not require handing over our countryside to multinational
corporations. For example, modern condenser boilers are 50% more
efficient than those of a decade ago. We could all be using low energy
light bulbs and switching off unnecessary appliances. We could be
investing serious rather than piddling amounts of money into “safe”
nuclear fusion. And we could enforce high building standards so that the
built environment, consuming one third of energy production, ceases to
be so profligate. Looking
at the success of community wind farms on places like Gigha, it is
evident that alternative energy, as well as energy conservation, is part
of the solution. However, it must be handled on a scale that is managed
by communities rather than for the enrichment of large corporations and
private landowners. As with taking medicine from the doctor, a solution
is only the right solution when applied with due sense of
proportionality and on the right scale. Local communities of place,
rather than foreign corporations of profit, are the proper arbitrators
of this. I am strongly in favour of wind energy in areas where
communities control their land and they have made the decisions in full
knowledge of the costs and benefits. But landlord-driven proposals, such
as Eisken, are quite another matter - especially in uniquely beautiful
landscapes that should be the inheritance of created life as a whole
and, especially, of the descendents of those once cleared from such
areas. If
community windfarms produce more power than local needs and what can be
exported with modest infrastructure, is there not a case for saying that
industry should come to the islands, rather than trying to set up energy
export on an all-or-nothing industrial scale? And on the question of
compensation for people who might find themselves in a position like my
Eaglesham plumber friend, has anybody thought of bringing in
professional property valuers for a full economic study of the costs and
benefits to communities and their members? Only then can compensation be
justly handled. Such
questions concern the future cohesion of our communities. As such, they
are more than economic questions. They are also spiritual ones, for the
bottom line is how we all choose to live our lives. Should we seek
life’s fulfilment from continued material economic growth, chasing
after surplus that goes far beyond the calls of necessity and
sufficiency? Or should we be attempting to live within the benevolent
constraints of the very motto of the town of Stornoway? Personally,
I feel divided within myself on the practicalities of many of these
questions. But where an industrial scale of exploitation is proposed for
the benefit of profligacy, it is difficult not to reflect upon the
Lamentation over the King of Tyre in Ezekiel 28, or to think about the
“businessmen of the earth” implicated in the Fall of Babylon in
Revelation 18. After all, in living memory many of our people lived
within the means of Providence for their energy requirements. With the
aid of modern materials and technology, and with a love of the beauty of
our people and place, is the same not possible again? Alastair
McIntosh Published in The Herald,
12 April 2006, p. 13, under the heading, "Hebridean religion is a
communal matter." (See also previous
letter). On
the matter of Sunday ferry sailings in the Outer Hebrides, Ruth Wishart
says that “Scotland is now largely a secular nation” and that
religious questions “are private and personal concerns which should
not be visited on the body public”. David
Ross similarly quotes the pro-Sunday ferries councillor from North Uist,
Archie Campbell, as declaring, "I don't believe it is possible to
undermine an individual's observance of the Sabbath… People observe
the Sabbath in their own way." Irrespective
of the rights and wrongs of having a collective day of rest, be it a
Friday, Saturday or Sunday, what distinguishes such arguments is their
profound emphasis on individuality. No consideration is given to the
fact that much Hebridean religion takes place in the context of whole
communities, largely indigenous at that. As probably a majority of these
communities see it, if some people are expected to work in a 24 x 7
economy and if some businesses plan to gain competitive advantage by so
doing, community cohesion will suffer because the weekly balance between
inner and outer life will be disturbed. You don’t have to be a “Wee
Free” (whatever that derogatory expression means) to feel the sense of
such an argument. As
democratically elected councillors of Lewis and Harris now move to
explore legal recourse, it will be interesting to see what is made of
Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees
freedom of religious observance “either alone or in community with
others.” After all, it was in the notorious case of a proposed
superquarry on the Isle of Harris in 2000 that Lord Hardie ruled that
even multinational corporations have “human rights” under ECHR! If
corporations do, then why not other legally incorporated bodies,
possibly church, council or voluntray agencies? It is true that
Article 9 is subject to "the protection of the rights and freedoms
of others", but these are cast in the context of "democratic
society". If it is truly the democratically demonstrable wish of a
majority of the people of Lewis and Harris to retain their understanding
of Sabbath, have they not a case? Ruth
Wishart says “Harris and Lewis are not like … most parts of
Scotland, a land they inhabit but from which they often seem detached by
custom and practice.” In a way she’s right, and whether we are
religious or not perhaps that’s why these islands remain of iconic
importance to the cultural mix of the whole nation. Alastair McIntosh
Published in The Herald , 31
March 2006, under the heading, "Land reform is an ongoing
process." You reported last week that the upper-crust estate
agency, C K D Galbraith, has launched an estate values ready-reckoner
(Sporting estate returns outstrip the stock market, March 24), presumably
so that our social betters can work out their rewards for the land that
they, in the words of a former convener of the Scottish Landowners'
Federation (now the SRPBA), "provide us with". Most striking of all have been media stories making out
that the CKD-G figures signal the failure of land reform. Do they? The
CKD-G study (as reported) spans a time horizon of 20 years. This
conveniently sets it right back into the boomtime speculative era of
Thatcherism when the natives had not yet woken up to the possibility of
becoming restless and applying principles of market spoiling to open up
community claims of right. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act was only passed in 2003.
