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Owen Dudley Edwards
DARLING, OF COURSE I’LL LOVE YOU IN THE MORNING
In the long demise of the press, the strange death of literate England, Murdoch on the Occident Express, there is a depressing tedium in the music of its mendacity. They don’t necessarily tell the same lies in each successive issue (setting aside the Daily Mail’s bootless yearning to achieve credibility by telling lies on the front page which the reader is exhorted to imbibe rebottled in agonising repetition on pages 3, 5, 7, 11 and the pull out, possibly on the thesis that the front page is what the medics call a specimen). But they insist on lying in the same cliché regardless of the alleged alteration in the victims of their vomited venom. There may be internal competition in these things, such that when someone has reused a meaningless word or phrase in all directions for every day of the year, s/he is hailed as Journalist of the Century and made Sports Editor. Accordingly Political reporting creeps daily (on the Daily Creep) into more and more transparent uselessness, as the relevant wretches contest with cruel owners perpetually decreeing change of mind with no change of matter. The Scotchman has never recovered from the genius of Mr Andrew Neill, who having been told the paper had built up a readership nurtured on devolution and now revelling in the Scottish Parliament, neatly halved or perhaps quartered its circulation by decreeing the Scottish Parliament should never be mentioned without execration in words of four letters. Mr Murdoch, now confronted on his or at least his empire’s death-bed, has discovered that Patriotism is the last refuse of a scoundrel, leaving the Leveson enquiry to conclude they have Scotched the snake, not killed it. Admittedly politics has seldom been so ready to reply in kind. In the United States, Racism having been supposedly outlawed in US politics with the election of President Obama, now returns in seven diabolic variations, each trumpeting rival lunacies and prescribing eternally healing bilgewater, headed by my fellow-Papists Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Ex-Senator Santorum (very much ‘ex’ as his former constituents in Pennsylvania made abundantly clear) is originally from the Pittsburgh Italianate (with Irish on their distaff side, as analysts forget at their peril: the last distaff Irish in Presidential Politics was Rose Kennedy, the master-mind of the Murfia). We are to presume the name was originally ‘Sanctorum’ implying descent from innumerable saints, on the strength of which he proclaims himself a follower of Jesus Christ by hating everything and everybody other than his financial backers, but this time not by Italo-Hibernian descent as by finding the true faith while ‘on his third wife’ (as the press have
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so delicately expressed it). Should Mr Gingrich become President, Ken Livingstone’s vet might be able to identify him as a disease among his patients as well as among the rest of us. Messrs Gingrich and Santorum are doubtful, if not indeed certain, as to the eligibility of Mormons for salvation (Mr Gingrich no doubt suspecting them of polygamy); this is a blind since they will also be doubtful about all other faiths.
and Gingrich Bulls. The rumour that Mormons believe Blacks are damned is false: it is only that they believe Blacks are descended from Cain, who isn’t on anyone’s list of Mormon ancestors to be saved with the welcome and well-paid support of Genealogical Offices. No doubt Bishop Romney’s defeat in the 2008 primaries by Senator McCain broadened the legion of the Unsaved, since his victory made it clear McCain had indeed descended from the Earth’s first-born. Another snake Scotched, so to say.
