Conference tallis::celt

483.0. "Scottish Newsletter (from Usenet)" by DECEAT::DARCY () Tue Dec 27 1988 11:49

Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic
Path: decwrl!labrea!agate!eos!ames!pacbell!att!occrsh!uokmax!sbmartin
Subject: News from Scotland
Posted: 21 Dec 88 17:16:51 GMT
Organization: University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
 
 
 
 
Because I never received this news posting from Jack Campin, he sent 
a copy to me on e-mail.  He asked that I post it again for US distribu-
tion, just in case it got lost.  So, here's the news from Scotland.
 
 
News from Scotland #5
*********************
 
	Poverty
	Debt and the Law
	The by-election that wasn't
	Fear, and the pit, and the snare, shall be upon thee - official
	Sorley MacLean's "The Cuillin"
 
Poverty
*******
 
Strathclyde Regional Council have just released a report they commissioned
on poverty in the area (Glasgow and its satellite towns, together with a
huge rural area reaching as far as Oban: 2 million people in all).  They did
it themselves because the British Government no longer prepares regional
poverty statistics; this is in line with the many changes they've made in
the definition of "unemployment" since coming to power, each time in such a
way as to reduce the figure.
 
One-third of the region's population is living at or below the state benefit
threshold.  There was a 42% increase from 1981 to 1986 in the number of people
on the rock bottom benefit (used to be called Supplementary Benefit, its name
was changed a few months ago).  Edinburgh's figures from a similar report last
year showed a 93% rise from 1978 to 1986.  There has been a 28% increase in
the number of people getting their gas cut off because they couldn't pay their
bills.
 
The usual British definition of the "poverty line" is 70 pounds a week for a
married couple with two primary school age children and no special state
benefits.  The Low Pay Unit, an English research and campaigning
organization about to set up a Scottish branch, estimated two years ago that
950,000 Scots were living at this level.
 
The new regulations on the young unemployed (too recent to be covered in the
Strathclyde report) have left between 18,000 and 20,000 British 16- and 17- 
year olds with no income whatever.  As I mentioned in my first bulletin, the
rules say teenagers are only entitled to state benefits if they are employed
on the Youth Training Scheme; if there aren't any places, as there aren't
for vast numbers of Scottish kids, tough.
 
Most YTS "trainees" (quotes because the "training" is usually in such skills
as sweeping factory yards and shelving tins in supermarkets) work for small
firms who are visited by a safety inspector, on average, once every seven
years.  Their rates of death and injury have risen by 50% since 1984 and are
twice those of people the same age employed on non-YTS work.  The proposed
Employment Bill will repeal most of the present legislation protecting young
workers (for example, they will be "freed" to work the same hours as adults).
 
In 1986-7, only 46% of YTSers got a permanent job after their "training".
 
I need my chimneys swept soon.  Geez, this might let me get a Government
grant to make it a YTS project!
 
 
Debt and the Law
****************
 
The Scots legal system is fundamentally different from the English one,
being based on Roman law rather than Teutonic tribal custom.  Many of the
differences are in favour of the Scots system - for example, people facing
criminal charges must be brought to trial within 100 days, whereas in
England people have been jailed on remand for two years before being
acquitted.  One exception is the Scots law on the recovery of bad debts,
which inflicts the maximum possible humiliation on the debtor.  A process
known as "warrant sale" is still used sometimes; it permits a debtor's non-
essential assets to be sold by public auction.  Another procedure,
"arrestment" of wages, is grotesquely complex and seems specifically
designed to encourage employers to sack indebted employees because of the
hassle - rather than setting up a single standing order, creditors would
haggle among themselves about their share of each individual pay packet.
 
The Debtor (Scotland) Act 1987, which has just come into force, will reform
both of these mechanisms to some extent (for the first time in 150 years),
while not abolishing them.  Warrant sale publicity will no longer name the
debtor, and sales will be held in auction rooms instead of at the debtor's
home.  Arrestments will be done by court-assessed standing order.  So, one 
small gain in civil liberties we can thank the Tories for.
 
