Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
12 May 2023
MY HOPES for the destruction of Humza Yousaf’s “continuity” approach to Scottish political theft received a boost yesterday when I read about his administration’s plan to abolish juries in rape trials. It seems that the Scottish advocate community will refuse to represent the criminal community in such cases. Justice will be crippled for political grandstanding reasons, just as it was in other ways when the learner driver from Uddingston was in the political driving seat.
Yousaf wants to send more Scots to jail. Who doesn’t? I have my list; he has his. The important question, however, is who will draw the short straw? Should we jail the guilty only, or a few innocents too, if only for statistical presentation reasons? The problem is that our jails are full. Convicts are given community service orders. As community service orders are not policed, they are not served. The result is that rapists, fraudsters and dodgy suburban owners of motorhomes will continue to stalk our streets.
Anyone who doubts the gravity of the feral crook problem should read about the convicts employed by the infamous Wagner organisation, which is playing a semi-detached part in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fresh from the ice-bound Gulag, these jailbirds volunteer to serve for six months in the Russian army so that, if they survive, they can claim an automatic pardon.
The trouble is these men believe in continuity as much as Yousaf does. When they return to civvies, they take up where they left off, murdering, raping or concealing expensive motorhomes amongst the shrubs, gnomes and wheelie bins of anonymous suburbia. Leopards never change their spots; Humzas never change their policies.
My thoughts on criminal continuity have been stimulated by reading W.H. Murray’s biography of Rob Roy MacGregor. It is so popular that you can buy the Canongate edition from Amazon for a mere 10p (sterling). But this should not blind the receptive reader to the messages that the book imparts: namely that private criminality can be noble and that seventeenth century crooks were thin.
Sadly today we have several SNP MPs and MSPs who appear to believe in public criminality and the virtues of girth. Unlike those ordinary people who have trouble controlling their weight, with whom everyone sympathises (thanks, Ed.), many expense-account politicians at Holyrood or Westminster seem to enjoy taunting the taxpayer with the amount of food and drink they can steal from the community of the realm.
Some people excuse such plundering with reference to the trickle-down effect. But the only trickling their food does is down a few bulging waistcoats. As for drink, the less said the better! Legs, of course, are involved and in extreme cases socks too. One MP for a Highland community is even reputed to have “filled his boots” in such circumstances.
Though W.H. Murray was an Englishman, born in Liverpool, he was clearly the sort of person who would have voted for Oor Humza, had he not, very sadly, died in 1996, when the young whippersnapper was only ten and, anyway, there was no crypto-parliament to vote him into. Unlike Yousaf, however, Murray’s mother was Scottish, and she brought her son back to Glasgow after his father was killed at Gallipoli in 1916. The young man soon lifted up his eyes unto the hills and became a passionate mountaineer. More relevantly for our problems with the political community in “a modern Scotland” (to use the Scottish Executive’s meaningless phrase), he also became a believer in the practical virtues of what today would be called rural deprivation.
This is what inspired a little scheme of mine whereby we could help the taxpayer-funded over-eaters in Holyrood and Westminster by giving them some positive healing deprivation along Rob Roy lines. The first stage would involve walking from Holyrood up to Glen Gyle, above Loch Katrine, where MacGregor had his base. Active travel does no-one any harm, especially as each will be given a sack of oatmeal for the journey. Being “Scottish”, they will of course know how to mix it with tartan water from a burn, and how to eat it with their hands cupped like a quaich.
They will be restricted to two such meals a day, with a parliamentary standards officer on hand to make sure the greedier ones do not smuggle any single-use straws out of the Holyrood canteen with the idea of sucking a few tadpoles out of wayside ponds for elevenses.
Walkers will be given plaids in which to sleep in the heather in wet weather, but they would be expected to make their own brogues before departure (without laces or soles, Rob Roy-style). Once those wear out, they will have to walk barefoot. They would be expected to cover at least twenty miles a day, as drovers in MacGregor’s time usually did. A competent squad of such men could escort a couple of hundred head of cattle from Sutherland to Crieff, or even Falkirk, in less than a month.
In the event that our political obesethetes refuse at some point to go any further, a platoon of Campbells would be on hand to re-motivate them with the flat of their broadswords. They might leave one whimpering gourmand to scuttle lamely back to Stirling in his underpants, bleating tearfully about his lost Range-Rover, in order to encourager les autres. I believe, however, there might be a more subtle way of encouraging Scotland’s tax-eaters to get up from the national table.
Rob Roy, Murray says, was a “cattle dealer”. Such an occupation carries with it neither pension provision, nor any entertainment expense allowance, and so would not appeal to the trencher-person community in Holyrood or Westminster. But in the days when the Scottish parliament was sovereign, “dealing” meant stealing your neighbours’ cattle, driving them to the head of the glen on a moonlit night and selling them for cash to other “dealers”.
Rob Roy had a second string to his bow. He blackmailed the MacGregors’ wealthier Lowland neighbours, extorting protection money in order to ensure that their cattle got to the tryst or mart unstolen. It was in response to this sort of thing that the Black Watch regiment was formed to patrol the Highland line in the early eighteenth century.
The latter was a protection racket, while the transactions at the head of the glen amounted to what is today called “reset”. None of our political face-fillers would be able to resist the thought of ill-gotten gains, jury or no jury. In either case, we could soon have the whole lot on remand pending trial. If we can persuade the advocate community to extend their protest to cover trials of those who caused the rape-related problem, the happy walkers could be held on remand until the next No Confidence motion in Holyrood. “Continuity” Humza then would be “discontinued” by the democratic vote of the rump parliament. Job done.
The beauty and equity of my scheme is such that it would suit the vultures too. The effect of prison food and idleness in their cells would soon restore them to their former, Lobengula-like physique. Everyone’s a winner!
I am now looking for sponsorship for my plan. If any readers would like to help, please be in touch. We need stewards for the march, and a few Campbells with properly sharpened broadswords in case any encouragement is needed once the walkers get well into the hills.
All helpers will be invited to a grand feast of stolen Blackford sheep on the slopes of Ben Venue in September at the souming. There will be a raffle for which the modern Black Watch have agreed to raid their CID evidence yard in Glasgow in order to donate a pre-loved motorhome as the first prize.
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon.co.uk and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
Also written by Ian Mitchell is The Justice Factory (second edition): Can the Rule of Law Survive in Twenty-First Century Scotland? which considers the future of liberal democracy, taking Scotland as an example.
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