It is to be assumed that the Papist thrones, dominations &c may be a little doubtful on their side as to whether ex-Speaker Gingrich’s Popery will last much beyond his next change of wife. But they probably take the descendant of the choir of Saints a little more seriously, or at least such of them as are Republicans first as Bishops afterwards (which President Obama’s election has produced in ominous numbers). But the Santorum as well as the Gingrich candidacies seem to deny a doctrine produced by the present Pope in the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth (one of the best and humblest scholarly expositions of our time): The cruel consequences of religiously motivated violence are only too evident to us all. Violence does not build up the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity. On the contrary, it is a favourite instrument of the Antichrist, however idealistic its religious motivation may be. It serves, not humanity, but inhumanity. (2011, p. 15) It is a magnificent judgement, sweeping away pious Crusades ancient and modern in its integrity. It may be argued that MM. Santorum and Gingrich do not use violence other than verbal, but it won’t be championed by them, for fear of impairment of their masculinity. They will defy their enemies to question one blot or comma in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing the right of people to keep and bear arms. It doesn’t actually defend their right to use them, but this is axiomatic for the embattled Papists, not to speak of their embattled Mormon fellow-Republican, Governor Willard Mitt Romney (Why would a man call himself Mitt? If his first name is Willard).He tried calling himself Billy first, but gave it up. It might be he worried that Massachusetts might have a few voters with painful memories of Billy boys. Enough of this havering: may they all kill themselves off electorally as painfully as possible (non-violently, of course), with Romney desperately scrambling to prise finger-holds of his rivals away from every ugly rock they can throw at Obama (non-violent, still of course). And, as a Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, ex-Governor Romney is as well poised to excommunicate the President of the United States as the Santorum
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How unlike the home life of our own dears! Granted we have no campaigner as gaudy as President Obama other than Alexander IV –- the only UK statesman of the first rank is the one wanting out of the UK (True, and not for the first time: Daniel O’Connell was the greatest orator in the Parliament of his day once he had finally stormed his way into it after a campaign of 29 years). But the plurality of ancestors seem no more effective here in the Salvation stakes than the plurality of wives, Gingrich-style, or of children, given Santorum’s insistence on the genitive plural. Cast your mind back to Killiecrankie, for instance, in Macaulay’s version. ‘We shall do it now’, said Lochiel: ‘that is not the cry of men who are going to win.’ He had walked through all of his ranks, had addressed a few words to every Cameron, and had taken from every Cameron a promise to conquer or die. It was past seven o’clock. Dundee gave the word. The Highlanders dropped their plaids. The few who were so luxurious as to wear rude socks of untanned hide spurned them away. It was long remembered in Lochaber that Lochiel took off what probably was the only pair of shoes in his clan, and charged barefoot at the head of his men. And we are into the battle won by the Camerons in two minutes. The entirety is not only one of Macaulay’s finest battle-pieces, but particularly to be admired because he forgets what side he is supposed to be on, and not only exults at the achievement of Cameron of Lochiel (one of his Jacobite heroes, like Patrick Sarsfield) but even mourns for Bonnie Dundee, hitherto one of his worst villains but now at the moment of his death in action ‘a great warrior and politician’, and hastily remedied by a quick memory of his ‘excess of wickedness’. But Macaulay had no previous maledictions to soften over Lochiel. To him the great Cameron chief (Camerons do not say ‘chieftain’) was ‘the Ulysses of the Highlands’. A lover of Homer like Macaulay could pay no higher tribute to a hero.
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It might be justly felt that I am stinting my Papist charity as meanly as the ex-Senator and the ex-Speaker in thus cruelly comparing the Prime Minister (up here to confront the First Minister) to what I take to be his ancestor of some third of a millennium since. Indeed however uncharitable we may feel towards Mr David Cameron, it is hard not to like the man as we contemplate the leading contenders from the Republican party for the American Presidency. Moreover the Romney/ Santorum/Gingrich circus-on-the-circuit combine mutual abuse too un-gentlemanly for Captain Kidd or Captain Hook with economics rigidly social Darwinist, weakest-to-the-wall, law-of-the-jungle, devil-take-the-hindmost (Santorum insisting his disapproval of the devil be recorded together with the disapproval of the hindmost he shares with his Republican brethren). Even if Mr David Cameron believes in pernicious class hatred of this kind (and there is not much sign that he does), he knows better than to utter it. Even his former chief and present very unruly nominal subordinate, Mr Andrew Lansley, has diminished the proud tower of his Competition Sanitising National Health, and seeks to make his solutions at least appear to bow down to Bevan. It might be a useful exercise to infect the three Republican front-runners with some curable disease and imprison them in Dartmoor, with the alternative of being cured by National Health or else being left to wallow in their ailments. One wonders whether Dartmoor might not suddenly find itself hosting visions of Brigham Young, and St. Bernadette, instructing their respective coreligionists that Heaven now revokes its previous prohibition of National Health. Somehow one suspects its previous prohibition of National Health. Somehow one suspects Mr Cameron needs no such heavenly emissary save perhaps to remove Mr Lansley to his eternal reward. There was therefore something touching about Mr Cameron’s public realisation that for all his love of the Union with his head, his heart, his soul, his (let’s leave it there, family viewing time)… he can elect only one Scottish MP (and that the leavings of defunct Social Democrats) although he had risen to two Pandas. (He’s 2-Pandas Cameron: Eat Your Heart Out Prescott.) it was, he felt, A wonderful job for Somebody, Somebody else, Not Me. He opened the bidding with Alistair Darling a courtesy which seems to gaining heirloom status. Gordon Brown in keeping with the Labour party inferiority complex as the lack of previous cabinet servitude in 1997 learned his economics from the Tories –- Kenneth Clark in his last days in 11
