Author: jamescalumcampbell

At the tail-end of the 9.00 am news on BBC Radio 4 this morning, it was announced that visitors to the Kelpies in Falkirk would henceforth be able to enter the two sculptures, climb 100 feet to the top, and thus get a horse’s-eye view of Helix Park.  It was perhaps an unusual item for the national news, but it just goes to show that the kelpies have a national, and even international reputation.

You see them to good advantage from the M9, situated at the confluence of the Carron River and the Forth and Clyde Canal, between Falkirk and Grangemouth, two enormous equine heads wrought in steel, one looking downwards in repose, the other keening to the sky.  They are particularly impressive at night, when illuminated.  They were conceived by the sculptor Andy Scott, designed on a pair of smaller models or maquettes, of scale 1:10, and constructed in 2013.  It is said that they celebrate the role of horses in Scottish industry, pulling wagons, ploughs, barges, and coal ships.  Apparently they celebrate two famous Clydesdales, Duke and Baron.  But you might say that their precise location at this point on the Forth and Clyde Canal could represent the end of conventional horse-power and the dawning of the industrial revolution. It was here at the beginning of the nineteenth century that a prototype steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, was successfully tested, hauling two 70 ton barges along a distance of 19 miles, against a headwind and at a speed of 1.9 mph.  If you walk half a mile east from the kelpies along the canal towpath to the confluence with the Carron River, you can read, on various plaques as you go, all about the history surrounding these developments. 

Some people are a bit snooty about the kelpies, rather, I fancy, the way people are snooty about the paintings of Jack Vettriano.  They’re quite commonplace, don’t you know; hardly great art.  They attract the undiscerning masses.  Well, I’m one of the undiscerning masses.  I visit quite often.  I usually park by Falkirk football stadium, cross a busy road into Helix Park, and stroll by lovely marshland and waterways to the base of the enormous structures.  There is a 10 kilometre circular walk you can do, from the kelpies to Rosebank distillery, thence to Falkirk Wheel, another inspiring feat of engineering that elevates barges between the Union Canal and the Forth & Clyde Canal.  From there you walk to Callendar House, in Callendar Park, before returning to the kelpies in Helix Park.

A trip to Helix Park is a favourite outing for parents with young children, which is rather ironic considering the mythological provenance of the kelpie.  It is a malignant water sprite, specifically inhabiting lochs in Scotland, most famously Loch Ness; but every sizeable loch in Scotland has its kelpie legend.  The nearest one to me is the Lake of Menteith, the only “lake” in Scotland.  The Lake of Menteith is the scene of a rather gruesome episode in Rob Roy, but the loch in The Lady of the Lake is I believe Loch Katrine.   

He watched the wheeling eddies boil,

Till from their foam his dazzled eyes

Beheld the River Demon rise…

And in The Bride of Lammermoor, there is a treacherous quicksand named “Kelpie’s Flow”.  Who knows, maybe the Loch Ness monster is a kelpie.

Kelpies drag humans, particularly children and young women, into the water, devour them, and cast their entrails up on to the water’s edge.  They have the capacity to extend the length of their back, so as to accommodate several children at once.  One child touched a kelpie and found he could not remove his hand as he was being dragged into the water.  He only survived by cutting his own finger off.  The name kelpie possibly comes from the Gaelic cailpeach, meaning a heifer or colt.  It appears in the 1750s, spelled kaelpie, in an ode by William Collins.  A kelpie is a shape-shifting sprite that can adopt human form, its hooves retained, but reversed in direction.  Robert Burns may have had this in mind in his Address to the Deil of 1786.

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord,

An float the inglin icy boord,

Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord,

By your direction,

An ‘nighted trav’llers are allur’d

To their destruction. 

Parents used to warn children about kelpies, in order to keep them away from dangerous waterways.  There is a sign on the edge of the Milngavie Reservoir just north of Glasgow – another popular haunt – stating rather sombrely, “Deaths have been known to occur in reservoirs”.  Maybe it would be more effective if it said, “A kelpie lives here.”  Kelpies can pose as handsome young men – a warning which, one way or another, continues to be impressed upon young ladies.    

So maybe I should take pause before accepting the invitation to go inside a kelpie.  You never know, I might find myself embroiled in a kind of reciprocal Trojan horse myth.  The hazard is not an enemy egressing from within, rather a siren-like enticement to enter, and encounter who knows what?                         

There is something comical, indeed farcical (but for the gravity of the general situation), about some of President-elect Trump’s proposed political appointments.  Health is to be run by a vaccine sceptic, and energy by a climate change sceptic.  It reminds me of the inappropriateness of some of the appointments in Stalag Luft III, at least according to the film of The Great Escape.  The chief tunneller had claustrophobia, and the chief forger was blind.  Even the illustrious Herr Bartlett, Big X himself, outside the wire, was a security risk.  Richard Hannay, in one of John Buchan’s thrillers, passes a wry remark about the British military and British Intelligence’s absurd propensity for placing round pegs in square holes.

Another unusual political appointment is that of Elon Musk, charged with the task of doing away with red tape in Washington.  I always get nervous about people who want to get rid of red tape.  All this bumf, they say, it’s health and safety gone mad, I tell you.  Getting rid of red tape usually turns out to be an attack on legislation put in place to defend the poor and vulnerable.

Mr Musk famously bought Twitter at vast expense and then rebranded it as X.  I have no idea what it means to buy something like a social media platform.  It would be like buying a cloud, an atmospheric area of cumulonimbus.  But a lot of people are shunning X, because its content has apparently become too toxic.  Good for them.  Besides, I always think it’s a good idea to shun any goods or services which make any one individual, or group of individuals, a vast sum of money.        

