The Canadian man behind the Scottish independence movement

By Nancy Macdonald - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Zoe Norfolk

Scotland has announced that in 2014, it will hold a referendum to decide whether to quit the United Kingdom. It turns out the Scottish National Party’s chief of staff, a man dedicated to tearing the U.K. apart, isn’t Scottish at all, though. He’s Canadian—not even fully Scots-Canadian, but equal parts English, Polish and Scottish—and arrived in Scotland all of six years ago. At first, the Kincardine, Ont., native admits, he felt funny trying to make the case, but he’s grown comfortable in the role, leading the charge for a free and independent Scotland. And yes, he’s acquired a wee Scottish brogue.

Q: So how does a Canadian come to champion Scotland’s independence movement? What was your connection to Scotland before this?

A: My stepdad is Scottish, that was a big influence in terms of Scottishness. And I have other family links to Scotland, including on my dad’s and mother’s side. I grew up in Kincardine, which obviously is named after a Scottish town, and was settled by two Scots; there’s a pipe band every Saturday in summer that marches up and down the street. It was settled quite heavily in the ’60s and ’70s with recent immigrants, sort of the second wave of Scots, and that included people like my stepdad. Edinburgh University has fantastic links with Queen’s University, where I did my undergrad, and I was very much encouraged to take an exchange year abroad. So in my third year, I went to Edinburgh and had a fantastic time. I started studying U.K. and Scottish politics then but I wasn’t involved with the party. For my master’s degree I was looking at continuing to study politics, and I applied to Edinburgh University, and got in.

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Scotland fights alcohol abuse with minimum pricing

By Leah McLaren - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

Jeff J Mitchell/Reuters

Hogmanay, the annual Scottish New Year’s celebration, is a slice of traditional Celtic bacchanalia at its finest. This year, as in others, hundreds of thousands of jolly, pink-nosed Scots took to the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow to toast 2012 with a drink or 12. The Scots love a party, and as a result, festivities traditionally last well into New Year’s Day and beyond. But there’s a downside. As Scotland fights off its hangover and confronts the sobering year ahead, the nation’s drinking problem is high on the political agenda.

Solutions on the best course of treatment vary widely, depending on who you talk to. But that there is a problem is not a matter of debate. The numbers are startling: the average Scot drinks more than the government’s weekly recommended limit (21 units for men, 14 units for women), and a staggering 23 per cent more than their Welsh and English brethren—no teetotalers themselves. The number of alcohol-related deaths in Scotland is twice that of its neighbours in the “soft south,” and it’s estimated that excessive drinking costs the country $6 billion and 3,000 lives a year.

In Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, a host of new programs was introduced in the lead-up to the holidays. They included a hotline for responsible citizens to report rowdy drunks, and a roving city bus manned by pastors armed with warm clothes, first aid and sober words of wisdom. Meanwhile, a ban on bulk-buying discounts for alcohol sold in Scottish shops and supermarkets took effect in October; by mid-December, Nielsen retail analysts reported that Scottish beer sales had fallen by eight per cent, followed by wine (five per cent) and spirits (three per cent).

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Closer to independence?

By Alasdair Soussi - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 4 Comments

Andrew Milligan/PA Wire/PA Photos/KEYSTONE Press

Look at the political map of Scotland today and, but for a smattering of red, blue and orange, the land screams nationalist bright yellow. The scale of the Scottish National Party’s victory in the parliamentary elections of May 5 was nothing short of historic. Having secured their first ever parliamentary election triumph in 2007 over their bitter rivals Labour by a narrow 47 seats to 46, the SNP, after a four-year term as a minority government, was handed a stunning 69 seats by the Scottish electorate. That pushed Labour, seen by many as the natural governing party of Scotland, into a distant second place with 37, and gave the nationalists a majority in the 129-seat parliament with which to pursue their much-coveted referendum on independence.

Despite being ahead in the polls for some weeks prior to the election, SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond was himself taken aback by the nationalists’ margin of victory—which has shaken the very foundations of the United Kingdom. “It’s unprecedented, and it’s given the SNP a whole list of opportunities and challenges,” says Gerry Hassan, a Scottish-based writer and commentator. “They’ve got the potential for an independence referendum, and they’ve got an agenda to begin dismantling the Labour apparatchik state in Scotland, which was gatekeeping, stopping things from happening, that was looking after their own.”