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Downing Street said he didn’t think he was infallible, but Gordon Brown did – then the Treasury and above all Alan Greenspan and similarly gifted psychics from the USA. It was a standard courtesy in the Brown administration that while George Osborne’s skills largely consisted of learning how to keep his sneer in place while seasick on luxury yachts (Peter Mandelson kindly giving the instruction), nobody knew any economics except Vince Cable, but if that Darling wasn’t a bull, he wasn’t a bear. The Latest Cameron could hardly distress George Osborne by suggesting Alistair Darling was his superior in economics (the rule appears to be that now the Liberal Democrats have imploded in all directions, too little remains of Vince Cable to be usable but that Kenneth Clark does know more economics than the future Sir George Osborne of Ballywhatsit (and thus the Irish joke in Tory form), and therefore must never be heard speaking about anything he knows nothing about. (Having an excellent sense of humour he consoles himself with crocodile tears for poor Scotch and Welch who won’t have the privilege of Mr Lansley’s reforms of the National Health, a little like the monk, forbidden to complain, who wept for his brethren with no mouse in their wine.) But Alistair Darling is in fact the child of a political dynasty which originated in the Tory party, and therefore deserves the recognition due to a cadet branch of the political grandees. Mentioning John Reid is probably a Tory speechwriter’s attempt at Machiavellianism: Dr Reid was, until lately, clothed in all green-oh (he seems to have abandoned Celtic as its correspondence became somewhat lethal), and perhaps this was an insidious idea of hinting to Rangers supporters (who had in fact other things to think about, if capable) that Independence is a Mick’s game. But the inclusion of Dr Gordon Brown was a flourish not unequal to Lochiel’s throwing his shoes away, however Mr Cameron chose to charge without them. Mr Cameron’s credentials for office before the election consisted of addressing Dr Brown in the old manner and manners of a Billingsgate fishwife in drag. So much did it seem that this tune alone was all Mr Cameron could play, that he felt obliged to show when in office he knew how to say pretty things to a boy in a rose-garden. But to have besought Brown’s assistance on the plea of his superiority in Scottish politics, however true, would be akin to the Mormon Bishop and the pseudoVatican duet offering a post to President Obama in their administration should the world ever have the misfortune to receive it. As Mr Cameron’s old nanny, now Lady Thatcher, would have liked him to remember Kipling is the only poet fit for Tory purpose.
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Though I’ve beaten you, and flayed you, By the living God that made you. You’re a better man than I am, Gordon Brown. True, of course, but who’d ’a’ thunk he was bright enough to realise it, or that his keepers would let him off the least long enough to say it? Unfortunately another poet seems even more appropriate for the Cameron return to Scotland, Macaulay again in fact, but recording somewhat different sentiments in those about to charge: Was none who would be foremost To lead such dire attack: But those behind cried ‘Forward!’ And those before cried ‘Back!’ And backward now and forward Wavers the deep array; And on the tossing sea of steel, To and fro the standards reel; And the victorious trumpet-peal Dies fitfully away. It really seems an unfair match. Mr Cameron’s only prowess is in Commons front-bench buffoonery, while visible Mr Salmond, crocodile in his turn, welcomes Mr Cameron to his gently smiling jaws. Mr Cameron is in power by a much-ridiculed coalition with the Liberal Democrats, voters for each loudly denying that was what they voted for, and Mr Salmond’s voters line up from Whithorn to John O’Groats. Mr Cameron’s electoral gear is patched and threadbare, Mr Salmond’s is overall. Mr Cameron wails for Salmond to show chivalry by calling the independence referendum while the pundits preface its defeat, Mr Salmond prolongs the delay in the knowledge that the longer he waits, the more unpopular will Mr Cameron’s government become. Of course if Labour were to wax anew, voters might think that the Union could still save them from the Tories, but the sound of Mr Ed Miliband hardly encourages that thesis. The voters at the Scottish general election of 1911 certainly did not vote for independence, but they did vote for one party able to form a government which would not be directed by London. Therefore any audible orders come for marching, from somewhere over there, are self-destruct, kamikaze, oxymoron. Mr Cameron’s own regiment in Scottish politics is painfully aware of that, and many voted for Mr Murdo Fraser for leader, when he declared that the only hope of a Tory revival in Scotland was for it publicly to burn all the bridges to London and rebaptise itself. The subtlety of this was beyond Mr Cameron, whose cosmeticians in Downing Street proclaimed preference for a Lesbian of no more than two years’ Tory standing, but while fulfilling London Tory order the party evidently managed to convey a little of Mr Fraser’s perception.