Lat year saw a 150% rise in the number of people seeking advice on debt
problems.  This is likely to rise even more sharply this year, as the Single
Payments Scheme, which gave lump sums to benefit claimants to cover one-off
expenses like furniture, was abolished in April; most claimants will have no
alternative to buying on credit.  Next year brings the poll tax and a rent
rise averaging 4 pounds a week for council tenants.  But, until now, the
basic reasons for indebtedness have been falling real income, the rise in
interest rates, and the increasing ease of obtaining credit.  A story from
the Edinburgh Citizens' Rights Office: someone wanted to buy something on
credit from a big store in Princes Street.  Their only identification?  A
letter from the South of Scotland Electricity Board threatening disconnection
for nonpayment the following day.  That did fine, they got the credit.
 
 
The by-election that wasn't
***************************
 
When the Govan by-election was coming up, it was thought that Labour might
spring another one at Falkirk East where the incumbent, Harry Ewing, was
due to be sent to the House of Lords.  Ewing's majority was not quite as
big as the Labour majority in Govan, but still colossal (14,023).  He more
or less announced his intention to retire after the 1987 general election,
when he declined to rejoin the Shadow Cabinet after being on it for 14
years.  He is also recovering from a broken neck, another reason to welcome
the more social hours of the Upper House.  The idea was that Govan should
have been a walkover, and the momentum generated by that ought to have
buried the Scottish National Party revival.  Well, it didn't quite work out
that way; in fact, Labour lost seats to the SNP in a council by-election in
Falkirk the day of the Govan election.  Now Kinnock is having second
thoughts about it, and poor old Harry is being asked to hang in there till
the SNP revival blows over.  He's at least putting a bold front on for what
might be a long wait:  "I cannot stop the speculation. I can say
categorically that there is not going to be a by-election at Falkirk East
unless the good Lord sounds the trumpet."
 
 
Fear, and the pit, and the snare, shall be upon thee - official
***************************************************************
 
According to the Sunday Post, Malcolm Rifkind (the Secretary of State for
Scotland) read the lesson at the annual service for Scots MPs conducted by
the Moderator of the Church of Scotland.  What the Post thought was amusing
about it was that his text, which in the modern translation referred to "a
bush in the desert", was "a heath in the wilderness" (Edward Heath, geddit?)
in the Authorized Version.
 
I looked this up.  Turns out to be from chapter 48 of Jeremiah, wherein the
Right Honourable Adonai Elohim outlines his regional development policy for
Moab:  "come, and let us cut it off from from being a nation... and the 
spoiler shall come upon the city, and no city shall escape...  make ye him
drunken: for he magnified himself against the LORD: Moab also shall wallow
in his vomit, he also shall be in derision... O ye that dwell in Moab, leave
the cities, and dwell in the rock... yet will I bring again the captivity of
Moab in the latter days...".
 
 
Sorley MacLean's "The Cuillin"
******************************
 
The Nobel Prize literature committee obviously decides the winners on some
sort of "Buggins' turn" basis - Africa got its turn with Wole Soyinka, the
Arab world with Naguib Mahfouz, and so on.  The last time a writer in a 
"fringe" language got one, as far as I know, was Iceland's Halldor Laxness 
in 1955.  Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) would have got it many 
years ago if he'd written in the same language as Graham Greene or William
Golding; but MacLean writes in Scottish Gaelic.  If the English literary
establishment has any say in the matter, he will never be considered.
 
MacLean's poems are like nothing else written in Britain this century.  For
a parallel, you have to look as far afield as Chile to Pablo Neruda, Turkey
to Nazim Hikmet or Hungary to Attila Joszef.  (Yeats and Brecht also some to
mind, but MacLean writes in a far more emotionally exposed way than either).
Like them, he combines a personal, confessional voice with a politicized 
perspective that never loses sight of the movement of world history.
MacLean is from Skye, and the Skye landscape permeates all of his work.  He
fuses traditional Gaelic love poetry and poetry of place - "Arran of the
many stags" and its like - with Freudian introspection and revolutionary
utopianism.  Among British English poets, only Dylan Thomas, the surrealists
and Ted Hughes have made a similar attempt at reaching beyond the narrow-
mindedness of the British literary tradition, but without MacLean's range or
intelligence.
 