Talking of bizarre appointments, there is a recurring theme in the bible about God calling the most unlikely people to fulfil equally unlikely tasks.  Moses was inarticulate, David was an adulterer and a murderer, Peter, called upon to be a rock, had already shown himself liable to cave in under pressure.  The underlying theme here is that God moves in a mysterious way, and that if you get the call, you must cast aside any personal doubts and misgivings, and put your trust in Him. Don’t allow yourself to succumb to Impostor Syndrome.  If you are called upon to be a witness, don’t worry about what you are going to say.  You are a vessel, a conduit.  The script will be given to you. 

Well, I’m all for Faith, Hope, & Love, but I prefer to back them up with 10,000 hours of practice, preparation, and rehearsal.  You really ought not to entrust somebody with a huge task, when they are really not up to the job.  My impression of Mr Trump is that, basically, he is winging it.  That is not to say that he is not in many ways a shrewd operator.  He knows how to work a crowd; well, his own crowd.  He can be charming if he feels so inclined.  He certainly knows how to win a political contest in a world which, by his own admission, is not very nice.  But he’s at heart a game show host.  He thrives on entertainment value.  He operates on the surface. He is a superficialist.  I don’t believe I have ever seen him subjected to an in-depth interview at which, under the forensic probing of a Robin Day or a David Frost or an Eddie Mair, the BBC used to excel.

Mr Trump appeared to enjoy his visit with Mr Biden in the White House, as part of the transition of power.  He had a nice day.  He was very courteous to the incumbent president, whom he had lambasted during the presidential election campaign, as unfit for office.  He did the same with Mrs Clinton in 2016, after he had defeated her.  He was terribly gracious.  He thanked her for her public service.  “And I mean that most sincerely.”  Previously, he had wanted to lock her up.  In Victory, Magnanimity, Winston used to say.  But this is something different.  It’s just a blatant disregard for the truth.  You say whatever is politically expedient.                

Meanwhile, President Biden has given the green light to President Zelenskyy, allowing him to fire US rockets deep into Russian territory.  It’s an abrupt change of policy, a volte face. Why now?  Could it have something to do with the fact that the President-elect has reportedly been on the phone to Mr Putin?  It is said that Mr Trump asked Mr Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine.  But Russia has just launched the largest drone and missile attack on Ukraine in the last three months – 90 drones and 120 missiles – targeting energy infrastructure, as winter looms.  The attacks reached Western Ukraine, and Poland scrambled its fighter jets.  That Poland should be extremely nervous about Russian military activity on its eastern border, is very understandable.

Sir Keir Starmer is currently in Brazil, urging member states of the G20 to show solidarity with Ukraine.  But people in the Trump camp want a negotiation.  Some of them address President Zelenskyy with great condescension.  You can forget Crimea.  Crimea’s gone.  But they don’t share the experience, and the collective memory of the European continent.  Civil war aside, apart from their War of Independence, Pearl Harbour, and 9/11, they’ve never been attacked.  Negotiating with Mr Putin will surely be like an episode of The Apprentice.

Well, it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.  But I have a horrible feeling that Mr Trump, alleged master of the art of the deal, will be no match, even, perhaps especially, at the negotiating table, for Mr Putin.         

When I heard the result of the US Presidential election last Wednesday morning, I experienced a vague sense of free-floating anxiety.  I was surprised that the result had come through so quickly.  My initial thought was that it was fake news.  The polls said it was going to be close.  We might not get a result for days.  Surely there would be accusations of voting irregularity.  Remember the “hanging chads” in 2000.  Maybe the losing side would contest the result.  There is, after all, a precedent. 

But no.  It was all done and dusted even by 9 am our time.  The magical 270 college votes had been achieved.  270 indicates due west in compass degrees.  270+ is, as it were, west of sunset.  In fact, as has subsequently become evident, Mr Trump got 312 college votes, and his (sic) Republican Party has gained control of the Senate, and at time of writing perhaps the House of Representatives.  He has won all seven “battleground” states.  The result is not a landslide, yet it is unequivocal.  The Democrats were silent for a while, perhaps absorbing the shock.  But they eventually conceded defeat.  They did not incite anybody to storm the Capitol.  Mr Trump will be “47”.

The reaction of most people I’ve been in contact with here in the UK has been one of dismay and disbelief, accompanied by a sardonic burst of hysterical laughter at life’s absurdity.  How could the Americans possibly vote into the highest office in the land a convicted felon who in 2020, it is said, tried to find a whole lot of votes that weren’t actually there, and then, allegedly, mounted an insurrection in the very centre of US power?

I just shrugged and texted my friends, “Keep calm, and carry on.”  The crucial thing is, from this side of the Pond, the USA is a foreign country.  None of us has a vote.  Winston said that we are two different nations divided by a common language.  He had a right to say that, because he was half American.  From May 10^th 1940, when he became Prime Minister, right up to the Japanese attack on PearI Harbour on December 7^th, 1941, he tried to get the USA to enter the war.  Roosevelt was sympathetic, an isolationist Congress less so.  Financial and military aid was forthcoming, but it was at a price, a quid pro quo.  Lend-Lease was a hard-nosed bargain, the loan of some obsolete war ships, largely a symbolic gesture, in return for the lease of some outposts of the British Empire.  The debt incurred by the UK was only finally paid off in 2006.  In the end, the USA only entered the war in Europe when Hitler declared war on them.  We seem to have been heavily reliant on the support, nay patronage, of the US ever since.  Every time a new Commander-in-Chief is installed, we get on the phone, like an anxious lover, to make sure the “special relationship” is still intact.  

I was always aware that the US is a foreign country, ever since I first visited in 1982.  I went to New York.  I remember I saw Evita on Broadway.  On a street corner outside the theatre, somebody offered to take my blood pressure, while a passer-by took his llama for an evening walk.  I hired a car and drove north through New York state, the Adirondacks, to Thousand Island Country, and hence Canada.  In Canada I knew I was much nearer home.  Before I re-entered the US through Buffalo, the Canadians looked at me quizzically and asked, “Why do you want to go back down there?”  About 30 years later I had an almost identical exchange at the Portugal/Spain border when, having landed at Faro, I hired a car with the intention of crossing into Spain.  It was the same question, posed by a smaller country contiguous with a larger:  “Why do you want to go there?”