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Mr Cameron has therefore retained the name of Scottish Toryism but has decided it should also give itself a working alias, and that for practical purposes Scottish Toryism shall be known as Alistair Darling. This at least suggests more objective appraisal of the political realities (after all Labour really did win the Scottish election of 2010 and Mr Darling was very visible then).Mr Ed Miliband is less able to learn, his chief visible anxiety about Scotland being to show that he really does remember the name of whoever he permitted to lead the Scottish Labour party. The difficulty is that Scottish politics assume awareness of history. Mr Cameron has been unable to remember Lochiel, which may not matter: voters have seen too many resurrected and warmed-up clan chieftains and perhaps even chiefs, notably in The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil when the drunken public school Anglicised lairds cover the audience with the guns they have so happily clowned with until the zero hour. But he has also apparently forgotten that latter-day Bertie MacWooster, the fourteenth Early of Home, a.k.a. sir Alec Douglas-Home, a.k.a. Lord Home of the Hirsel, who told the Scots of 1979 to vote against the then devolution proposals in referendum since the Tories would bring in more devolution than Labour offered, and instead the Thatcher administration held dinner in Edinburgh and London ten years later to celebrate their denial of what the Scots had voted for. Mr Cameron’s pretty promised of a bigger stick of Edinburgh Rock if the Scots reject independence has all the charm of Sir Alec, and all the reliability. Even permission granted to Nick Clegg to promise the same thing as though the Lib-Dems had thought it all up by themselves is unlikely to damage the cause of independence unduly. There is a limit to the charm of exhibiting a perfectly potty-trained posturer. The Unionists to date are so deficient in data that their arguments acutely resemble grimy cribs passed from one hand to another in a public school examination. Whatever the voting method for the referendum, the Unionists are campaigning on the single transferable cliché. And the cliché is pre-Copernican. Scots no longer think the Sun goes round the Earth, a.k.a. England, although those of them in Government service have been well schooled not to hint at anything so tactless. The UK without Scotland and even the name of the UK cannot lose its seat on the Security Council of the United Nations, and the revolting thesis that the seat depends on overkill-power may gratify Tory adrenalin of the ‘hang ‘em, kill-‘em, castrate-‘em variety, but it exists only in Tory dreams or (saner folks’ nightmares). The UN is constituted as the prolongation of the World War II United Nations, the official name for the
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USA-USSR-UK alliance in that conflict, and seats on the Security Council with attached vetoes date from then. Ghiang Kai-Shek may be replaced by Mao Zedong, the USSR may lose the Ukraine, Belorussia, and every Red Republic, the UK may be downsized to England, but the seats with vetoes (the constipation corps) will go on as long as the United Nations, and if anyone tries to say/anything else they will be vetoed. If Mr Cameron had been told otherwise, and then he had better fire his informants, who are swindling him, and therefore us. The taxpayer pays for official lies, in all senses. The same applies to the fiction that Scotland would be denied entry as an independent power to the EU. Constitutionally there is no objection, and politically there is none provided the separation has been achieved with the relevant signatures on the appropriate document. On the other hand anything less than independence won’t be admissible. Independence-lite, independence while hosting the UK nuclear weapons, devo-max, devo-plus, devo Douglas-Humed, Clegged or Milibanded, prohibit acceptance. Scotland must evict all weapons of mass destruction. She has neither need, funds or moral right for any. Mr Cameron may deserve the credit of making the case for Independence stronger by a defence of the Union consisting chiefly on its having the fourth biggest kill-power on Earth. He is showing us that Scotland’s case divides it from UK policy. Politically the gap grows wider steadily and clearly. Scotland at all elections has rejected the xenophobe political parties mushrooming into Electoral significance in England. Scotland has released a dying and possibly multi-homicidal foe on compassionate grounds where the Unionist parties either screeched for their vaunted vengeance or