It can have had but the slightest impact on the CKD-G study. Why should
there be such interest in doing down the flagship introductory legislation
of Scotland's restored parliament? Whose interests could that inflate? On the basis of material disclosure I trust that CKD-G
will be informing all prospective investors of a pararagraph prominently
set into the Foreword of Lord Sewel's January 1999 green paper from the
Scottish Office, namely: "It is crucial that we regard land reform
not as a once-for-all issue but as an ongoing process. The parliament will
be able to test how this early legislation works and how it effects
change. They will then have the opportunity to revisit and refine their
initial achievement . . . which will generate a longer-term agenda for
further legislation." Buyer beware! Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow. Published as the centrepiece letter
in The Herald, 6 March 2006, p. 13, under the heading,
"Britons live under a constitutional theocracy."
(Nb. an Eileen Hamilton of Maybole kindly wrote sending
her compliments about this letter, but pointing out that the DG title
actually referred to the RC faith, as it was originally conferred on Henry
VIII by the Pope. I accept this origin, but it does not alter the fact
that Henry subsequently carried it over into what became a Protestant
British constitutional formulation, as is made very explicit, for example,
in Article 2 of the Acts of Union, which addresses succession to the
British throne and thereby roots sectarianism into the constitution. For
further exploration of this arcane point and how it relates to Britain holding nuclear
weapons, see: http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/2000_trident.htm
).
Contrary to much comment over the
weekend, it is entirely fitting that Tony Blair should factor the
Christian God into his political decisions (Blair: God will judge me on
Iraq, March 4).
Published
as the featured letter in The Herald, 6 February 2006, p. 11, under
the heading, "Usury is the honest word concerning debt." Let’s
use the honest word for what we are witnessing with this debt crisis (£1.75bn
student debt leads to call for shake-up of loans system, 1 February).
Let’s talk about usury. When
I was a boy on Lewis in the distant sixties, most people had no student
loans and no pension investments. You grew up in something that was called
a community – a living membership one of another. You got educated
broadly at the expense of and to help serve that community – the old
Scots “democratic intellectual” ethic. And when you got old, your
peats would be cut by the younger generation following on; indeed, many
was the time as a teenager that I’d deliver a bucket of haddies fresh
from the sea loch to elderly neighbours, or turn their hay. Today
a system has been engineered that no longer values such community. It is a
system condemned by most religions because it works by siphoning off
life-energies from the relatively poor to the relatively rich. This system
– usury in its many hues – accepts the principle of money being
made simply out of having money. Even our mutual, friendly and provident
financial societies have nearly all now collapsed into its
“de-regulated” fire-filled hollow Molochean arms. We
(if I might speak collectively as one who holds to community, warts and
all) are the people who have voted for this canonisation of avarice. We
have been blinded by our greed, albeit partly with eyes put out by
manipulative men. And we still vote for usury every time we’ve got a
little bit of spare cash that's invested for the highest rate of
return rather than for the greatest common good. And
our children? Well, the whole point of ancient infant sacrifice to Moloch
was the procurement of economic gain. Think
about it as you turn now to the money pages to watch that pension fund.
After all, we have failed the coming generation. We’d better not be
expecting too much in return. The actuaries are our community now. Alastair
McIntosh Published
in The West Highland Free Press, 13 January 2006, pp. 13 & 19,
under the heading, "Mandarins and Crofting Reform." What astute analysis of
proposed crofting reform from Brian Wilson and Roger Hutchinson recently.
