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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 February 2008, p6, 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.
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