Mr Trump has said he will end the war in Ukraine in a single day, with a single phone call.  Today, apparently, it transpires that he has already made that call, to Mr Putin.  Russia denies it.  But if Mr Trump made the call, that seems extraordinary.  He is not yet the President, so presumably he was making the call as a private citizen.  No officials were keeping a record.  Mr Trump sounds very confident.  I seem to recall that Mr Chamberlain was similarly confident, when he met the Führer at Berchtesgaden.  I hope Mr Trump has better luck.  But blessed are the Peacemakers. 

Today is Remembrance Day.  My free-floating anxiety continues.  Mr Trump is completely unpredictable.  What will 2025 bring?  I am afraid we live in interesting times.    

In the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra we are rehearsing Beethoven Symphony No. 3, the Eroica.  It is said to be the symphony that completely revolutionised music in the early part of the nineteenth symphony.  It is unusually long, about fifty minutes, and unusually fraught, full of Sturm und Drang.  Beethoven planned to dedicate the symphony to Napoleon, who I guess he initially thought was a man of the people.  But then Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and Beethoven realised he was just like all the other movers and shakers – in it for himself.  So in a fit of rage (it is said) he scored Napoleon’s name out of the score’s frontispiece so violently that he tore right through the paper.  This autograph, this iconic memorial to disgust, survives, and remains to be seen.  Some people think that the second movement, the funeral march, stands as a memorial to what might have been.  It is a remarkable piece of music to play, or even to attempt to play.  Central to the movement, its fugue seems to explore heights, or depths, of emotion quite unprecedented.

The notion of music exploring, and expressing a response to contemporary events, is examined in a book by the critic and historian Jeremy Eichler, Time’s Echo, Music, Memory, and the Second World War (Faber & Faber, 2023).  Eichler makes the startling proposition that music might serve as a kind of cultural memory.  Music is history, a unique way of recording and defining the past.  He looks at the response of four composers to the events of the Second World War – Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich.  In particular, Eichler concentrates on four major works – Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13.  These four composers all had an uneasy relationship with the authorities, and the society in which they moved, and worked.  They were all outsiders, who might easily have been destroyed, but for the fact that their celebrity and their pre-eminence offered them a modicum of protection.  Strauss survived the Third Reich, and also managed to escape the subsequent censure of the allies, in a way that Furtwängler didn’t quite.  His relationship to Nazi high officialdom remains ambiguous.  Schoenberg’s opposition to Nazidom was entirely unambiguous, and he had to get out.  In the USA, as a composer he was revered, but perhaps not loved.  Serial music has yet to “catch on”.  He did not fulfil his ambition of having his tunes, or more precisely tone rows, whistled in the street.  Nevertheless, the highly unlikely world premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw, given by an amateur orchestra and a choir of cowboys in Albuquerque, was a huge success.  The piece was immediately encored in the way that, for example, the allegretto of Beethoven 7 was immediately encored.  Perhaps twelve tone music had finally found its home, depicting episodes of utter degradation.

Britten was homosexual and pacifist.  But that wasn’t why he felt tortured; rather it was the combination of these traits with his wish to be conventional, a pillar of the community.  He set the words of a First World War poet while commemorating an event that occurred during the Second World War.  Setting “Futility” was perhaps more acceptable when it alluded to events two generations ago.

Shostakovich greatly admired Britten’s War Requiem.  Always at odds with the authorities, he himself famously lived in various apartments, a suitcase packed ready to go, with the expectation that the secret police would call for him in the night.  There was huge pressure on him not to go ahead with the premiere of the 13^th symphony, with its settings of poetry by Yevtushenko, in particular Babi Yar, the dreadful atrocity at Kyiv, whose depiction forms the first movement of the symphony.  The authorities tried to obliterate the memory of Babi Yar, precisely by obliterating the site itself.  But the memory lives on in the poetry, and in the music.  That is the point.

I found myself wondering about contemporary music, and its relationship to the troubled world in which we live, when I attended the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday for a concert of Scandinavian music, part of “Nordic Music Days”, a long-running music festival that has come to Scotland for the first time.  The RSNO were joined for the opening piece by young players from Big Noise Govanhill, an educational enterprise modelled on the Simón Bolívar project in Venezuela.  The concert is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday evening.  It was introduced by Radio 3’s Ian Skelly.  There was a sense of occasion.  We heard music by Lisa Robertson, Errollyn Wallen, (Master of the King’s Music), Rune Glerup (a violin concerto played by Isabelle Faust), Bent Sørensen, Hildur Elísa Jónsdóttir, and Aileen Sweeney.  I think all the composers were present.

It was certainly an interesting, if emotionally somewhat chilly, concert.  And although the audience reception, by contrast, was characteristically Glaswegian and warm, I can’t say I was conscious of any profound sense of emotional rapport which bound us all together.  But then the RSNO played Sibelius 7, and at last, we heard great music.        

Wes Streeting the Health Secretary in Westminster has opened up a national conversation about the future of the NHS.  He is consulting widely – patients, health care professionals, allied professions, ancillary staff, everybody really, for who is not a stakeholder in the NHS?  The consultation will run into the New Year, and lead to the formulation of a ten year plan which will apparently presage the biggest reform of the NHS since its inception in 1948.  The NHS is broken. Mr Streeting has suggested that three broad evolutions are necessary.  Briefly these are: complete the change of data management systems from analogue to digital, change the focus of health care from treatment to prevention, and change the locus of health care from hospital to community.