In speaking of the mysterious “desire of the civil service to shake free
of this strange smallholding system,” Hutchinson echoes Wilson’s
oft-expressed concern that it is the mandarins and not just the
politicians we should spotlight. Is it not time to start
asking pointed and personalised questions about some of the gatekeepers to
this debate? The trade-off for the
pleasure of such company is obsequience, expressed at being “a safe pair
of hands” and conducted in sufficiently subtle ways as to facilitate
self-denial of the tension between public service and co-option by the
mores and interests of unelected power. The purpose of functionaries is to
facilitate “interests” in ways that, above all, conserve them and
protect the holder from the greatest fear of anybody who needs power out
of an insecure sense of their own being
– namely, embarrassment. If wisely developed with
the help of further land reform legislation (such as Lord Sewel promised
in the 1999 Scottish Office “Green Paper”, p. 1), the crofting model
could provide a template for the sustained provision of affordable rural
housing and therefore social cohesion for local people up and down the
nation. The infectious principle
at its core is that a crofting-style land transaction is a
double-barrelled process. The seller passes on their “improvements”
including the house, but the open-ended and heritable land lease is a separate
linked transaction. In principle this allows for vetting, regulation, and
potential dispossession if in serious default of agreements, as well as
offering a potential income flow from peppercorn rents by which the
community land trust might become self-financing. From the security and
dignity of living with (if not entirely, from) the land such a model
permits individual family entrepreneurship - but within a
community-held regulatory framework. It thereby squares the circle of
capitalism and communism and so addresses the concerns of those who found
the 1976 Act to be misguided because “you can’t own the land; the land
owns you.” In short, I suspect that
crofting is under challenge neither because it has been forced into an
agricultural box it no longer fits, nor because it has outlived its
cultural and tourism potential. It is under threat from those who fear
that, if more widely understood, it could get contagious. And why should
that trouble landed power? The property columns of one Welsh newspaper
expressed it nicely last year: if socially affordable rural housing became
a reality, other property values might tumble. Yours faithfully Alastair McIntosh 26 Luss Road, Drumoyne,
Glasgow, G51 3YD Published
in The Herald, 28 Nov 2005, p. 15, with 4 similar under the heading,
"Now we know the true identity of the 'evil empire'" Thank you for such a
forthright leader stating that torture flights through Scottish airports
are "morally repugnant, evil and probably illegal" (November 26). Imagine if
we, the ordinary citizens of Scotland, had been decent law-abiding German
citizens during the gradual erosion of human rights by the Nazis. What
should we have done then? And what ought Scots today do about
"rendition" via our doorstep? Should we hide behind the figleaf
of "reserved matters", thereby appeasing the rendition of our
core cultural values? Or are we, as a nation, today challenged to engage
with our morality?
Nb. Here is the literary reference to William Shakespeare's Macbeth (4:3) that opens my final paragraph in the above letter. I deliberately used the subjunctive "be" to stimulate archetypal resonance with the shadow side of the Scottish psyche, as something we must face in order to address. See also Kevin Franz's commentary on Macduff's question from a Scottish churches perspective.
MACDUFF
Stands Scotland where it did? ROSS Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot Be call'd our mother, but our grave; where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy; the dead man's knell Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying or ere they sicken. Published as the centrepiece and featured letter in The Herald, 23 November 2005, p. 15, under the heading, "Nuclear energy? Perhaps. But no nuclear arms."
Nuclear energy may be part of the answer, but first we must ask what are
the questions (Blair goes for the nuclear option, 22 November).
What would happen to energy demand if we separated need from greed, and
heavily taxed the latter? What contribution could be made from
renewables, especially maritime ones rather than massive land-based
schemes that are possibly entertained only to frighten the horses into
the nuclear stable? What of a massive shift to ecological architecture
and retro-fitting (given that buildings use a third of our energy,
usually wastefully - see www.rmi.org )?
What of taxing aviation fuel, and socially stigmatising fast cars?
Non-nuclear alternatives require a patchwork of solutions. But above
all, they require addressing our shrivelled and shrunken sense of
what it means to find fulfilment as a human being, so that we can start
replacing quantity of consumption with quality of relationships. The
nuclear option, by contrast, is a centralised industrial approach that coddles
lazy energy addiction but defers costs to unborn generations.
The bottom line is that if Hunterston, Torness or Faslane were hit by a terrorist
attack, we could perhaps say goodbye to central Scotland for Kingdom
come. No insurer will carry such a risk. If the criterion of unacceptable
risk is uninsurable risk, where, precisely, does that leave
us?
Nevertheless, It may be that our politicians conclude that nuclear
fission is the implicit choice of their highly materialistic
electorate who fear the lights going out. If so, let us hope it is but a
stopgap until dirty atomic fission is replaced by relatively clean
atomic fusion. But ever since I was a boy, fusion has been a technical
challenge kicked "thirty years away" into the long grass.
If society does go back down the nuclear road, let it be on a basis of
using up existing military nuclear material rather than mining yet more.
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, there are currently
some 4,000 tons of plutonium or highly enriched uranium spread across 60
countries of the world. This, they say, is enough "for
hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons." Whatever our energy
choices, that is a legacy of 20th century warmongering that must be
tackled.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair holds onto and is exploring the replacement
of Britain's Trident missile "deterrent." In the course of guest
lecturing at staff college I have discussed this with large numbers
of senior military. Privately, many say that Trident
wastes resources because its use would be militarily impractical
and ethically unconscionable. They say its main value is political. It
secures Britain a seat at the UN Security Council. But such, surely, is
only the game of politicians whose wisdom is dwarfed by their egos.
This country does need a debate and decisions about future energy
security. But the price of even considering the nuclear option has got
to be foreclosure on Britain's chosen weapon of mass destruction.
As a nation faced with the threat of asymmetric warfare, we must reclaim
the moral highground. To replace Trident would only be to glorify
terror.
Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow.