"Chapman" magazine has recently been serializing his long poem "The Cuillin"
("An Cuilithionn")  written in 1939, when MacLean was at his closest to the
Communist Party ("I never accepted the whole of Marxist philosophy, as I
could never resolve the idealist-materialist argument for I regarded
philosophical materialists as generally more idealistic morally than
philosophical idealists").  He shelved the poem in 1944 after the Soviet
betrayal of the  Polish uprising.  He is now publishing "what I think
tolerable of it".  The power of this poem, like most of MacLean's work,
comes from the immensely large scale and hypnotic convolutedness of its
thoughts; it is impossible to give the feel of it in a short quotation.
Images - the Cuillin mountains as a world revolution, the bogs of Skye as
the morass of the bourgeois order, a mythical Stallion who is part pagan
god, part Christ and part Scottish proletariat, recur over and over, wound
into long incantations that range between the Clearances and the rise of
Nazism.  Buy the magazine (the serialization starts in #50 and is still
going; the latest is #54) and see for yourself.  MacLean's own translation
is printed beside the original.  Here are some small selections.
 
[from part II:]
 
Seo latha eile air na sleibhtean	Another day this upon the mountains
Is Alba mhor fo bhinn bheistean,	and great Scotland under the doom of
								beasts:
A miltean bhochdan air a spuilleadh	her thousands of poor exploited,
Air am mealladh 'nan cuis-bhurta	beguiled to a laughing-stock,
Air am briagadh, air an ungadh		flattered, doctored and anointed
Aig maithean is buirdeasaich dhiadhaidh	by the nobles and godly bourgeois
Tha deanambh buirdeasach de Chriosda.	who make a bourgeois of Christ.
 
Seo latha eile air na sleibhtean	Another day this upon the mountains
Is Alba gheal 'na brochan breine,	and our choice Scotland a porridge
								of filth;
Sasuinn agus an Fhraing comhla		England and France together
Air am muchadh san aon otraich,		smothered in the same dung-heap;
A' Ghearmailt mhor 'na boile breige,	great Germany a delirium of falsehood
'S an Spainn 'na cladh an laigh an	and Spain a graveyard where valour 
			treuntas,					lies;
Agus uachdarain nam Polach		and the rulers of Poland
Nan culaidh-mhagaidh na Roinn-Eorpa.	a laughing-stock of Europe.
 
Tha solus - bioreach air a mhointich	There is a Will-o-the-Wisp on the moss
'S chan eil 'na mhanadh an solas	and its portent is not solace
Ach casgairt, gort is mort is dolas,	but slaughter, famine, murder and grief,
Bristeadh cridhe 's bas an dochais.	heart-break and the death of hope.
 
[end of part IV:]
 
'S fhada, gort fhada,			Distant, sore and distant
'S fhada 'n latha nach tainig,		the day that has not come,
'S fhada 'n oidhch' air a' Cuilithionn	long the night on the Cuilinn
'S e ri tulgadh an amhgair		that rocks in its anguish:
'S fhada 'n oidhch air na sleibhtean	long the night on the mountains
'S iad ri eigheachd cruaidh-ghaireach,	that shriek with a hard cry,
'S fhada 'm feasgar air ciaradh		long the greying of evening
Air beinn iargainn mo graidh-sa.	on the longed for mountains that
								I love.
[beginning of part V:]
 
Chuala mi gum facas bristeadh		I heard that a breaking was seen
Agus clisgeadh air an fhaire,		and a startling on the horizon
Gum facas ros dearg urail		that there was seen a fresh red rose
Thar saoghal bruite mabte;		over a bruised maimed world.
Chuala mi mu Abhainn Chluaidh		I heard about the River Clyde
A bhith air tiar na carnaid;		being of the hue of scarlet;
Chuala mi mu MacGill-Eain		I heard about Maclean
Bhith deanamh ceangal neo-bhasmhor	making an undying knot
Air gach cridhe agus eanchainn		on every heart and brain
Le meanmnachd thar cradhlot.		with spirit over agony.
 
Chunnacas manadh mor is uilebheist,	A great portent and a monster was seen,
An t-Aigeach a' sitrich air a'		the Stallion neighing on the Cuillin,
			Chuilithionn,
Eirigh nan creagan a bha builgeadh,	rising of the bubbling crags
Air an tug an spiorad tulgadh...	that the spirit made to rock...
 