Mr Streeting does well to consult.  North of the border, I feel a certain detachment from the process, as Health is devolved.  Yet the problems up here, much as, by most parameters, the NHS fares rather better in Scotland than in the other nations of the UK, are largely the same.  The demand outstrips the supply.  In approaching this problem the Health Secretary clearly has some fundamental ideas of his own, but I hope the medical profession in England will be clear, and robust, in providing some leadership.  This is what I would say to Mr Streeting:      

Analogue to digital, as a plan to save the NHS, we can dismiss immediately, because we have been pursuing this false chimera for the last twenty years, and it has been a disaster.  Of course that is not to say that Hi-Tech doesn’t have its uses.  You can’t operate an MRI scanner without a lot of computer power.  But the invention of the MRI scanner was in response to an investigatory and ultimately a therapeutic need.  We needed a technique for imaging that was at once high resolution, non-invasive, and non-toxic.  The scanner responded to the clinical need.  But Information Technology was thrust upon the NHS, just as it was thrust upon other publically funded bodies such as policing, and education.  It was a solution in quest of a problem.  Now, in Artificial Intelligence, we see the same phenomenon.  AI has its doleful eye upon the ailing NHS.  The accumulation of massive amounts of data readily available via hyper-connected systems is the latest NHS panacea.  But the NHS needs to do precisely the opposite, and restore the sanctity of the medical consultation, with its inbuilt confidentiality.  Most of the time, all the doctor needs in order to make an accurate diagnosis is a quiet room, the skills to take a history and undertake an examination, and some tender loving care.  Medicine is an intensely human, one-on-one activity.     

Shifting the focus from treatment to prevention sounds very plausible.  It is said that we don’t have a National Health Service, but rather a National Disease Service.  And prevention is surely better than cure.  That’s true, but it is also a truism.  You could summarise the whole of preventative medicine on a postcard, or on the back of an envelope:

1. Get vaccinated.
2. Don’t smoke.
3. Don’t drink too much.
4. Don’t get overweight.
5. Eat a varied diet.
6. Get plenty of exercise.
7. Get plenty of sleep.
8. Switch off all electronic devices as often as possible.
9. Be sociable.
10. Oh – and whatever else you do, don’t be poor.

To state such recommendations briefly is not to downgrade their importance.  They should be known, and understood, across the community.  In addition to advice directed at the individual, there should also be a societal conversation about such public health issues as the importance of Health & Safety, the imperative need to adhere to the speed limit on the roads, and the inadvisability of resorting to interpersonal violence.  But this is all in the public domain.  Doctors and nurses can, and do, make such recommendations, but prevention cannot supplant their essential role of providing care to the sick and needy, by elucidating accurate pathophysiological diagnoses and initiating appropriate treatment plans.  Like it or not, bad things do happen. 

By contrast, I think the notion of “hospital to community” has merit.  The Royal College of General Practice gives the idea broad support, but rightly points out that if General Practice were to take this on, it would need a bigger portion of the health budget.  A community-based health service is integral to the nascent idea of a National Care Service.  Successive governments have paid lip-service to the notion of an NCS for about a quarter of a century now, but nothing has come of it, undoubtedly because of cost.  At the same time, there has been very little discussion about what a community-based health and social care service would look like.

So how about this for a pilot study?  Let us consider a community of 10,000 souls.  At its heart would be a health centre, with 10 doctors, as well as nursing staff, and various other professions allied to medicine, for example physiotherapy, clinical psychology, and so on.  Some people might consider a doctor-patient ratio of 1/1,000 to be “pie in the sky”.  Yet suppose you were on a cruise ship carrying 1,000 people.  Wouldn’t you want a doctor on board?  Or suppose you had a secondary school with a roll of 1,000 pupils.  Would you not expect at least one of them to wish to become a doctor?  Currently, a doctor might consider a flock of merely 1,000 people to be something of a luxury, but remember the considerable increase in workload that a community-based system would entail.  In many ways, moving the hub of medicine from the hospital to the community would mean that primary care doctors would have to adopt some of the attitudes, and work practices, of hospital doctors.  First off, doctors would have to take back the responsibility for providing 24 hour care, 7 days a week.  With a per capita list of 1,000 patients, they would be unlikely to see more than 100 patients per week.  A full time equivalent (FTE) doctor might see, for example, 25 patients on each of four days, be on-call one night per week, and have a non-clinical day following the night on call, for pursuit of special interests, research, administration, or if necessary to catch up on sleep.  Such a workload would be sustainable in the long term.

The Health Centre would have an in-patient unit.  Actually it would have three in-patient units, comprising a short-stay ward, a care home, and a hospice.  Out of hours, the on-call doctor would be responsible for oversight of the units. 

These are the beginnings of a model of care.  The trouble with political discussion about such issues thus far is that they have been too abstract.  How can they be otherwise if the Health Secretary studied History at Cambridge?  This is why the medical profession needs to provide leadership. 

But how do you fund it?  I’ll leave that to Mr Streeting.           

Speaking as a member of that rapidly dwindling constituency of grey-haired individuals who regularly attend church, I am keenly aware of the financial constraints currently placed upon the Church of Scotland in particular, and no doubt upon every other Christian denomination throughout the nations.  The problem may be summarised in a few words: congregations too small, ministers too few, real estate too vast.  I suppose it all goes back to the Disruption of 1843, when disgruntled parishioners walked out of one church, and built another one round the corner.  There is the gag about the Church of Scotland parishioner who was cast away on a desert island, and lived in solitude for thirty years, until finally rescued by a passing ship.  It was noted he had built a church just off the beach.  “Yes, I attend every Sunday.”  His rescuers had also noted another church on the other side of the island.  “Yes, I built that too.  But I never darken its doors!”

Ministers don’t like to talk about money.  Didn’t Our Lord tell us not to make showy demonstrations of extravagance?  If you want to pray, shut yourself up in a closet.  If you want to give, do so quietly, like the widow, with a couple of mites.  Yet Dunblane Cathedral, or more accurately Dunblane Cathedral, Kilmadock and Blair Drummond Church of Scotland have organised “a review of giving”, quite simply in order to remain financially viable.  Frankly, it would be good if everybody could increase their offering by 25%.  Now there is a very simple way of doing exactly that.  Whatever you give – Gift Aid it.  I am invited to fill in a Gift Aid form.