Published as the centrepiece & trailered letter in The Herald, 8 August 2005, p. 15, under the heading, "A racist Scottish identity would be a fascist one." (Iain Crichton Smith's essay, Real People in a Real Place, is published in his essay collection, Towards the Human, Macdonald Publishers (Lines Review Edition (also, Saltire Publications)), 1986, pp. 13-70).
Once more today our braggarts crousely craw over the grave they would dig for multiculturalism (How London bombs have left One Scotland divided, August 6). The same people who have caricatured racial, gender and class justice as weasel-sounding "political correctness" now relish the prospect that multiculturalism may fail. "We cannot continue with the multicultural apartheid," said Boris Johnson, MP, in yesterday's Sunday Herald – as if multiculturalism and apartheid can be conflated just because both, in completely opposite ways, recognise cultural differences.
Published as the featured letter in The Herald, 14 July 2005, p. 19, with others under the heading, "The insanity of interpreting Islam in this way."
Asked
why Muslims were so often the focus of insurrection in British-occupied
Egypt, the nineteenth-century pioneer of Islamic reform, Muhammad Abduh,
replied: "The focus on Muslims is due to the fact that the majority
of nations who are betrayed and humiliated, and whose resources have
been usurped by foreigners, are Muslim." That colonial process
continues today as globalisation.
Why do young Muslims bomb in the name of God when, as community leaders such as Dr Bashir Maan of Glasgow mosque have so often said, the killing of innocents is utterly unIslamic? They do it for the same reason that Irish bombers and British colonialists perverted their Christianity. They do it because violence is actually a mental illness. It arises in minds that have been wounded in their capacity to build and sustain human empathy. Thus the spiral of violence feeds on more violence. Love lies shredded on the street. True security can be achieved only by a massive shift away from the politics of ego, greed and violence such as caused Britain illegally to invade Iraq and which hangs around our necks as the shame of being the second largest exporter of armaments in the world. The alternative is to build a world free of usurious debt, a world in which geopolitical injustices such as Palestine are addressed, and where "free" trade is held in a "fair" framework of social justice and environmental sustainability. That is why a quarter of a million of us protested against G8 policies recently in Edinburgh, Faslane, Dungavel and at Gleneagles. That is why, in a Scotland that takes her very name from a dark-skinned North African woman – Scota, the daughter of pharaoh – we must not allow the British origin of the London bombers to infect our minds and destroy our multicultural empathy. Hope lies in the beauty of a rainbow society that, across a long front with many different positions, navigates the shift from violence to non-violence. We must each strive to take away the causes of war. Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow.
Published as the lead letter in The Herald, 14th April 2005, p. 17, under the heading, "Duty-free is a major loophole in airport security."
Published in The Herald, 18 March 2005, under the heading, "Scotland's open door to those who want to belong." Unfortunately, I wrote this letter in a hurry, and it was rather too long meaning that the editor (unusually) cut it. In consequence, the last three paragraphs are a bit disjointed, and I have restored some of the original in [brackets] for greater clarity in this version.
John Thorpe misses my point if he thinks being English-born implies he should cringe for living in Scotland. I was born of an English mother in Doncaster. Alongside my Scottishness, I take pride in many deep and often hidden roots of English radical culture, some of which I alluded to in my literary references (Letters, March 16).
Published in The Herald, 16 March 2005, as the lead letter under the heading, "The tragedy of mainstream English identity."
I read Melanie Reid's article (March 15) on English identity shortly after returning from speaking at schools in Jersey, where a majority of the children seemed to identify themselves as "southern English, I suppose".
Published in The
Herald, Glasgow, 25 February 2005, p. 23, under the heading,
"Jeremiah's relevance."
Published in The Herald, 22 February 2005, p. 15, with others under the heading, "Not anti-Semitism but falsification of fact."
Well done, Sandy Gemmill, for defending Scotland's foremost modern liturgist, the Rev John Bell of the Iona Community, against character assassins who pick at the mote in their neighbour's eye. As Tony Benn's mother used to say, "The Bible can be understood as a confrontation between the kings who loved power, and the prophets who loved righteousness." Would that apologists for Israeli repression read from the same Bible.
Published as the featured letter in The Herald, 11 February 2004, p. 23, under the heading, "The tsunami as a divine visitation."
I am sometimes tempted to take the reality of the Devil literally, and suspect that his best work in Scotland is from the pulpit (“Tsunami ‘a divine visitation’, says minister”, 10 February). How sad of the Rev John MacLeod to propagate his nihilistic heresy. It must leave some readers scoffing at all matters spiritual, alongside Screwtape. Are we so infantile as to not see the tsunami as part of natural tectonic process, indeed, the “process theology” by which the Earth constantly renews itself? And are we so egocentric as to think that we are not bound up in that process? One riposte to the Rev MacLeod is Deuteronomy 30:19. Another is Edwin Muir’s One Foot in Eden:
Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow.