Apologies for any typos in the Gaelic.
 
Most of MacLean's poems are printed in "Spring Tide and Neap Tide: Selected
Poems 1932-1972" ("Reothairt is Contraigh: Taghadh de Dhain 1932-1972"),
Canongate Press, Edinburgh, 1977, ISBN 0 903937 15 8 (still in print).
Also try to find Ian Crichton Smith's translation of the 1943 "Poems to
Eimhir"; it's been reprinted several times.
 
"Chapman" magazine is at 80 Moray Street, Blackford, Perthshire PH4 8QF.
It may be the best (albeit the worst printed) literary magazine in Scotland.
Subscriptions 6 pounds a year UK, 7 pounds abroad.  A "chapman" was a door
to door poetry salesman; until last century poets would have their stuff
printed in little booklets ("chapbooks") and go round knocking ("chapping")
on doors to sell them.

Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic
Path: decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!jack
Subject: news from Scotland #6
Posted: 20 Dec 88 18:31:11 GMT
Organization: Computing Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland
 
News from Scotland #6 (Festive Season Issue)
********************************************
 
 
Not sure if I'll get another issue out this year, so some seasonal items in
this one.
 
	Merry Xmas and a European Standard New Year
	Black Bun
	Het Pint
	Scottish Universities
	The Fishing Industry
 
 
Merry Xmas and a European Standard New Year
*******************************************
 
The British government has, after six years of arguing, persuaded the
European Community to adopt a standard minumum alcohol content of 40% for
Scotch whisky.  This means that firms making a weaker product (which they
have been able to sell cheaper) will have to think up a new name for it.
(Ideas, anyone? - I expect an explosion of new brands of bourbon with bogus
Jack Daniels-style traditions attached to them.)  This may save many older
distilleries from closure; on the other hand, a number of other distilleries
have recently sprung up making the weaker stuff and they are in big trouble.
Their local MPs are arguing for two years' grace so they can retarget their
marketing.
 
The next target is the Japanese liquor tariffs, due for review in April.
Presently they're ferocious on imported Scotch.  That being the nation that
invented tinned whisky-and-soda.
 
This is the government's second foray into European alcohol standardization.
Their last one, about a year ago, was to get the European Community to
override the thousand-year-old German laws on purity of beer so that British
brewers could legally export their blends of surfactants, preservatives and
recycled ethanol there.  (British excise law was changed a few years ago to
tax the alcohol in stale beer, so pubs now return it to the brewers.)
 
 
Black Bun
*********
 
This is a traditional Hogmanay recipe; it's what you have handy (together
with the glass of whisky or, formerly, the substance described below) to
give to the first-footers.  This recipe is from Mrs. Frazer's "Practice of
Cookery" (1791), quoted in F. Marian McNeill's "The Scots Kitchen" (Blackie
& Son, Edinburgh, 1929, and reprinted a zillion times since for good reason).
 
	Take half a peck of flour, keeping out a little to work it up with; 
	make a hole in the middle of the flour, and break in sixteen ounces
	of butter; pour	in a mutchkin of warm water, and three gills of
	yeast, and work it up to a smooth dough. If it is not wet enough, 
	put in a little more warm water; then cut off one-third of the
	dough, and lay it aside for the cover.  Take three pounds of stoned
	raisins, three pounds of cleaned currants, half a pound of blanched
	almonds cut longwise, candied orange and citron peel cut, of each
	eight ounces; half an ounce of cloves, an ounce of cinnamon, and two
	ounces of ginger, all beat and sifted.  Mix the spices by 
	themselves, then spread out the dough; lay the fruit upon it; strew
	the spices over the fruit, and mix all together.  When it is well
	kneaded, roll out the cover, and lay the bun upon it; then cover it
	neatly, cut it round the sides, prickle it, and bind it with paper
	to keep it in shape; set it in a pretty quick oven, and, just before
	you take it out, glaze the top with a beat egg.
 
According to my Chambers dictionary, a mutchkin is four gills, or one fourth
of a Scottish pint; a Scottish pint in turn being three imperial pints, and
an imperial pint being four gills!  A peck is 2 gallons, or one fourth of a
bushel.  I'd guess a 1791 Edinburgh pound was about the same as modern 
British one.
 