attempted huckstering under the table. Independence is in fact required by the best traditions of the Unionist parties, conservation, civil liberties, the welfare state. Unionism today effectively withers the best of the past which Independence is committed to preserve. The case for the Union is reduced to errors and omissions. No wonder they have to fall back on Alistair Darling. But presumably there will be the ‘independent’ pressure-groups mobilising against independence in the way in which the US Presidential elections now let loose rat-plagues of uncontrolled fan-clubs to spend millions in blackguarding the opponents of their chosen fancy man so that he may get elected and undercut the legitimate needs of his voters to favour the special interests of his financiers. We may be about to see the equivalent,
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albeit it has (fortunately) some way to go to reach the saturation levels now obliterating rational American comment. But we are hearing from private-owned utilities that thrown to the dogs of the market by Thatcherism, and understandably they do not like Independence and want it taken out of Scottish hands as far as its referendum dates are concerned. There could hardly be a better proof that these bodies ending the costs of consumer services higher and higher, are fearful of a vigilant local control. Their grandees pocket enormous bonus payments, though the good of the bonus is limited to its recipients. The fact that a privately owned utility can openly intervene in restraint of Scottish control of its own referendum suggests a brazen front, although one masking a fearful heart; and instead of benevolent reception of its political intervention, what it should be asked is how it can justify this expenditure of money gouged from the electricity bills it has inflicted on the public. If there is much more of this, there may well be a backlash |demanding better and more responsible supervision of the utility-czars, with hopes of their possible penance for self-enrichment at consumer expense. And Mr Cameron might suffer the fate of Margaret Thatcher, Stepmother of Devolution. Someone has evidently told him of the Golden Days of Masterful Margaret when the Scottish Tory Party cried aloud to Heaven or Hell to keep her away from the country where her every appearance lost more and more Tory votes. He was modest to the point of bashfulness in promising to put the Unionist crusade out for Opposition tender. He is probably familiar with a source of pseudoScottish history containing the line ‘Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake thy gory locks at me.’ But the few remaining Tories hardly want to add the role of Banquo’s ghost to their few remaining occupations. Banquo’s ghost gets no bonus.
as well as Alistair Darling, John Reid was by this stage dead, mummified, and on his way to those twin Valhallas, the House of Lords and Glasgow Celtic. As for David Blunkett, no politician with any pretensions to sanity would consider his views in relation to future cabinets other making sure he realised he would never again enter one. Many political futures are potentially combustible, but Mr Blunkett in cabinet is an accident certain to happen. But to cite Messrs Reid and Blunkett as a cause or symbol of prohibition of a LibDem-Labour coalition was simply a way of saying that it wasn’t going to happen if Alistair Darling could help it. Mr Cameron could name Dr Reid as a non-person guaranteed to fill any non-job. As for Dr Brown, even Mr Cameron could hardly have the complacency to assume he was hugging his ruined dreams in a solitude he yearned to have broken by a summons from his replacement. It was a neat way of saying Alistair Darling when naming the Unionist knight-at-arms, as though he was Alistair Darling’s original old master, Tony Blair, expressing his devotion to education. But what is in it for Alistair Darling? He has been around long enough to know the value of any blandishment such as MR Cameron offering him the next coalition partner. If he is to save Scotland, presumably he is to save it for something or someone, preferably himself. The precedent here is Mr Neil Kinnock who campaigned against Devolution in Wales like some Welsh evangelist beginning the twentieth century, and made himself indispensible enough to win the Labour party leadership, with the somewhat depressing condition that he had to accept Devolution in the future. But we can hardly imagine Alistair Darling claiming victory over Independence followed by instalment as Premier in an Independent Scotland, somewhat Independentlite. And while dignified, he hardly has the fire.