Published as the featured letter in The Herald, 1 December 2004, p. 17, under the heading, "A high-gain but low-cost housing strategy." I have appended an informal note from Andy Wightman adding a further perspective to this issue. Note also an excellent BBC website on affordable housing at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/A3193571 . Melanie Reid (30 November) describes the rural second-homes problem with admirable clarity, but strangely omits to identify community ownership and reformed planning law as the way forward. The bottom line is that there is no land shortage in Scotland. We have vast empty spaces averaging 4 acres each – that’s 3 football fields per woman, man and child. The problem is that current ownership patterns concentrate land in the hands of those who capitalise from scarcities of their own avaricious creation. This is why it typically costs £50,000 for the plot on which to build a £30,000 house. Land ownership is only half the problem. Equally of concern is a planning system more appropriate to the overcrowded South than to Scotland. We might remember that planning embodies a barren construct of the countryside set in place back in the days when many county councillors were lairdic types or their sycophants. These preserved the country as a playground for the rich. Others, whose only window on nature became a TV up an urban high-rise, were deprived of their full connection with nationhood. It is not necessary, as Melanie Reid implies, for councils to be discouraged by impossible burdens of monitoring and regulating to ensure that social housing stays in the community. The councils don’t have to do it. Instead, democratically elected community land trusts can do it themselves. Already new patterns and examples are showing the way forward. On Iona, for example, the Iona Housing Partnership is pioneering a joint ownership scheme where some of their new social housing will be owned partly by the householder and partly by the community. This will allow householders to get mortgages and thereby have a toe on the property ladder. But equally, it gives the community control over who subsequently moves in to the area, and it creates collateral with which to start buying back holiday homes that currently comprise 40% of the island’s housing stock. Another approach is the crofting model, where a householder possesses the “improvements” but the community (where there has been a buyout) leases and thereby controls the land on which these are built. Such models need to be combined with planning reform to favour empowering approaches as eco-design and self-build. Gigha is showing the way, with some two-dozen new homes being built, compared with just one under the previous 30 years of landlordism. Eigg, likewise, is re-organising its crofting and now has 83 residents including 20 children - a population increase of 26% since the 1997 buyout. Land and planning reform enables people to stand on their own feet precisely because they can stand on their own ground. That’s what makes it a high-gain but low-cost political strategy, and that is how we can build a new Scotland.
Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow.
Andy Wightman adds, pers. com. 2 Dec 04:
Alastair, See http://www.scotland-legislation.hmso.gov.uk/legislation/scotland/en2003/03en09-c.htm
, Section 43.
Published in the Stornoway Gazette, 1 July 2004, under the heading, "'A niggle of unease' at wind proposals". (For a more full exploration of acceptable wind energy principles see my earlier article in The Hebridean.)
As a writer and activist on social and environmental matters, I am disturbed at the number of people, including native islanders, who have been contacting me to air their concerns about the way wind power proposals are being moved ahead on Lewis.
Published as the featured letter in The Herald, 5 June 2004, p. 14, under the heading, "Shedding light on the roots of gratuitous violence." The published version as shown here was slightly cut, thus missing out reference to Bob Johnson's work in England (similar to Gilligan's in the US) - see www.jnf.org.uk . Lorina
MacLaren's article on serial killers as studied by Dr Helen Morrison is of
more than just criminological interest (June 4). The central dynamic, as
Morrison explains, is that killers appear to suffer a lack in their
ability to relate with feeling to others. Understanding the origins of their
dysfunction may be of wider social importance. It may shed light on much
more commonplace manifestations of social malaise - such as mindless
destruction of the environment, mindnumbing managerialist culture, and
what has been undertaken in our names by otherwise "normal"
soldiers in the jails of Iraq. A deficit of
empathy is at the root of gratuitous violence. Anybody who can shed light
on the origins of such a deficit offers hope for the salving of the
human condition. So I was disappointed to find that Dr Morrison's focus is
entirely on genetic explanations. "Serial killers are born, not
created," she concludes. This slams
the prison door on those who might be able to heal and thereby be
less likely to re-offend. It leaves us arguably barking up the wrong tree
and, worse still, with our "normal" heads comfortably in the
sand, unable to find the humility to confess the terrifying possibility
that, just perhaps, "There but for the grace of God go I." But overt
criminal actions are only one of a range of possible symptoms. In her
book, For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing (Virago), the
Swiss psychotherapist, Alice Miller, argues that the "violation
of a child's primal integrity" generally takes much more commonplace
stiff-upper-lip forms. These start within the neurotic bounds of
"normality" and extend all the way to what her case studies
reveal of the childhoods and psychopathic behaviour of senior members of
the Third Reich. Some
prominent prison psychiatrists, such as James Gilligan of the Harvard
Medical School, arrive at similar conclusions. Gilligan, formerly
director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison service, sums up
his experience as follows in his study, Violence: Reflections on a
National Epidemic (Vintage, New York): "I have yet to see a
serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling
shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed.... Without feelings of
love [especially in childhood], the self feels numb, empty ...