McNeill's own recipe is for a third less and says to bake it in a moderate
oven for four hours.
 
 
Het Pint
********
 
Another New Year's Day recipe from McNeill:  Grate a nutmeg into two quarts
of mild ale, and bring it to the point of boiling.  Mix a little cold ale
with sugar necessary to sweeten this, and three eggs well beaten.  Gradually
mix the hot ale with the eggs, taking care that they do not curdle.  Put in
a half-pint of whisky, bring it once more nearly to the boil, then briskly
pour it from one vessel to another until it becomes smooth and bright.
 
That's the Edinburgh/Glasgow version.  Serve it from a copper kettle.  The
Orkney one adds pepper, ginger and pieces of toasted biscuit.
 
I should add that I haven't tried this and disclaim the usual responsibility.
 
 
Scottish Universities
*********************
 
The government has been steadily cutting university budgets for several
years.  This process has been very selective and uneven; prestigious places
(above all Oxford and Cambridge) have been left untouched; institutions that
mainly take working-class students have been slashed.  Scotland as a whole
reflects this pattern.  Edinburgh's funding has mostly been maintained; some
small departments, like Turkish, have been chopped.  Glasgow (with a much
higher proportion of Scottish students) has been cut by about the British
average; linguistics has gone and the library has been hit quite hard.  I
think Strathclyde (in Glasgow) and Heriot-Watt (in Edinburgh) are slightly
worse off, but don't have much information about them.  Stirling has been
steadily run down for years; the plan seems to be to turn it into a business
school (a university without a maths department, for crying out loud?).
Dundee and St.Andrews are being forced into a merger, students being asked
to commute for ten miles across the Tay.  And Aberdeen University is being
systematically destroyed.
 
The management of the university, facing a 12,000,000 pound deficit by 1992,
has been outdoing Thatcher in ruthlessness over the last year; they tried to
impose a four-term year without consulting the staff, drastically increasing
the workload with no extra pay.  Several departments have been closed or
severely cut.  Three members of the staff have committed suicide this year
after being told they were to be axed; two in their fifties and one a
classics lecturer in her early thirties.  Further departments that are to be
closed include divinity and music.  Through all this the administration has
shown monumental financial incompetence and a secretiveness that would have
had standing ovations from Brezhnev and Ollie North.  They've forced 71 
people out so far and have increased their original target of 130 sackings
to more than 200.  I don't know what Principal George McNicol's original
discipline was, but his description of his plans suggests Dr. Who Studies,
specialism Dalek Dialectology:  "We shall endeavour to achieve the maximum
of these savings in the non-pay sector but much of the saving will have to
come from pay-roll expenditure... We can be fairly confident that the target
of 130 will be achieved within the plan timescale.  Progress on staff
disengagement among the non-academic staff is somewhat slower but the target
should be achievable."
 
Note: he said that AFTER the suicides.  The one new job he's creating is a
full time social worker for suicide prevention counselling in people about
to be laid off.
 
The other tertiary institution in Aberdeen is Robert Gordon's Institute of
Technology, which has been better funded than the university, mainly thanks
to its links with the oil industry.  This too is now suffering.  The two
Edinburgh universities are jointly setting up an Institute of Petroleum 
Sciences with 5 million pounds of oil industry and government money; this
undercuts two pre-existing Aberdeen proposals, a project of RGIT's to set up
a Chair of Petroleum Engineering in memory of the Piper Alpha victims and a
scheme for an oil and gas drilling technology centre on a similar scale to
the Edinburgh institute.  RGIT's professorship would have emphasized safety
research, which is not something either the government or the industry is
very keen to have talked about at the moment.  The Edinburgh centre's remit
seems to exclude it. 
 
The upshot of all this is that the government and the University Grants
Committee (the body that allocates funds on their behalf) seem to want
Scotland to have two major universities (Edinburgh and Glasgow) and a motley
collection of five or six de facto vocational colleges.
 