Concentration on Alistair Darling seems the clear message from Mr Cameron. He may indeed have mentioned Dr John Reid by way of showing his years of goggling at the Labour Government had shown him the all-purpose cow, Dr Reid, relied on as an old Stalinist perpetually yearning for Stalin, and hence the available man for any cabinet post made suddenly vacant. His political corpse was indeed sent dancing in the final throes of the Brown government, as Mr Cameron lf all people knows. When the Liberal Democrats were estimating their chances of auction-sale of their bodies to the highest bidders, we have it from Alistair Darling in his remarkably coy memoirs that ‘I met both John Reid and David Blunkett forcibly denouncing any move to form a coalition between ourselves and the Liberal Democrats’. Now as Mr Cameron knows
The dignity is no joke. It is a commodity very rare indeed in the House of Commons of our time, and one feels proud of Mr Darling in austere contrast with the yahoos and monkeys gibbering cat-calls across the floor. Most modern Prime Ministers threw away their chances of it: Macmillan was probably the last who brought it off. Major was an oasis after the screech in which Thatcher conducted official business, but having no ideas of his won beyond the commonplace he was forever being programmed for posture by the lords of his control. Mr Darling fully intends to show that dignity can return to 10 as well as 11 Downing Street. That, in fact, is what is ‘in it’ for him. Mr Cameron, whose premiership has difficulty in thinking beyond next week, could hardly have invoked Mr Darling had his advisers not convinced him that Mr Darling
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is an elder statesman. They have not convinced Mr Darling, whose dignity has indeed enabled him to preserve the same manner at all ages of statesmanship, and whose prematurely white hair has collaborated in the invisibility of his immaturity. Meanwhile , whither his campaign? He has to be visible, and his black eyebrows have to promise activity below the grey matter. If his own party has little to show in examples of elder statesmanship in recent years, what with Mr Blair lost among his millions and Dr Brown among his mountains, the Tories have a stock and it is no reassuring sight to contemplate the leadership bids of Sir Malcolm Rifkind and the most noble the Marquis of Lothian (aka Michael Ancrum aka Michael Kerr), either of whom were Nobel prizewinners in intellect compared to most of the present cabinet (apart from Kenneth Clark, Dracula of front bench with a bite any private-practice dentist in Transylvania could be proud to drill, but destined forever to exist solely among the walking undead). Alistair Darling is at least in agreement with the Prime Minister that some heroic presence is required of him, but it is not proving so easy. There were rumours that he would honour at least one Macaulay tradition by defending the doomed bridge with two other champions, and these were rumoured as Annabel Goldie (Scottish Toryisms most original leader since Andrew Bonar Law), and if Mr Kennedy be awakened he might become as truculent about the Westminster government as about that in Holyrood. Anyhow an invisible army was declared in fighting trim under the name of ‘KEEP SCOTLAND IN BRITAIN’ and Mr Darling’s name floated alongside it like the body of the dead dog flung from the spaceship in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. If Mr Darling had provided the title, it said little for his grasp of either geography or political science. Scotland is Britain, has been since the tectonic plates put it there, and will remain so until they next diverge, and not a blind bit of use MR Darling or anyone else can be in either keeping it there or getting it out of there. Britain is an island. Up to 1964 it was the vulgar name for the island of which the snob name was ‘England’, and it is pleasing to think that if ‘England’ had only remained true to Nancy Mitford, Hugh Trevor-Roper, etc, today the organisation could market itself as ‘KEEP SCOTLAND IN ENGLAND’, which no doubt is what most of its votaries would think if and when they think at all. On the other hand ‘KEEP SCOTLAND IN THE UK’ obviously drags Northern Ireland into it, and Mr Cameron’s chief attempt at self-Ulsterization signed him up with the Ulster Unionist Party whose only MP in the Commons divorced herself from the party when he declared
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his nuptials with it. The internet data on the ‘KEEP SCOTLAND IN BRITAIN’ has now been removed with the interesting obituary ‘This is a purely speculative page about a group which does not exist, and may never exist’. Enquirers are referred to ‘UNITY SCOTLAND’ by some unknown traffic-cop. It too lives in Shadowland, being driven, not by party politicians but by you’ which ‘you’ apparently have consolidated by choosing Red, White, Blue or Platinum membership each costing more than the last, and those in the Platinum class get a free Unity Scotland Golf Umbrella, as well as a larger reduction in the price of tickets for ‘public events’. Mr Darling would be well advised to stay out in the rain. The defence of the Union is currently in clumsier hands than Mr Darling’s, as shown in the Conference Speeches by Mr Cameron’s partners and Mr Cameron’s emulators. Denunciations of Alexander IV for making friends with monstrous businessmen may be apposite, but simply recall even to the most unhistorical mind the wholesale whoring beneath the money moguls by Labour and Tory as indistinguishably as possible. Expressions of pride in the welfare state raise uncomfortable spectacles of Labour and Tory Thatcherisation, more in mutual imitation than in competition: Mr Miliband for one was too obvious a participant in Labour’s chipping away to convince that his denunciations of Toryism for development of Labour’s Thatcherite policies could afford to be anything more than rhetoric. It will be easier when Labour is no longer in Brownite hands. But would that eliminate Dr Brown’s Chancellor of the Exchequer? No reader of Mr Darling’s Back from the Brink should be under any illusion that Mr Darling is, or ever was, Dr Brown’s. The Observer obligingly began its interview with Mr Darling (26 February 2012) by telling him that his book ‘was praised for its measured tone. Were you not tempted to stab a few backs? Eliciting: Oh no. I wanted to write a straightforward account of my 1000 days (almost) in Number 11 – how I saw it, what happened. I do think there’s a market for that sort of straightforward account. It’s been received ok so far. And, as Flann O’Brien would say, d’ye mind the cuteness of it? There is the reverential allusion to ‘market’ to convince relevant fellow-neoThatcherites that this was where this little pig went. There is the repetition of the self-judged ‘straightforward’ to fix the verdict in the reader’s mind as to book and man. And there is the charm of the ‘Oh no’. The reader is warned: this is not a book to tell how Cabinet colleague X spoke to the voters
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of Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh with his fly unzipped. The claim is even accurate. Mr Darling stabs Dr Brown repeatedly in this book, but strictly in the front. He even explains it on racist grounds: ‘Being Scottish, Gordon and I find it difficult to compliment one another; it doesn’t come naturally’. I know few people more charming in their compliments than Dr Brown. As for Mr Darling, his compliments to George W. Bush as here expressed are cringeworthy. But perhaps he means that it is unnatural for Scots to compliment one another, perhaps bordering on a deplorable propaganda for Independence?