biologically alive yet spiritually and emotionally dead." He concludes:
"Only when you go into violence and its logic can you see the heart
of darkness at the centre of the psychology of civilization.... Other
cultures ... demonstrate that violence does not have to be universal; and
that altering social, cultural, and economic conditions can dramatically
reduce, and for all practical purposes eliminate, human violence from the
face of the earth." Alastair McIntosh, 26 Luss Road, Glasgow (The above letter attracted the following response, that I think merits including here, not least because it fills in some points that had been cut from my own original): To
understand the roots of violence - published 7 June. Alastair
McIntosh, writing in response to Helen Morrison's claim that "serial
killers are born, not created", proposes that a deficit of empathy is at
the root of gratuitous violence (Letters, June 5), and appeals for light to be
shed on the origins of such a condition. There is much light to be found in the
writings of Alice Miller, as cited by McIntosh, but even more in the vast area
of psychological research under the umbrella of attachment theory, in the work
of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Pat Crittenden, and many others. There are no absolute answers here, but many clues as to how a close examination of the variations in the sensitivity and responsiveness of an infant's caretakers generates understanding of precisely the forms of attachment insecurity that are characterised by severe relationship difficulties and deficits of empathy. The
quotations from Morrison herself – if representative of her wider thinking –
show an astonishing failure to follow through on the psychological material that
seems to be staring her in the face. She says "serial killers have no
attachment to other people". So why not look at the vast amount of work
being done on how these fundamental attachments are formed, and positive or
negative trajectories put in place? It is a cop-out to resort to reliance on
future genetic technology, and the physical analysis of killers' brains, as she
does. Equally
astonishing is her comment that "often serial killers will come from
perfectly normal homes" – she appears unable to scratch beneath the
surface of what appears superficially "normal". Alice Miller's
writings could offer her many chilling examples of the dangers of naive
psychology. Morrison also suggests that "there seems to be something in
some children that allows them to survive bad situations". Yes indeed, it's
known as resilience, another burgeoning area of research, rooted in attachment
theory. If
answers – or just a few more productive clues – are to be found in the
understanding of violent behaviour, we need more in the way of joined-up
thinking, not only by individual workers such as Morrison, but also between
disciplines of inquiry. Dr
Angus Macmillan, 76 Georgetown Road, Dumfries.
Published as the lead letter in The Sunday Herald (Seven Days), Glasgow, 11 April 2004, p. 10, under the heading, "End of a long campaign".
The vastness of the proposed, opposed and now withdrawn Harris superquarry scheme is exceeded only by the scale of the campaign that fought it over13 long years. Rob Edwards’ stirring article gave, if anything, over-generous acknowledgement of my own role (News, 4 April).
But there are many unsung actors, most of whom kept low profiles. I would request to add three further points of acknowledgement. Firstly, key community leaders and residents on the island have played absolutely pivotal roles, from politics all the way through to prayer. Secondly, it was a remarkably successful example of well-co-ordinated NGO action. The NGO umbrella organisation, the Link Quarry Group, included Friends of the Earth Scotland, Ramblers Scotland, RSPB, WWF Scotland, Rural Scotland, Sustrans, NEMT and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. The staff and members of these organisations deserve gratitude. Thirdly, all parties recognise that Scotland’s planning and political system was not up to handling a proposal of this scale. However, the Western Isles’ MSP, MP and most councillors of Comhairle nan Eilean Siar handled the matter with artful concern. The Government’s own environmental agency, Scottish National Heritage, mounted a principled and fearless stand at massive legal cost. As your columnist, Muriel Gray, suggested, the people of Harris must now be given the support of the nation as a whole (Seven Days, April 4). In the 1995 secret ballot, 67% of them on an 83% turnout rejected the opportunity of violating a National Scenic Area with a superquarry. Here, then, are a people that have chosen long-term integrity of place over the short-term buck. This enriches all who are sensitive to beauty. The onus now rests on a wider world to sustain such a community. Everybody can do their bit. Visit Harris. Buy vernacular products like the famous Harris Tweed. And encourage the Scottish Executive and other wheels of governance in their vital efforts to stimulate community empowerment, economic resilience, cultural renewal and environmental sustainability. Oh, and one last thing, thank you, Redland-cum-Lafarge. You provided a challenge to the cultural immune system. You bowed out with dignity and, by bothering to visit the islands for your final announcement, a personal touch that will not pass unremarked. You leave behind you a community that is stronger – like its mountain.
Alastair McIntosh, 6 Abden Court, Kinghorn
Published as the featured letter in The Herald, 9 April 2004, p. 23, under the heading, "To tackle the rural housing crisis." (The letter to which this is a response is pasted below, as is my original below that).
Andrew Bradford of the Scottish Rural Property and Business Association suggests that I should "open [my] eyes" about the rural housing crisis (Letters, April 8).