I have never fancied Gift Aid.  Isn’t it a kind of tax evasion, or at least tax avoidance?  Didn’t Our Lord, again, say “Render under Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s?”  But maybe my problem is that I just don’t understand how it works.  So I Googled it, and printed out the Wikipedia article:

Gift Aid is a UK tax incentive that enables tax-effective giving by individuals to charities in the United Kingdom. 

Well!  That’s just not true.  Gift Aid allows you to divert a portion of your tax burden to a charity of your personal choice, and is therefore a tax disincentive.  A tax disincentive cannot be tax-effective because it lowers the amount of money recouped by HMRC.

How does it work?  Suppose you donate £100 to charity.  If you claim Gift Aid, HMRC assumes you have actually donated £125, which they will tax at the basic rate of 20%.  You are left with 80/100 of £125, which is £100.  The charity can claim £25 from HMRC. 

Suppose you are being taxed at a higher rate, paying 40% tax on part of your income.  The charity claims 20%, and you can also reclaim 20% through your tax return, so that you are only out of pocket by £75.  You can only do this if you are a UK tax payer, and you cannot, perhaps through multiple donations to various charities, exceed your tax bill. 

Am I missing something?  Is it just me, or is this not utter lunacy?  We elect a government, for better or for worse, charged with presenting a budget (next on October 30^th), largely designed to finance public services such as health, education, social services, defence and so on.  Since the election of July 4^th we have been gloomed up about the presence of a £22,000,000,000 “black hole” in public finances, and we have been forewarned that the government will have to make some “difficult decisions”.  We may have to endure another protracted period of “austerity”.

I hate the use of the word “austerity” in this context.  It’s as cold as charity.  It first started appearing around 2010, following the financial crash, when the then chancellor George Osborne discovered another fiscal black hole and told us “We are all in this together.”  That turned out to be, tragically, a falsehood.  In fact, the gap, the gulf, between rich and poor, both here and across the western world generally, has widened, and continues to widen, dramatically.  Here, food banks are commonplace, as is begging on the street.  It is universally recognised that the National Health Service is “broken” (but don’t worry, Wes Streeting will fix it in a decade using AI and “smart” technology, God help us).  The prisons are bursting at the seams.  Winston, when he was Home Secretary said that if you want to evaluate the state of wellbeing of a society, visit the prisons.  He encouraged prisoners’ access to books.  Here and now, even amid life outside, libraries are closing.  I could go on.

Would it not be better drastically to simplify the tax system, such that the government knew how much money they have to spend?  Of course, there is always the possibility that they will spend the money on something grotesque, like Trident.  But that’s democracy for you and, at least up here in Scotland, we should all know what to do about that. So I’m not going to opt for Gift Aid.  But I remain sympathetic to Dunblane Cathedral, so I will ensure the same result.  I’m accustomed to putting £20 cash into the plate.  To use the London East End vernacular, I’ll make it a pony.                              

Kingmaker

Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers

Sir Graham Brady

Ithaka Press, 2024

In the publishing world, the fashion for pithy one word titles continues unabated.  I see that Boris’s latest tome is “Unleashed”.  The part of Sir Graham Brady’s memoir devoted to Boris begins with the chapter, “HE’S NOT SANE!”  For Sir Graham, “Kingmaker” implies that as chairman of the backbench 1922 committee he was something of an éminence grise.  But given his modest demeanour, I think Sir Graham wold have denied he held such power.  Indeed, you might understand his book simply as a rather mundane piece of bookkeeping.  He would receive from MPs letters of no confidence in the incumbent prime minister, and lock them away in a safe until their number exceeded that required to trigger a vote.  Or, in the event that the Tory Party were electing a new Prime Minister, he would dutifully announce the number of votes cast by the parliamentary party for each contender, remove the least successful candidate from the ballot paper, and move on sequentially to the next vote, until the last two members standing could be presented to the party membership.  Reading all this, I was reminded of Conclave (another one word title) a book by Robert Harris, recently, I believe, made into a film, about the cardinals in the Vatican shutting themselves up for a similar series of sequential votes for the next pope, and staying in seclusion until white smoke finally emanated from the chimney.  Habemus papam.  It’s hard to imagine that might be the stuff of a thriller, and similarly the number-crunching in Room 14 at the Palace of Westminster might be mind-numbingly tedious. 

But I have a fascination for the lives, or at least their time spent in office, of British prime ministers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  With the passage of time they seem to have become more numerous.  There have been five in the last eight years.  It was always difficult to ascend the greasy pole, “the slipper slope”, but recently it seems to have become impossible, having made the ascent, to stay up there.  Doubtless this reflects the political and economic turbulence that has characterised British public life since the economic crash, Brexit, and the pandemic.   Sir Graham examines five tenures, those of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, and the “events, dear boy” – Harold Macmillan’s remark – that truncated them.

David Cameron’s was the longest run – six years.  He oversaw three referenda, and won two of them – First Past the Post versus Proportional Representation, which went by, and went the way of FPTP, almost unnoticed; then the Scottish Referendum, which he won, although he and Chancellor George Osborne must have broken into a sweat when they saw the polls just prior to September 18^th 2014.  Lastly, Brexit, which he lost.  He never thought he would need to run that referendum, because he thought he would still be in coalition with the Lib Dems, and the Lib Dems would never have allowed it.  Events, dear boy.  So the podium came out into Downing Street, he resigned, and walked away whistling a breezy tune – an old Etonian’s show of insouciance. 

Boris might have been next, but Boris got stabbed in the front by Michael Gove and, in any case, for whatever reason, he chose not to run.  Thus Mrs May attained the highest office.  But Mrs May had been a Remainer, so it was always going to be impossible for her. There was a protracted period when you could not hear the BBC News because of the strident laments of Remainers on College Green.  Mrs May kept trying to cobble together a leave package, each one heavily defeated in the House of Commons.  She called a snap election to try and bolster her power base, but it all went wrong and she became heavily reliant upon the support of the DUP.  The attorney general in his booming baritone declared this parliament to be a dead parliament.  She had to go.