unconscious is this an echo of Lyndon Johnson on J. Edgar Hoover ‘ I’d rather him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in’? But he sees no reason to tell us what else is in that ‘ outside’ or how far back it goes. Yet to understand any authority to which this book lays claim it would have been refreshing to hear from Greatuncle on bankruptcy on which his understanding seems sounder than his collateral descendant’s and certainly much more entertaining. Mr Darling was but four when Sir William was gathered to their ancestors, but he can hardly have played the aprt he did in Edinburgh city politics without awareness of the ancestral precedent. Above all, he could have been constructive on how much family experience in Tory local government paved the way for participation in the Labour variety, where MR Darling found himself between his student membership of the IMG (Trotskyites) and his winning of an Edinburgh seat in the Westminster Parliament. The Observer might not be expected to ask him anything profound on Scottish politics. But its substitute, ‘Do you ever call your wife darling?’ received a sharp drop in temperature: ‘How my wife and I describe each other remains private’, and the thermometer seemed to stay the same for ‘I feel equally Scottish and British, I don’t see any conflict between them. I’m proud of both and I don’t see that you should be forced to choose between them’. But what does it mean to him that he is either? And what does either mean to him? They seem to mean less than George W. Bush’s success in getting his name right.
If so, he has been kind enough to forgive his Scottish analysts for their compliments, above all Alex Massie in the Spectator proclaiming Mr Darling as the next leader of the Labour Party. This might seem a reciprocation since Mr Darling was one of the judges in the Observer Mace for Debating when Alex Massie won. But it was no compliment. I was another, and Alex Massie was as clear a winner as could be asked. His father the novelist Allan Massie was the only notable Scottish intellectual convert to Thatcherism, and his son’s columns in a print still masterminded by Andrew Neill show no sign of generation gap or middleaged rebellion. On the other hand, Alistair Darling himself has little filio-pietism on offer. It is doubtful if political memoirs have ever been written with so little to say of their author. It begins on 7 October 2008. Then three weeks earlier. Then to June 2007. Then to 1997. All in three pages. But the focus is perpetually on London and jetset aka statesmanlike air termini. Page 4 admits he lived in Edinburgh in order to fly from it. Edinburgh ‘where I was an MP’ gets mentioned to place the headquarters of Northern Rock, on p18. London Scotophobia is by now legendary, and Mr Darling may conceal less of his Scottish origin than Tony Blair (he is less Scots than the first Prime Minister he served, having been born in London where Blair was Edinburgh-born and Edinburgh-taught). But any reader deserves to get some roots of an autobiographer to make any sense of what he says happened, and neither the London birth nor the Kirkcaldy upbringing nor the Loretto education nor the Aberdeen higher education nor the local government servitude nor even the Greatuncle Sir William Young Darling wartime Provost of Edinburgh, MP for Edinburgh South, and author of The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller and Hades, the Ladies get so much as a blip on his computer. In the course of his judiciously sprinkled silver-forkings at Dr Brown, Mr Darling raises his black brows to tell that ‘Something changed after her became Prime Minister, and suddenly I was definitely outside the tent’. How
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When politicians put their names to books the voter may want to know who (apart from publishers, agents, and comparable parasites) benefits? When Gordon Brown wrote Courage, publication coinciding with his premiership, the answer may not have been clear, but he evidently hoped that the people of Burma would gain, and in that spirit he devoted the last of its eight studies to Aung San Suu Kyi. And it evidently was successful. Burma refused entry into the Commonwealth and has been isolated for some forty years, but the British impact and influence over the years of imperial rule, while doubtless not as great as the British liked to imagine, must nevertheless have been considerable, and their long shadows powerful. That the Prime Minister of Burma’s former imperial ruler should have singled out the imprisoned leader of the Opposition as an example of human courage, one of eight living and dead, could not fail to have impact when the Burmese authorities were assessing their image in the eyes of the world and the desirability of taking its improvement seriously. Dr Brown’s book thus holds a noble place