What we are witnessing is the first major outing of that mouthful of plums, the SRPBA, which is the new face of the erstwhile Scottish Landowners' Federation. The SLF has, alas, just fallen victim to the best PR advice that money could buy. As its website puts it, "Today, March 31, 2004, the SLF officially changed its name and structure to become the Scottish Rural Property and Business Association." And so we witness another Orwellesque Windscale-like transmogrification to Sellafield. Let it go on record, then, that SRPBA is still the same old Lairds' Trade Union.
Mr Bradford's letter tries to reduce to one simple polarity a debate that actually offers several alternatives. He sees housing provision as something that is done for people by either the "private rented sector" or "the public purse [of] the social housing sector". By setting up this simple dichotomy of capitalism versus communism, both treating ordinary folks as needing something done to them, he makes a straw-man argument – a caricature that he can easily knock down.
6 Abden Court, Kinghorn, Fife.
Herewith the letter of 8th April to which the above was my response:
ALASTAIR
McIntosh (Letters, April 5), in responding to Lucy Bannerman's article on
rural housing, expresses contempt for my continual plea that the private
rented sector (not just landowners) should be given incentives to supply
affordable housing. My reason for this being that, as I have, personally
demonstrated on this estate, there are circumstances in which the private
sector can deliver affordable housing at far better value for the public
purse than can the social housing sector. Mr
McIntosh should open his eyes and be prepared to think what for him is
probably the unthinkable. Surely the best solution for the very serious
rural housing problem in Scotland is for all potential housing providers
to be allowed to participate in trying to solve the problem and to
utilise those capable of delivering local solutions at best value for
the public purse. If that means, as I am certain it would in many rural
situations, using the co-operation and willingness of his dreaded
"lairds" to accept modest rates of return in order to support
local communities and helpmeet local housing needs, then common sense
dictates that this course of action should be allowed. I
know of many landowners who would be only too willing to develop
affordable housing. They cannot do this without financial assistance but
they could deliver around 25% more homes or the same amount of
taxpayers' money when compared with rural social housing provision. Far
from "the poor", as Mi McIntosh suggests, involvement of the
private rented sector would either save the taxpayer a fortune or
deliver more affordable houses for those in need. Either of these seem
entirely reasonable outcomes. The
real scandal is that, in denying assistance for the private sector to
develop affordable housing, society has prevented a great many people
who desperately need housing from getting a roof over their heads. Andrew
Bradford, Scottish Rural Property and Business Association,
Kincardine Estate Office, Kincardine
O'Neil, Aboyne.
Published in The Herald as the featured letter, 6 April 2004, p. 17, under the heading, "Three roads to affordable rural housing." Your excellent coverage of Scotland's crisis in affordable rural housing (5 April) reported, remarkably, that Andrew Bradford of the Scottish Landowners' Federation "criticised reliance on the social sector, saying landowners should get more incentives to supply low-cost homes."
How typical of the "Lairds' Trades Union" to seek public help that would result in taxing the poor via an ongoing stream of rentals paid to the rich!
But thankfully, our politicians have already created an "incentive" that will soon start dropping into place - land reform. But we need to keep holding the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 in the light of the Government's 1999 green paper committment to address the land question "not as a once-for-all issue but as an ongoing process." The new Act is a modest start to, and certainly not a conclusion of the process.
Three things must next be tackled. Firstly, the planning system requires review. It must ease provision for housing that, i) addresses social need, ii) is Scottish vernacular and ecologically sound, and, iii) encourages such empowering approaches as community self-build. We need to remember that much British planning law developed in an era when rurual county councillors were typically of the landed classes. They had an interest in keeping the countryside for the rich and their servants, and that policy is now more bankrupt than ever.
Secondly, legal structures need to be established that separate ownership of the land from rights over the private improvements made upon it, such as building a house. In social housing developments the land should be inalienably owned by local community housing trusts. Only the improvements upon that land should be privately owned, and the sale of these must hinge upon agreement by the community to transfer the land lease. There is nothing radical or new about this proposal. It is current position with crofting law. Here landlords retain the land, crofters own the improvements, and the Crofters' Commission controls transfer of the land lease. Why not, then, use a similar structure to address the need for social housing? It would allow democratically accountable community bodies to stop housing originally intended for local social need from being sold on as holiday homes.
Thirdly, the current land reform act will scarcely touch the big players, with "their property" stitched up in overseas holding companies and family trusts. This needs to be tackled as Scotland's political confidence grows. As an estate agent up north told me recently, "The reality is that your typical landowner holds on to housing plots more tightly than to his balls." That is why Scotland has 5 emptied-out acres of land per head of the population, yet housing plots on the west coast now change hands for upwards of £50,000.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in The Herald, 24 March 2004, under the heading, "Campbell and Steele."