Enter Boris, unleashed.  He vowed to “get Brexit done”.  He had an oven-ready deal.  He would rather be found dead in a ditch than not leave.  A hard Brexit loomed.  Then, dear boy, “events”.  Covid.  Covid nearly killed the Prime Minister.  But in the end it was his scant disregard for the rules, those of his own devising, that killed him politically.  Partygate. 

Liz Truss was duly elected.  Her shelf life was famously shorter than that of a lettuce.  Or was it a cabbage?  She “spooked the markets”.  She was defiant.  She said she was a fighter, not a quitter. The next day, she quit.  There were three contenders to succeed – Boris, Penny Mordaunt, and Rishi Sunak.  The 1922 Committee contrived a rule that each contender would require at least 100 parliamentary nominations.  Boris withdrew (again), Ms Mordaunt didn’t reach the threshold, so in effect Rishi’s was a coronation.

But by now the Tory government was on its last legs and consistently badly behind in the polls.  There was no political advantage to Rishi calling an early election on July 4^th 2024, and I sometimes wonder if he made an honourable decision to go to the country sooner rather than later, just to get on with it. 

Enter Sir Keir Starmer; but of course, Sir Keir was not part of Sir Graham’s remit.  He came in with a huge majority and a huge mandate, reminiscent of that of Tony Blair on 1997.  But the first 100 days don’t seem to have gone well, and who knows, maybe Labour’s 1922 equivalent, the men in suits, are already circling.

Is Kingmaker a kiss-and-tell book?  It’s not vindictive, although occasionally it can be startlingly candid.  Rishi Sunak comes across best in terms of his humanity.  And Ms May is honourable, if perhaps not a “people person”.  Reading Kingmaker, one has the impression that twenty-first century PMs are fated to topple like nine-pins.  There were, if memory serves me right, twenty PMs in the twentieth century, and already in the first quarter of the twenty-first there have been eight.  Yet perhaps this acceleration of “events” is an illusion.  After all, the period 1900 to 1924 actually saw nine PMS come and go – Salisbury, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Baldwin, and Ramsay MacDonald.  Events, dear boy. It was ever thus.    

Assisted Dying is very much back on the agenda, both north and south of the border.  BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions (Friday evening and Saturday afternoon) came from Beccles Public Hall and Theatre in Suffolk.  On the panel: Rushanara Ali, Labour MP, Annabel Denham, Telegraph columnist, Tobias Elwood, Conservative MP 2005 – 2024, and Adrian Ramsay, MP, co-leader of the Greens in England and Wales.  The first questioner to the panel pointed out that it had been ten years since Parliament had last voted on the issue of Assisted Dying.  Had public opinion changed sufficiently, such that a different outcome might be expected?

It was an interesting way of framing the question.  It suggests that politicians are rather like weather vanes, pointing in the direction of public opinion.  There were three MPs on the panel, two currently standing, one recently released from the responsibility.  Why not just ask, how will you, or would you, vote?  After all, this is a “conscience” vote; there is no whip.  Yet clearly the questioner felt that public opinion mattered.  Perhaps this is how MPs function.  You develop a sense of what impending innovations might be à la mode – “finger in the air” – and vote accordingly.  Is this not what it means to represent the public will? 

I have to say I thought the responses to this question were extremely poor.  Rushanara Ali thanked the questioner for the question.  It was a sensitive issue.  She had voted against Assisted Dying in 2015.  She was aware of a shift in public opinion.  This was a private bill, introduced by Kim Leadbeater, a free vote and therefore a conscience vote.  (The word “conscience” came up a lot, but there was no real analysis of what the dictates of conscience might be, or the foundations on which such might rest.)  Yes it’s an important issue.  As a minister, Rushanara Ali had a neutral position.  It would be inappropriate for ministers to express views. 

(Let me see if I’ve got this right.  We live in an open democracy, enjoying freedom of speech.  A free vote arises, but it would be “inappropriate” for a minister to express a view.  Really?) 

Tobias Elwood.  What is your stance?  …Difficult question.  (Clearly he had scruples.)  What is the role of the GP?  Will terminally ill people feel they are a burden?  Lots of questions, but apparently no answers. 

Annabel Denham.  There has been insufficient debate.  This ought not to be rushed through.  In favour in theory, but not in application.  Look at Canada.  Massive increase in assisted dying.  Slippery slopes.  Is there a forum for public debate? 

I found myself yelling at the radio, “Yes!  But what do you think?”  Or, “What do you think?” – putting my emphases on unusual words after the fashion of former-Friend Chandler Bing, aka the late, much missed Matthew Perry.  “Could you be more evasive?”

Adrian Ramsay.  Consider the evidence.  Palliative care good.  Right to choose good. 

I don’t suppose I should have been surprised.  Politicians are past-masters in the art of saying nothing.  There was no consideration of evidence from around the world.  Does mission creep exists in reality?  What are the statistics?  Are they even measurable?  People at the end of life who consider themselves to be a burden are perhaps unlikely to own up to the fact. 

You might have thought that a free vote would, indeed, free politicians up to express an opinion.  The Chief Whip gives them free rein.  But look what happens.  They clam up.  It turns out that they are only comfortable coming down on one side of an argument when they are toeing a party line, when they are reiterating a dogma.  Take the politics out of the equation, ask them what they really think, and they are struck dumb.  I think they are terrified of expressing a view that might be in contravention of some established, or perceived established, Zeitgeist.  They lack the courage of their own convictions; and because of that, they lack convictions.      

If I were an MP, or an MSP, I would vote against Assisted Dying, not, I hope, because I lack compassion for the terminally ill, and their loved ones, but because I suspect the project would be taken over, in short order, by a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with compassion.  As a medical practitioner, I would certainly not take part.  It seems to me that the administration of a lethal cocktail is entirely alien to the practice of medicine as I have known it.  I wonder what would happen if the entire medical profession declined to take part.  Presumably specialists – call them thanotologists – could be trained up for the role.  I wonder if that would sit comfortably with the public.