On the independence question, analysts like Hassan believe that in building up to a referendum—likely in 2015—the SNP must make clear what independence, currently supported by just under 40 per cent of Scots, really means in a modern context. “The SNP are not going to galvanize Scottish public opinion by talking about border controls,” explains Hassan. “They have to talk about what kind of Scotland we want that fleshes out this concept of independence, which I think will be a very different kind of independence.” This “different kind of independence” will likely be less of a tearing up of the 300-year-old union with England, and more renegotiating the terms of the union—the “united kingdoms rather than the United Kingdom,” as Mike Russell, a SNP minister, told the Times.

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The shrimp that won't die

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Walter Meayers Edwards/National

When the first diminutive dinosaurs emerged on land, the common tadpole shrimp was already swimming around the Earth’s wetland pools. And it looked very much like the one that recently hatched in an aquarium in Scotland.

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Clegg: is he good for the Canucks?

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 23, 2010 at 1:56 PM - 34 Comments

You’ve probably heard about the startling eleventh-hour rise in the polls that Britain’s Liberal Democrats have enjoyed since their leader Nick Clegg, a reformed skirt-chaser and unreformed atheist, leapt out of the tall grass to win an Apr. 15 televised election debate. It’s time Canadians started contemplating the domestic impact of a strong Lib-Dem performance in the May 6 vote.

Lately you can find individual UK polls that have the three major parties in almost every order except for those that have the ruling Labour Party at the top. Conservative leader David Cameron, until recently a heavy favourite to win the election and capture a majority, suddenly finds himself confronted with the possibility of a historic, 1964-Phillies-esque collapse down the stretch. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been reduced to near-irrelevance on the hustings—but because of his Labour Party’s regional strength, his party is likely to control more seats than the Liberal Democrats even if Labour finishes third in the vote.

Punters at UK gambling site Betfair are currently forecasting better-than-even odds (57%) of a hung Parliament and a reasonable chance (fractional odds: 7-to-1) of someone other than Brown or Cameron becoming Prime Minister. Under such chaotic circumstances it is entirely possible that “someone other than Brown or Cameron” could end up being a coalition leader other than Clegg himself. And the price of the exotic “two elections in 2010″ prop bet has soared, implying a 27% chance of a quickie second vote. Also, dogs and cats have been spotted living together in Scunthorpe.

The Clegg boomlet may not end up changing anything in the long run. But even though the UK parties map awkwardly onto ours, it would appear to have relevance to Canada on at least a couple of fronts. The Lib-Dem moment is the very same one of which the New Democrats have been dreaming since the Winnipeg Declaration, and of which they caught a brief glimpse in ’88; to wit, voters finally get tired of the choice between Coke and Pepsi and start getting curious about Dr. Pepper.

I went to rabble.ca expecting to find a lot of excitement about this. More fool me. The online left is far too busy tilting at Zionist windmills and trying to win the All-Canada Summarize Chomsky Competition to pay any heed to the model for our democracy. But a strong electoral performance by Clegg would provide data for a future debate about the fate and usefulness of a social-democratic party that no longer believes in socialism—and one that, given the excess weight given to labour unions in its leadership balloting, arguably isn’t all that strong on democracy either. Recall that the “Democrat” half the Liberal-Democrat DNA derives from light-pink Labourites who got tired of trade-union bullying and wanted to build a non-militant home for the Left. Thatcher crushed the unions, Labour became neoliberal, and thirty years zipped by, but somehow the Lib Dems have recovered a raison d’être.

It seems highly speculative to imagine that such a thing could ever happen to the NDP. (I’m not aware that there exists some brand of “awareness of one’s own irrelevance” fairy-dust that can be sprinkled on NDP supporters.) Of more immediate concern to Canada is the possibility that a strong Lib-Dem result could a) create pressure for the adoption of proportional representation in the UK and b) bring about the conditions for its immediate adoption as the price of Liberal-Democrat participation in a governing coalition. If the three UK parties were each to get the exact same numbers of votes on May 6, with the regionally distorted riding-by-riding distribution remaining about the same, the seat distribution in the Commons would end up being roughly LAB 300-CON 200-LIB 100.