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as benefactor of humankind. It is difficult to think of a book by a head of government with a theme as altruistic and a potential as valuable. President John Quincy Adam’s epic on the conquest of Ireland is comparable, but was less useful. Judged by this standard Back from the Brink looks more like Nixonian self-service, but it may not have been Mr Darling’s yardstick, however much it should have been. The Observer inquisitor noticed ‘you’ve got Tony Blair’s memoir A Journey, on your bookshelf’ to which Mr Darling confided ‘I reviewed it for The Guardian, so that’s why I’ve got it. I’m afraid I was kind of mercenary about it –I said “If you want me to review it then you need to send me a free copy”. It’s a good book, I enjoyed it. IT’s readable, which is an accusation you can’t level at every political biography’. To describe this as disingenuous borders on the inadequate. There is clearly a cunning absit omen in the saccharine confession that the reviewer was mercenary in demanding the free book. No reviewer worth any decent salt will review without receiving a free book (which is why I am not reviewing Back from the Brink, my copy being editorial rather than publisher manna). One wonders if Mr Darling had fought down the impulse to pay The Guardian for printing him. It was clearly necessary to distinguish himself from Mr Blair, whose mercenary achievements could have paid for Wallenstein’s army, if not the entire Thirty Years War. But is he so far distant in other respects? His publications are more akin to Mr Blair’s than Dr Brown’s, in self-interest. Mr Blair’s has the additional interest that it is the only ghostwritten work of which I have ever heard to have had both a book written and a film shot about its ghost writer, and a very good book and film they are too. Mr Darling will have no such fate: but is he ghost-written? Breathes there a ghost dull enough to bore for Britain, to anything like Mr Darling’s achievement in these pages? Mr Darling’s place in the ensuing fracas on Independence may nevertheless raise the tone if only by lowering the receptivity. He will inhabit some of the Unionist clichés, true, but will infuse his own sobriety where possible. He may assist at the business of marshalling businessmen to bellyache about Independence being bad for business. He will not have done himself any harm in denouncing Fred Goodwin’s knightie, especially with other members of Goodwin’s profession. (In any case the removal of Fred Goodwin’s knightie was a gross insult to Roger Casement, deprived of his for high treason, aka the freedom of Ireland: it showed appalling insensitivity on the Government’s part to equate the materialistic Goodwin to the spiritual Casement.) He may try to make our flesh
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creep at the thought of the bankers who landed us in the present mess refusing to stay and swindle an Independent Scotland. He may bleat his Unionism with a persistence far outstretching the patience of any audience thrown before him. He may even share the ignorance of Margaret Curran in imagining that an Independent Scotland could not retain the Sterling link without punitive barbed-wire fencing , despite Ireland’s having done it from 1922 to 1979 and never blaming Whitehall for one moment as to that amid endless regurgitating whinges for everything else. He will be outflanked and outspoken by Dr Gordon Brown when Dr Brown launches Professor Alvin Jackson’s great book on The Two Unions in a few weeks time. But he will probably bore on to the end, which, win or lose, will put him in front and centre stage in Labour politics. Elder statesmen who want to return to the battlefield need Bulgarian atrocities to resell them, as Gladstone did. Mr Darling may arise from the ashes of the Union or from its reaffirmation, but, either way, he will have shown his value to the future, as Sir Malcolm Rifkind and the most noble the Marquis of Lothian had no issue on which to stamp their countenances. And Mr Cameron will be left looking at the train of electoral disaster which may have been cut out for him by his own Frankenstein monster.
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THE DROUTH
Carol Baraniuk
‘IRISH ON THEIR OWN TERMS?’: reviving the revival, or the progress and implications of some current strategies for Ulster Scots
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