So I wrote to The Herald last week.  Dear Sir…  

The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill is once more about to be scrutinised by the Scottish Parliament (“Campaigners raise further fears over safety of assisted dying legislation”, Herald, September 30).  For MSPs who may be undecided on this issue, may I recommend a trip, should they have time and space, to Berlin, specifically to Herbert von Karajan Strasse, just off Tiergarten Strasse.  In front of Philharmonie Halle, home of the Berlin Philharmonic, there is a series of exhibits relating to Aktion T4, or Aktion Tiergarten 4, a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany.  On a note dated 1^st September 1939, the Führer entrusted the medical profession with the responsibility to identify patients, both children and adults, “after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment”, who were incurable, and to grant them “mercy death” (Gnadentod).  Conditions considered incurable included schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntingdon’s Chorea, “imbecility”, chronic alcoholism, Down’s syndrome, microcephaly, hydrocephaly, spasticity, and paralysis.

Now it is perfectly true that Aktion T4, and the Assisted Dying Bill are radically different in one respect: Assisted Dying is voluntary, but the Nazi euthanasia programme was compulsory.  But these two programmes do share one common feature.  They are both clandestine.  Children were removed to “Special Sections” and gassed.  The cause of death was recorded as “pneumonia”.  Buried away in Paragraph 17 of the Assisted Dying Bill, believe it or not, is this extraordinary statement:

For the purposes of section 24 (certificate of cause of death) of the Registration of Births, Deaths, and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1965, the terminal illness involved is to be recorded as the disease or condition directly leading to their death (rather than the approved substance provided to them by virtue of section 15).

In other words, MSPs will make, remotely, a pathophysiological diagnosis that was not the patient’s cause of death and, in the normal course of events, might never have been the patient’s cause of death.  How dare they?

There are some people who believe – or say they do – that Assisted Dying is coming, is inevitable, and like a tidal wave, cannot be stopped.  Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen.  Let them come to Berlin.                    

I attended three concerts while on the European mainland last week, four if you count the impromptu buskers, two accordionists, outside St Mary’s Basilica in Kraków’s Old Town.  (I know “serious” music is not everybody’s cup of tea, but indulge me.)  I paused to hear Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the last movement of Vivaldi’s Summer, which you might be forgiven for mistaking for autumn, if not winter, and then the Alla Turca from the Mozart A major piano sonata K.331.  I thought, they’re terribly good, so in a way I wasn’t surprised to hear them again the following night in the Sala Koncertowa Filharmonii, a lovely hall, about the size of the Glasgow City Halls, which happened to be directly across the road beside my hotel.  There is a wonderful freemasonry about live classical music, all across the world.  You enter a concert hall, and immediately feel right at home.    

Maciej Zimka and Wieslaw Ochwat.  They were joined by mezzosoprano Magdalena Kulig, and bass Piotr Lempa, for a concert of arrangements of music by Szymanowski and Mahler.  Rather a minority interest, I guess, and indeed when I bought my ticket I noticed the audience was thin on the ground.  In the event, we all sat up on the stage, maybe about sixty of us, and the performers faced us with their back to the beautiful auditorium.  It worked well and, consummate musicians as they were, they gave everything.  The Mahler, two Kindertotenlieder and two Rückert-Lieder, worked very well with an accordion accompaniment.  I thought, “So that’s what Mahler’s all about!”  The accordion is a very expressive instrument, just how expressive, I came to realise when the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra accompanied the remarkable Ryan Corbett.  And I also remember hearing Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae for solo viola accompanied, not by an orchestra, but by an accordion, and finally “getting” it.       

In Berlin the following Saturday I heard the Berlin Philharmonic, in the Philharmonie Halle, on Herbert von Karajan Strasse.  The Philharmonie Großer Saal is a very large hall, bigger I would say than Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, yet it was a sell-out.  I found myself wondering if the RSNO in Glasgow could have sold out the concert hall with a concert consisting of Prokofiev’s Symphonic Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, followed by Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande.  The cellist, Alisa Weilerstein, was magnificent.  As an encore she played the Sarabande from Bach’s Third Cello Suite.  After the interval the Berlin Phil played Pelleas with total commitment.  What an orchestra. 

And on the Sunday afternoon I was again in the neighbourhood, taking a stroll around the Tiergarten, and chanced to notice people congregating outside the hall on Herbert von Karajan Strasse.  I went in.  Yes, there was a concert shortly to commence, but, alas, a sell-out.  I went back outside, ran into a lady trying to sell on her ticket, bought it, and snuck in.

This was one of a series of Populäre Konzerte, given by the Philharmonie Sinfonie Orchestra of Berlin.  Another sell-out.  This time I was on the other side of the hall, behind the orchestra and choir, and facing the conductor, one Stanley Dodds, I gather of Canadian and Australian provenance who, at least from a distance bore an uncanny resemblance to Sir Alexander Gibson, who dominated Scottish classical music throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.  The orchestra certainly played a lot of “lollipops”, starting with Verdi’s Triumphal March from Aida.  The choir was extraordinarily good.  Such power. 

Next up, a Holst planet: Jupiter.  I have to say this was the least successful rendition of the evening.  I like to think I’m open to hearing English music performed by overseas orchestras.  They often get rid of all the timeworn barnacles and rediscover the essence of the music.  But I had a sense here that they didn’t really “get it”.  It was a play-through.  I’ve heard it said that Karajan couldn’t stand the Planets.  Fake news, for all I know.

Next up, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, played most beautifully by Gabriele Strata.  We were treated to a delightful Chopin encore.

After the interval, the little heard Camille Saint-Saens „La Muse et le Poète“ for violin, cello, and orchestra.  We certainly weren’t being short-changed for lovely music.  Then, three pieces from Edvard Krieg’s Peer Gynt – Morgenstimmung (a sigh went through the audience as the famous flute solo commenced), Anitras Tanz, and In the Hall of the Mountain King. 