I don’t think there is necessarily a major ethical problem with this, particularly since what it practically amounts to is giving Scotland and Wales something more like an equal say in British government and protecting them from being demographically overrun. Only a crazed extremist for “democracy” in the strictest technical meaning of the term would argue that Scotland and Wales should have influence on Parliament not one iota greater than their nose count. The effect of “first past the post” in current British politics is much the same as that of the U.S.A. giving equal representation to the states in the Senate, and, by extension, giving smaller states a disproportionate say in the Electoral College.

Still, this election may provide a tough, maybe destructive test of tolerance for that arrangement—particularly in the light of ever-louder murmurs of English nationalism and English awareness of the West Lothian Question. (The existence of Welsh and Scottish assemblies considerably weakens the argument that Parliament can never revise constitutional arrangements in a manner contrary to the interests of Wales and Scotland, and the argument isn’t totally decisive anyway.) A fiasco for first-past-the-post would be bad news for its future here; its abandonment in the UK as part of a power-sharing deal would make us stick out like a sore thumb. Even pro-FPTPers can’t deny that.

Newsmakers '09: Feuds

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 1 Comment

	PALIN vs. JOHNSTON Call it the tussle on the tundra: America’s most famous Alaskans have been at each other’s throats ever since Levi Johnston left the Palin family home shortly after the birth of his son, Tripp, to Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol. In interviews and a tell-all article for Vanity Fair, Johnston paints a portrait of Sarah as a lazy, tempestuous, money-hungry egomaniac. Palin, meanwhile, has dismissed Bristol’s relationship with Johnston as a “mistake” and accused the 19-year-old newly minted Playgirl model of being a deadbeat on a “quest for fame, attention, and fortune.”
	PORT vs. COHEN The Skanks in NYC blog was never destined for greatness. And yet its musings about Canadian-born model Liskula Cohen (right) made headlines after Cohen went to court to force Google to identify the anonymous blogger. Cohen eventually dropped her US$3-million defamation suit against Rosemary Port, the 29-year-old fashion student in question. Port, though, launched a US$15-million suit against Google, which she claims should have upheld her right to call someone a “psychotic lying whore” online.
	INDIA vs. SCOTLAND It’s a fixture in Indian restaurants, but Glasgow chef Ahmed Aslam Ali says chicken tikka masala isn’t Indian at all—it’s Scottish. In fact, the 64-year-old founder of the Shish Mahal restaurant claims he invented it in the early 1970s. A Scottish MP is now taking the Scot’s claim one step further, trying to secure “protected designation of origin” status for the dish. Indian foodies have dismissed Ali’s claims as “preposterous,” and say chicken tikka masala is an “authentic Mughlai recipe” that’s been passed down for generations.
	VLADIMIR PUTIN vs. UKRAINE When Ukraine missed a US$500-million payment for Russian gas in November, Russian PM Vladimir Putin was incensed. His Ukrainian counterpart, Yulia Tymoshenko, stepped in and negotiated a deal to guarantee gas deliveries. But Putin has since suggested Ukraine’s payment “problems” could be met with significant supply “problems.” And should Ukraine decide to siphon gas from shipments meant for Europe rather than buy it from Russia, he threatened, “we will cut supplies,” a tactic he already used last January.
	SEPARATIST vs. THE NATIONAL BATTLEFIELDS COMMISSION When Quebec’s hard-core separatist fringe threatened to disrupt a re-enactment of the battle on the Plains of Abraham, Canada’s National Battlefields Commission simply cancelled the event altogether. “We don’t want it to become a clash,” André Juneau, then commission president, said by way of explanation. “There was one in 1759 and we don’t want another.” History, it seems, isn’t written by the winners, but by the whiners.
	BECKHAM vs. FANS David Beckham probably knew better than to expect a warm welcome when he returned to L.A. for his first home game with Major League Soccer’s Galaxy. Despite his US$250-million contract, the star had skipped the Galaxy’s first 17 matches of the season, opting to play for an Italian club. But the reception was enough to leave Beckham wishing he’d stayed in Italy. Fed up with the taunts and boos, he tried to climb a barrier to get at an angry fan. Beckham claims he just wanted to shake hands; he was fined US$1,000 for the goodwill gesture.
	ATHEISTS vs. UNITED CHURCH Last winter, Canadian atheists announced they would be buying ad space on buses to promote their message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Rather than try to censor the message, the United Church of Canada opted to run a cheeky reply of its own: “There’s probably a God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Whatever impact the ads may have had, the real message may very well have been, “There’s probably no point arguing about religion on the sides of buses.”
	AMERICAN APPERAL vs. WOODY ALLEN Woody Allen isn’t the first name that comes to most people’s minds when the topic of fashion models comes up. Still, no one was as surprised as Allen himself when his frumpish mug found its way onto an American Apparel billboard in 2007. Allen sued over the ad, which showed him dressed as an Orthodox Jew, with a caption, in Yiddish, calling him “the high rabbi.” They settled out of court in May for US$5 million.
	CHINA vs. RIO TINTO Last July, Chinese officials arrested four employees of Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, accusing them of stealing state secrets. The arrests followed a failed bid by Chinalco, a state-owned Chinese manufacturer, to invest US$19.5 billion in the company. Rio Tinto, along with Australian officials, is still working to free Stern Hu, the company’s chief iron ore negotiator, but Chinese officials say their investigation isn’t complete.

