Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
Wednesday 23 August 2023
OUR ANTI-AFFORDABLE “government” in Scotland has been conspicuous by its silence in the matter of the first lesbian kiss to be broadcast on The Archers, the celebrated radio series which has been telling “an everyday story of countryfolk” since 1951. This happened on 10 August yet Humza Yousaf, who has been First Minister since before the arrival of the corncrakes in Scotland this year, is normally quick to exploit any manifestation of “sustainability” and The Archers is, if nothing else, sustainable. In fact, it has proved to be more sustainable than almost any radio show other than Desert Island Discs or the Shipping Forecast. So why has Yapping Yousaf gone so quiet on this one?
In my beach-side laboratory, I brewed up a sample of Thongweed (himanthalia elongata) and read the fronds in the bottom of my retort flask. They directed me to the Who’s Who page on “The Archers” section of the BBC Radio website. Apparently, there is a character in Borsetshire called Jack “Jazzer” McCreary, who is a Scottish pigman. He is described as “Ed Grundy’s renegade pal [who] represents the dark underbelly of Borsetshire life.” I could immediately see why such a character might not immediately attract a nationalist politician who some would describe as “the non-white overbelly of Murrellshire life.”
The BBC does not pull its punches: “In wilder times [Jazzer has] been known to steal cars, grow cannabis and abuse ketamine, but in recent years he’s shaped up, initially working with Tom Archer’s pigs and taking on Mike Tucker’s milk round.”
Surely it is time for the Scottish “government” to take this case of blatantly hostile stereotyping to court? There must be plenty of advocates in Edinburgh who could be persuaded by a juicy, tax-payer-funded brief to withdraw their opposition to the deeply unpopular Regulation of Legal Services (Scotland) Bill. This “enabling act” is currently “out to consultation”, which means the bureaucrats who control its content and progress through parliament are on holiday. But they will return shortly, leaving their expensive, trophy croft-houses empty for the next eleven months and taking their Fair Trade families back to the phone-looking suburbs of imperial Edinburgh. There they will get back to work on their mission to destroy our Scotland for their benefit.
The crave in ScotGov vs The BBC would be to stop any further broadcasts due to the “naked prejudice” displayed by having “a Scottish pigman in The Archers, a radio programme recorded in Birmingham, a town in central England, and set in Borsetshire, also in England. It is submitted that the corporation could easily have found an English pigman to tend England’s unclean beasts. The job itself is clearly unacceptable to Muslims and Jews and is, ipso facto, exclusionary, elitist and discriminatory.”
If the progress of the case through the courts could be delayed until the Legal Services Bill has passed into law, the government could use the powers it had thereby acquired over the courts to ensure a happy outcome for all its friends, clients, enforcers, trolls, tipsters, spads, pop-up crowds and running dogs.
No less august a body than the Senators of the College of Justice have submitted a response to the consultation, and it makes sombre reading. The collective reaction of the judges in the Session Court and the High Court of Justiciary summarises the aims of the trophy crofters from St Andrews House in these words:
“In this Bill the government proposes to:
• take into its own hands powers to control lawyers;
• remove aspects of the Court of Session’s oversight of the legal profession; and
• impose itself as a co-regulator along with the Lord President.
These proposals are a threat to the independence of the legal profession and the
judiciary.”
The Executive Summary of the document prepared by the judges adds: “This response represents the unanimous view of all of the senior judiciary.”
The single most important component of the rule of law is the existence of an independent judiciary. To undermine that is to destroy the basis of Scottish national life as we have known it since the end of Royal terrorism in 1688 and the suppression of Jacobite thuggery in 1746. What the judges are saying, in effect, is that Scotland is about to politicise, and thereby destroy, Scots law. This is a point which was made a few years back in a book entitled: The Justice Factory: Can the Rule of Law Survive in Twenty-First Century Scotland?
What was predicted there is exactly what is happening now with Yousaf’s attempts to cripple the court system in Scotland today. I imagine he wants to protect the likes of Heat-pump Harvie from the consequences of his own actions, and to allow the government to evade allegations of manslaughter in connection with the elderly victims of Covid in care homes. That is the dark underbelly of Scotshire life.
If Alister Jack and his limp lugworms (Arenicolae marinae) in the Scotland Office do not stand to and man their guns, the British state will soon have surrendered the principle of the rule of law in Scotland which, one sometimes needs to remind them, is still part of the United Kingdom. That is a state whose existence has been increasingly defined by the aspiration to rule-based governance as exemplified by the beheading of Charles I in Whitehall on a bitterly cold day in January 1649.
But Yousaf should not get too enthusiastic. It is well known that he wants to sell Scotland to Europe, but if he knew more about the EU he would be aware that the Polish government is currently locked in bitter conflict with the bureaucrats of Brussels over their attempt to destroy the rule of law in Poland by curtailing judicial independence there. The golden river of grants is at risk, and it is that river of bungs, tips, doles and hand-outs that most members of the Scottish government appear to be counting on for their pensions once independent Scotland has gone bankrupt. In Poland’s case it is only its robust response to the Russian rape of Ukraine that is saving its bacon – for now.
SNP hostility to the rule of law and the restraints it imposes on the government’s power to do what it likes is illustrated by a person, who shall remain nameless, who responded to allegations of peculation and long-fingering the bulging tills of sectarian politics by saying: “I know beyond doubt that I am in fact innocent of any wrongdoing.”
The implication of that statement is clear. It does not mention law and therefore implies that if the “innocent” person is found guilty, it will be due to a miscarriage of power, not of justice. Something will have gone wrong with the system by which the rulers can ignore the law in the interests of personal political sustainability. Part of the remedy for such lapses of control will be the Legal Services Bill.
The reason I selected Thongweed to brew up in the matter of lesbian kissing on The Archers is related to the assertion just quoted which implies the replacement of the rule of law with “the rule of me”. The psychological backstory is that jokes were made in the early 1990s about me-centred wall-flowers at the University of Glasgow who were referred to as “seaweed” because they were so lacking in sex appeal that “not even the tide would take them out”. Now my Thongweed fronds tell me jokes about a lipless lap-dancer from Govan whose stage name was The Thong of the Clyde. Might the two species be related? I must remember to ask Kenneth McKellar at our next seance on the intertidal rocks of Great Todday.
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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 antique statue of two women kissing; generative AI by R.R Wave – Thongweed omelette by Picture Partners and Lugworm by sinhyu – all from Adobe Stock