I confess at this moment it crossed my mind to slip out quietly, because the two remaining pieces were two movements from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Ravel’s Bolero.  I’m not sure if I would mind if I never heard either of these pieces again, but I was quite keen to hear the choir once more in the Orff, and they were certainly magnificent.  And well done to the side drummer, for sustaining concentration in the Bolero. 

Is there a qualitative difference between attending a concert in mainland Europe, and back home?  The atmosphere in the concert hall is certainly intensely familiar.  I suppose, as here, the audience is somewhat grey-haired.  I’m sure Glasgow would have had just as much difficulty as Kraków had, in attracting an audience for Szymanowski and Mahler with accordionists filling in for an orchestra. 

And it’s evident that there is even on the continent a need to play concerts after the fashion of the Boston Pops. Still, I’m not sure how much time the Berlin Phil devotes to film music, or “gaming” music, or other crossover genres that are becoming increasingly common over here.  At the end of the day, I’m profoundly impressed that they can sell out Philharmonie Halle performing Arnold Schoenberg.        

Our tour bus picked us up – a party of 30, on Wielopole, on the edge of Kraków’s beautiful Old Town.  The journey was to take an hour and a half, so we were invited to sit back, relax and enjoy the scenery.  There would be no further announcements until we reached Oświȩcim. 

We had chosen a beautiful day for our visit, with cloudless blue skies and temperatures in the mid-twenties.  One of our two tour guides, Olivia, happened to sit beside me; an elegant young lady, dressed in black, with a pale complexion and raven black hair.  She had just returned from a holiday in the forest.  She had switched off her mobile and gone for long walks with her dog.  How often did she do the Oświȩcim excursion?  Three, maybe four times a week.  It struck me, even before we had started, that maybe it was not the sort of job you would want to hold down for too long.   

In effect, the 60 mile journey took an hour and three quarters.  It took a while to negotiate the suburbs of Kraków, and we had a very careful driver – I was much impressed – and in any case it wasn’t a fast route, rather like travelling to St Andrews from somewhere in the West of Scotland, frequently slowing to go through villages and towns.  We travelled through forests, and more open countryside, very beautiful.  Oświȩcim itself was an attractive town.  I wonder why the National Socialists chose it as the hub of their killing machine?  I got the answer shortly. 

There was a car park, with a few other assembled buses.  There were toilet facilities, and you could get a coffee, but the amenities were basic.  We split into two groups of 15.  I stuck with Olivia.  We then passed through security, just as in an airport.  We were scanned, and our photo ID and documentation perused.  Certain rules were made clear: no sharp objects, no smoking, no eating, no hot drinks; bottled water was OK.  Photographs were also permitted, but not everywhere.  In some locations, silence was expected.  I had had some apprehension that the concentration camp experience might be one of “barbed wire kitsch”.  Young people would be whooping and taking selfies.  Mugs, T-shirts and other samples of tat might be available on sale.  But no.  The predominant atmosphere was one of silence.  Even the birds were silent.     

Next we passed through a transition zone in the form of a long, featureless white tunnel, eventually emerging back into the sunlight and taking us into a different world.  We might have travelled back in time 80 years.  The facility remained largely as it had been then.  We passed through a gate, and under the infamous sign vouchsafing the Big Lie.  Arbeit macht frei.  We wore headphones, and Olivia spoke to us through a microphone, so she didn’t need to raise her voice.     

You try to marry up what you see with what you already know.  What is meant by the banality of evil?  Auschwitz 1 reminded me of the Barracks in Stirling, which have been converted into a conference centre.  Here in Poland, these facilities had also been the barracks of the Polish army, but the Nazis took them over and converted them into a concentration camp.  It opened in 1940, and initially housed political prisoners largely from Poland.  But then there was an escalation, a degree of mission creep. 

So why did the Nazis choose Oświȩcim?  A large map in one of the barracks buildings told us.  It was deemed to be at the heart, the very epicentre of Europe.  The decision bespoke a certain predilection for efficiency.  All roads lead to Auschwitz. 

Auschwitz is a holocaust museum.  The exhibits include human hair, spectacles, children’s clothes, battered suitcases, medical prostheses, and of course, empty canisters of Zyklon B.  A “death factory” has been entirely preserved.  It comes in three parts – a facility for undressing, then “the showers” – in reality the Gaskammer – and then the crematoria.  The last word in ruthless efficiency. 

There were all sorts of other indications that I was not strolling through the Stirling barracks.  Punishment cells, execution walls, a “medical” facility (its workforce might have called it a scientific research laboratory), and, everywhere, gibbets.

Just when you think you have reached the nadir of human degradation, you find yourself moving to another level.  We reboarded the bus and travelled a few kilometres to Auschwitz 2 – Birkenau. Actually there’s not that much to see at Birkenau.  With the Russian advance in 1944, the Nazis destroyed most of the facilities.  The gas chambers and crematoria are in ruins.  But still, one is struck by the sheer scale of the thing.  I think Olivia said Birkenau occupied 160 hectares. 

Of course, the entrance to Birkenau must form one of the most infamous, notorious images in the world.  The railway track carries the cattle trucks through the wooden portal, and then the tracks diverge at “the ramp”, where the commandant made his “Selektion”.

Then there are the huts, row upon row.  Most of the huts have been razed, though I did go into one that still stands, and was able to see the appalling conditions under which people lived, or died.  By this time I’d just about had enough.  Thankfully, it was the last part of the tour.  I went back outside and took a few deep breaths of fresh air.  I noticed that heavy clouds had formed to the east, and there was a low rumble of thunder.  As we headed back towards the gateway to Hell, the storm clouds were amassing, and there was more thunder.  Before I left, I took a moment to imprint an image in my memory.  I walked over to the railway track, about fifty metres before it passed under the infamous gateway, and I stared in the direction of the ramp.  I didn’t actually take a photograph, but in a sense I did.  For just as I was taking in the scene, it became illuminated by a single flash of lightning.