Two further threats face university education in Scotland.  Firstly, the
poll tax is likely to drastically cut the number of students wanting to
study here next year; student grants have been whittled down to below
subsistence levels everywhere in the UK, and the prospect of having 400
pounds knocked off even that for choosing to study in Scotland would deter
anyone bright enough to know what a "-" sign means.  Secondly, the Tories
intend to replace student grants with US-style loans, in one of a number of
schemes none of which have been described in very convincing detail.  All
proposed schemes ignore the fact that Scottish universities teach a four-
year degree rather than the three that's standard in England; this means 25%
more indebtedness if you choose to go through the Scottish system.  The
university administrations seem to prefer an Australian-style graduate tax,
but have had minimal impact on government thinking.  Students all over the
UK prefer the existing grants system; a massive demonstration in London in
defence of it was broken up by a mounted police charge in much the same way,
and with much the same consequences, as at the football game I described in
bulletin 4.
 
 
The Fishing Industry
********************
 
Aberdeen University Marine Studies, a consultancy company run by the 
university, has been investigating the prospect of putting old oil rigs to
use as artificial reefs.  This has been tried successfully in the Gulf of
Mexico; it seems to provide a useful habitat.  The European Community is
offering to fund half the costs of a full-scale commercial evaluation of
the idea for the North Sea ecosystem, and the oil industry is prepared to
chip in a substantial part; but that still leaves the scheme likely to
founder for lack of 400,000 pounds from the Government.  This despite the
fact that they'd have to pay 70% of the cost of total rig demolition 
otherwise.
 
The major recent development in the fishing industry is much gloomier.  The
EC has set new quotas for the North Sea; even though Scotland gets most of
the allocation, the cuts are drastic.  The haddock quota is reduced from
145,000 tons to 48,000 tons.  This means many fishermen are likely to be
slowly bankrupted; there has been no hint from the Government of any aid to
bridge the gap till stocks recover (probably about 2 years).  Fishing in the
North-East is a small scale enterprise - 7,000 fishermen in 1,000 boats,
most of whom will try to hang on by going to sea less often and getting
loans privately; a typical fishing boat is worth about a million pounds and
run by a family with a massive mortgage.  The media treatment of this issue
has been abysmal, as British scientific reporting usually is: the actual
evidence used by the EC and the reasons why the stock has been allowed to
run down so far have not been described in any public forum.  A permanent
increase in net mesh size seems to be one way to handle the situation; this
would allow a much higher proportion of fish to survive to reproductive age.
 
Robert Allan of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation claims "the days of the
traditional fish supper could be numbered."
 
Salmon farming is one of the few boom industries in the Highlands in recent
years.  The two biggest firms are owned by Unilever and Booker McConnell;
both of these are facing legal action at the European Commission by Friends
of the Earth, for dumping massive amounts of furunculosis-infected dead fish
in pits around Loch Sunart.  The Highland River Purification Board and the
local council are also getting worried; it is quite unusual for bodies like
that to agree with FoE on anything.  Conservationists are not much loved in
the Highlands; more on this in a future bulletin.
 
A smaller salmon farmer is Ian Anderson, of the early Seventies group Jethro
Tull (they made their first record only three weeks after he started playing
the flute; it sounded like it, too) who put some of his money into farms
around Skye.  He's just moved the head office of his operation (Strathaird
Ltd, with an annual turnover of 2.5 million and 80 employees gutting fish and
managing rock bands) from London to Inverness.  Next time I'm up that way
I'll sniff about Loch Slapin before scrambling up Blaven.
 
 
-- 
ARPA: jack%[email protected]          USENET: [email protected]
JANET:[email protected]      useBANGnet: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack
Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Dept., Glasgow Univ., 17 Lilybank Gardens,
      Glasgow G12 8QQ, SCOTLAND     work 041 339 8855 x 6045; home 041 556 1878

    
    
    
    	Oh .... Another "Burns" joke eh ....  !!!!	:=)
    
    
    
    
    	keVin Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrns
    
    
    
    

    Nice one George...."in the very best of taste, of course".
    
    My sympathy keVin, must bring back some memories, eh?  Especially
    at this time of year.
                                                           
    "You take the high road and I'll take the low road......"
    
    "I belong to Glasgow......"
    
    At least the Scottish know how to celebrate the Christmas / New
    Year season in the proper fashion.......
    
                Yours missing the true celebratory spirit,
    
                            Murphy.