The exoneration of TC Campbell and Joseph Steele is a partial vindication of Scottish justice, and all credit to the largely unsung Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which investigated and referred his case. But as Aamer Anwar says (letters, March 23), there must now be a full inquiry so that confidence in Scottish due process can be restored. Mr Campbell has always maintained that "this is not a miscarriage of justice, but a conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice." That claim must be openly examined.
Alastair McIntosh
Published in The Herald, 26th February 2004, p. 21, under the heading, "The private concerns of senior public servants."
I was fascinated to see that the case against the intelligence officer, Katherine Gun, who tried to stop what she described as "an illegal war", was mysteriously dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service after her solicitor revealed his intention to seek disclosure from Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, as to the nature of his advice about the Iraq war's legality ("Follow your conscience, GCHQ 'spy' urges intelligence staff, 26 February).
In the run-up to the war, a number of senior public servants were privately concerned that if they followed the dictates of duty in the absence of a UN resolution, they might be a party to war crimes. Some went personally to Lord Goldsmith and sought counsel on the matter.
One has privately told me that Lord Goldsmith's opinion was that the war would be illegal, unless Saddam really did have weapons of mass destruction that could threaten Britian. This person added, "It is my view that if the WMDs are not found, it could well bring Blair down."
I suggested that it could, additionally, render a number of politicians and public servants war criminals. This, my source said, was, "something we take very seriously."
I am well aware that the publication of this letter might bring both journalists and the intelligence services tapping on my door or telephone line. I shall oblige them no further than this statement. Let me only add that, as a Quaker, truth and integrity in public affairs is a spiritual obligation of both conscience and consequence. I hereby give my affirmation that there is neither exaggeration nor distortion in what I am placing on the public record.
The sequel to the Hutton inquiry has been set to establish the quality of the intelligence that led to going to war and, thus, to regional destabilisation, increased global terrorism threat and some 10,000 registered civilian deaths in Iraq. Two questions remain unexamined by Mr Blair's self-established inquiries: what political process surrounded the use of intelligence, and within what framework of advice from the Attorney General?
The mysterious dropping of a potentially "treasonable" case against Ms Gun suggests that the spotlight must now fall on the latter question. There could be no higher test of the capacity of law to safeguard the integrity of our democracy. We can but presume that Ms Gun's case was dropped with good reason. Indeed, the "treason" in question may not have been hers.
Yours faithfully
Alastair McIntosh
As a black Glasgow health service
executive said on the Lesley Riddoch Show in April 2000. "Look at me. I'm
Scottish, Nigerian and Jewish. That's what it means to be a Real Scot".
Published in The Herald, 23 January 2004, p. 21, as the featured letter under the heading, "Our own classical traditions left to wither."
Culture is the glue that holds a people together. It inspires them to take responsibility both for one another and for their environment, so building communities in which human dignity becomes a possibility. In contrast, the process that Paulo Freire calls “cultural invasion” is vital to subjugating a colonised people’s spirit. They must be persuaded that their own music, poetry and other arts are “backward”. Only by aping the mores of the oppressor’s “high” culture can the dominated cadge legitimacy and standing. Once this inner colonisation of the soul has taken place outward force of arms and law can be relaxed. The people’s own power ebbs as the apathy of inferiorisation becomes normalised. This justifies continued domination, and so we learn to lionize the classical culture of the Romans and all that followed in their wake. As Tacitus reported the Pictish chieftain Calgacus, “Harriers of the world . . . they make a desolation and they call it peace.” In the past year I have been to the opera in Scotland, and parts of Beethoven, Handel and Bach lift the soul to transcendental levels. For, this let us celebrate the Italians, Germans, English or whoever. But such art forms are not the centrepost of Scottish culture. You don’t go to homes in continental Europe and find many CDs of Verdi by a Scottish orchestra, Carmen by Scottish Opera or Scottish Ballet videos. Instead, you find Runrig, Capercaillie, and a European populace where virtually everybody can sing Auld Lang Syne in their own language. They want our authentic national music more than to hear us mimicking a version of theirs. Until now, Scottish taxpayers have had to subsidise non-indigenous classical art forms rooted in feudal patronage. Our own classical traditions such as pibroch have been left to wither on the chanter. We’ve been told that this was good for us; that we needed to educate our tastes, become refined and so find improved standing in the great wide world. In short, we’ve been told a lie – and told it by that dominating social class of latter-day Romans who, until Devolution, held hidden power virtually unchallenged in Scotland. That is why your survey of 21 January is so timely in suggesting that only 2% of people would favour public funding for ballet and opera over traditional music (31%). It is why the Scottish Executive’s review of arts policy is welcome and vital. We are talking here not just of reclaiming the “national music” of Scotland, but of reconnecting the nation with deep sources of power and empowerment. Such "work in the spirit" will have both social and economic payoffs. It will restore our birthright of cultural rooting and confidence. From there we will be able to reach out better to other cultures with discernment, grace and authenticity.
Yours faithfully
Alastair McIntosh
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