Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
Thursday 20 July 2023
THE MASS STRANDING of 57 pilot whales on Great Todday last weekend produced some interesting reactions. Boris Johnson offered them each a glass of wine; Michael Gove wanted to ship them off to Ruanda; while Hamsta Yousaf phoned out for two squid curries at Bute House. As “Mr Continuity”, he has let Scotland down.
His role model, Mrs N.F. Murrell (52) of Bluetent Drive, Uddingston, would never have ignored an opportunity to pose in front of the cameras and do some ostentatious “caring”. In her aggressive prime, she would have dropped everything but her drawers to be out on the island before the press arrived to photograph her empathising at full throttle with dead whales, and handing out elongated baby boxes for use as cardboard coffins. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to their families and loved ones…”
On any other issue, Continuity’s normal response is to get his whacker out and give the waiting world a full truncheon’s worth of ambergris about how he is “addressing the issues”, and why the SNP is in fact more popular than the Beatles. Not this time, though. So why the casual cold-shouldering of our submarine cousins? Could it be that Hamsta does not think whales should have the vote in Scotland?
Green Party insiders tell me that plans have already been drawn up to give the vote to all sorts of mammalian life forms, including Angus Brendan McNeil. Pilot whales, of the sort washed up on our Traigh Mhor (Big Strand), generally live much longer than the 16-year minimum for voting in Scotland. Due to their healthy diet of uncurried squid or baby octopus, males can survive up to 45 years, and females another ten or more—that is, if they are not “taken out” by Angus von Robertson’s policy of making pensions conditional on early death for non-nationalists.
I mean no disrespect when I observe that there were more whales stranded on Great Todday than there are Green Party members in Holyrood. If I were Lorna Slater, Hamsta’s non-sleeping partner in government, I would have let the First Citizen eat his curry in peace while I chartered a ship to take me out to the island. I could have spent a quiet hour in The Puffer, posing for press photographs in front of a green-screen in order to give me a beach backdrop—though if the picture library is shut due to the weekend, Antarctica would be OK, or at a pinch an archived oil slick.
Since Slater actually took no action at all, I concluded that she was too embarrassed to appear in the company of beings more intelligent than herself. There is ample evidence of this disparity. For one thing, no whale has ever put him or herself forward for election to the Scottish Parliament. There is a sound physiological reason for this. Pilot whales have bigger brains than members of the Green Party, and a single sperm whale’s brain is bigger than those of the whole of the parliamentary Party put together.
On average an ocean-going whale’s brain weighs about 9 kgs. That makes it light enough to be carried on to aircraft as hand luggage while still being large enough to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Deposit Return Scheme or the Hate Crime Bill. The full-load displacement of the average Green Party brain is just shade over 1.2 kg at sea-level.
If that explains Slater’s absence from the scene of the empathy opportunity last weekend, what about Hamsta? Why the curry rather than the caring? Could it be due to the Islamic position on whales? As on so many subjects, I decided to turn to the relevant volume in the excellent Oxford University Series entitled VSIs – or Very Short Introductions. I happen to be the happy owner of the volume on Islamic Law (2021), by Mashood A. Baderin, the Professor of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Without unbalancing or over-popularising his account, Prof. Baderin has managed to reduce the essential elements of one of the world’s great legal systems to a manageable 136 pages.
I consult the index. Whales? Nothing there. Nothing under “nature”, “animals” or even “conservation”. In fact, there is no entry between “conservative” and “consolatory gift” The latter term, it might be noted in passing, refers to the payment that should be made to a wife who is divorced while she is pregnant. The authority for this is the Qur’an, chapter 65, verse 6: “Lodge them where you are lodging according to your means and do not cause them any suffering in order to restrict them.” (p. 69) For completeness I should add that an unpregnant wife is entitled to the same rate of payment “for a period of three menstrual cycles”. (p. 70)
Where does the authority of the Qur’an come from? In the chapter entitled “Historical Development”, I read that the Prophet, when aged 40, had a divine revelation while in a cave on a mountain outside Mecca. (Prof. Baderin spells it “Makkah”, but I will use the conventional spelling as in this part of the world it might be confused with Paul McCartney, who was known as Macca, and there are numerous caves on the Mull of Kintyre.) In his cave, Muhammad was appointed by God to be his messenger to humanity. For the next twenty-three years, the holy transmitter revisited the cave, where he experienced “subsequent periodic visitations by Angel Gabriel with piecemeal revelations of other verses of the Qur’an.” (p. 1)
Due to the silence of Islamic law on the subject of whales, I thought I’d see whether there were any Qur’anic verses on Hate Crime, since that was the First Minister’s legislative rite of passage. Could he have had divine inspiration for his jihad against free speech in Scotland, from family dinner table conversations right through to divine revelations in mountain caves? I can find nothing about this in Professor Baderin’s summary of the corpus legorum Mussulmanorum.
Likewise, I see nothing referring to driving without insurance, which the Continuity Car-driver did when he came down to earth as Minister of Transport. Is that allowed under Islamic law, or did the matter not arise during the Prophet’s exchanges with Gabriel between 609, when he went first to the cave, and 632, when he died?
It is not hard to see that whales are never going to get a fair shake in Scotland with this First Minister. These noble creatures will have to vote Green next time, or they will be left behind by society, ghettoised in the Atlantic Ocean without so much as a free Bus Pass or a Mass Funeral Grant.
There is a practical problem too. In order to vote, any creature needs a polling booth. Until the Electoral Commission authorises polling stations on the beaches for “whales and such as whales”, Scottish democracy will remain selective and discriminatory. Would on-beach booths qualify as a form of “consolatory gift” to a submarine life-partner that dry-landers have scorned? I hae me doots. Surely the least that we, as a caring society, can do is compensate whales for the discrimination they suffer under a First Minister whose spiritual precepts are derived from revelations from a divine source in a mountain cave in the Arabian desert? Such places are as dry as a Martini and therefore the polar opposite of the wet world of the deep Atlantic where whales normally swim about broadcasting Judy Collins numbers to friends within a five-hundred-mile range.
Maybe the Opposition could get off its own beach for once and steal a march on this anthropocentric government by emphasising the inalienable civil rights that ought to be enjoyed by ordinary, working-class whales. It could expose Hamsta’s lack of environmental empathy through the introduction of a Whale Crime (Scotland) Bill?
The parliamentary drafters could follow the Hate Crime model by authorising the construction of underwater jails for MSPs whose evident prejudice against whales can be “aggravated by malice and ill-will towards a pod based on the pod being defined by reference to species, colour, nationality, voting intentions, or ethnic or national origins.” (Part 1, Section 2, para. 2A sub-para. (b))
My policy: First Minister – first inmate. Lead from the front. Yellow badge – yellow submarine. Octopus’s Garden – squid curry. Run silent, run deep.
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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 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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Photo of Pilot Whales by Stanisla from Adobe Stock