A bad example

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 27, 2009 at 2:43 PM - 7 Comments

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle considers the possibility of a minority government in Britain.

Britain has had hung parliaments and minority governments before. They have much to be said for them. They can make politics interesting. They can force governments to think twice before doing stupid things. But they can, as the Constitution Unit report emphasises, be well managed (as Salmond’s has mostly been in Scotland) or badly (as Canada illustrates).

They inevitably hand power to small parties as well as to factions within large parties – and thus to party whips. And journalists love hung parliaments. What hung parliaments cannot do, though, is to compel rival parties to co-operate on big reforms. By and large we don’t do coalitions – or co-operation. The idea that a hung parliament after the next general election will enable Labour and the Lib Dems to come seamlessly together and introduce a fairer electoral system is very seductive to many, but historically unpersuasive.

The Constitution Unit report is due for public release next week.

Top 5 spooky places

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 2:04 PM - 2 Comments

Every experienced traveller has stories of places or experiences that left them feeling strangely unsettled. Memories like these provide an illuminating counterpoint to the pure pleasures of many travel experiences. Here are my five personal travel recollections that return frequently, always accompanied by a shiver.

1. The Riverside Hotel, Clarksdale, Mississippi
   “Y’all will wanna stay in the room where Bessie died,” was the greeting from the octogenarian proprietor Mrs. Hill as we entered the modest building that was once an African-American hospital in the Mississippi Delta. It was here that the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, died after a car accident in 1937. A story that Smith died at this hospital after being turned away from a ‘white’ hospital was later debunked, but our experience in Clarksdale that day in the late 80s suggested that the wounds of slavery were still raw. After closing the extra-wide door to our roach-killer scented room (and former hospital operating room), there was little sleep to be had.

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Alexander 'Sandy' Collie Shaw 1944-2009

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Alexander “Sandy” Collie Shaw was born on April 30, 1944, on Rothiemurchus Estate in the Scottish Highlands, overlooking the Cairngorm mountains. In accordance with family tradition, Sandy came into the world in an upstairs bedroom of his grandfather’s farmhouse, and was placed in the bottom drawer of an old dresser. His parents, Andrew and Isabel Shaw, named him after his uncle, a member of Scotland’s Lovat Scouts, who died earlier that year in an avalanche near Jasper, Alta., during wartime training. Sandy’s father, a heavy-duty mechanic, was often on the road, so Sandy spent his early years at the farmhouse with his mother and older sister before moving to nearby Aviemore.

Growing up, Sandy and his friends occupied themselves on the wooded hillside trails, gathering berries and exploring. Before there was a ski resort in the area, they would carry their skis up the slope on foot. An athletic boy, he played soccer, and joined the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team. His sense of compassion was ingrained early on: sister Anne was severely disabled, and brother John, 15 years his junior, had Down’s syndrome. Continue…

Tom Watson, and doing the impossible

By The Editors - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Last Sunday in Turnberry, Scotland, Tom Watson had one seven-foot putt left to sink: slightly uphill, with a moderate right-to-left break, complicated by a stiff wind in his face.

Standing on the 18th green, he held a one-stroke lead over his closest competitor—36-year-old American Stewart Cink. Drain that putt and the 59-year-old from Kansas City would win the British Open Championship. But there was more on the line than that. He was poised to triumph over the greatest golfers in the world—a world that had changed a great deal in the 26 years since he won his last major title. Where his game was refined in an era of wooden drivers and endless repetition, his rivals were reared in a sport redefined by graphite shafts, titanium club heads, nutritional supplements, psychologists and swing doctors. Continue…