Ian Hamilton QC

by Ian Hamilton

To be conscripted by poverty and killed in a Scottish regiment was all the nationalism we were permitted for more than two hundred years. Still the conscription goes on. Until recent protests the army recruiting teams scoured the sink housing estates offering a job and a home to the poorest. It is an old British tradition. Nelson’s fleet scoured the coastlines of Ireland and Scotland kidnapping all the men they could find. Now the Royal Navy has the insolence to boast that one third of Nelson’s sailors were Scots. There is a monument to him in my neighbouring village of Taynuilt. I piss on it on Trafalgar day.
 
The violence of hunger and the lash did not end there. The sailors were discharged at Portsmouth and had to make their own penniless way home. The English vagrancy laws were passed to make it more difficult for them to beg. Today there is a direct parallel. Wounded and sick soldiers are left untended, and in some cases sent back to Iraq. Maybe it is not all that proud to be British when we remember such things, and why should we forget?

There was a time when the Labour Party did not forget. In the days before New Labour many town councils would not let recruiting parties near their schools yet I see them still at it. They have resorted to even meaner methods. In my childhood they had a recruiting poster saying, ‘THREE SQUARE MEALS A DAY AND ALL FOUND.’ To the hungry such a cynical appeal had its merits. That is what I mean by conscription by poverty. Do you wonder that I rage at the British armed forces?
 
This arrogant treatment by the haves of the have-nots should be a thing of the past but it isn’t.  For many the schoolroom map still glows a comforting red from the time when the empire was there to keep the blacks in order, or so we were taught. We have a very hazy idea of what the empire did. We know that at home it enriched a few and impoverished the rest. Not until we were rid of it could our rulers say, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ It was these hungry conscripts of the Royal Navy and the Highland Regiments who won the empire

The Highland Regiments march on in every Scottish heart. Forgotten are such lowland regiments as the Cameronians, the only regiment never to drink the ‘loyal’ toast. It is the Highland Regiments we dream of. Who among us has not a secret thrill at their history of bravery and at their pipes and drums and tartans? We love the Thin Red Line at Balaclava and the pipes at Lucknow. Even when they could not defend their own homes Colin Campbell’s unwavering soldiers still enchant us. The enchantment for my part is a secret one because I am ashamed. To the world the Highland Regiments typify Scotland and Scotland is not like that at all. The Regiments gave a home to the defeated Highlanders. Their colonel was their chief, but all that was make believe. The real truth lay in the words of the poster, ‘THREE SQUARE MEALS A DAY AND ALL FOUND’.

Against that background the Edinburgh Military Tattoo continues to blaze away. A fine spectacle it is and I love it too. Yet in no way is it typical of Scotland or our history. It is an irony that the tartan is our international badge for the clans were broken at Culloden. The clansmen, conscripted by loyalty to their chiefs, died for nothing and vanished from history. I suspect the Braveheart Warriors will disagree. They will sit on the Castle Esplanade in their thousands, bold with the bevy. ‘Finest small country in the world,’ they weep into their beer, and then vote unionist for their own destruction. It is the false sentiment I attack, not the soldiers. Their boots go echoing on in every conscience.

Nowhere do they echo more loudly than in Downing Street which has no conscience. When I volunteered for the forces all those years ago I did so because I believed the fight was just. Soldiers do not fight in cynicism. They fight for something they value. In the Iraq war we sent our youngsters to defend ourselves against weapons of mass destruction, or so they told us. They told us lies. There were none. These youngsters in Iraq are not defending their Scottish homes. This war is the last dying twitch of imperialism and our soldiers out there know it. That is why I, an old man, rage for them.

Blair betrayed us and them. The sands of the desert are sodden red, not red with the wreck of the imperial square that broke. They are red with the blood of all nations, Iraqi, Scottish, English, American alike, dead for oil and Halliburton. Blair says he will answer to God. He should answer first to a war crimes tribunal. More than people have died in Iraq. Regimental pride and the false glamour of soldiering have died with them. Maybe at last the echo of the boots will shuffle into silence.

Just inside the West door of Westminster Abbey there is a stone on the floor saying, ‘REMEMBER WINSTON CHURCHILL.’

Remember Anthony Blair. Some day he will be brought to justice.
 

 

I have a researcher whose report I publish without comment because it speaks as I speak but more eloquently.

Back from various libraries. Getting into the War museum was worse than breaking & entering the Bank of England. I had inside help from the lassie in the Antiquaries’ Library, but even so, what a goddam palaver! I had to have passes issued, bag searched, and be escorted up big flights of stairs by a puir  auld sowl with arthritic knees- the result of standing in a  swamp in a bloody jungle in Burma, he said. Seemed appropriate, somehow.
 
Try these quotes.

1) James Grant. “It is generally acknowledged that but for the retention of the kilt in the British Service and for the high character of the regiments who wear it, the military name of Scotland had been long since forgotten in Europe, and her national existence had been as completely ignored during the Wars of Wellington as in those of Marlborough; nor in times more recent had the electric wire announced that,when the cloud of Russian horse came on at Balaclava and our allies fled “the Scots stood firm.” 
 
The kilt alone indicated their country, as our Scots Lowland regiments are clad like the rest of the line. The material and picturesque costume of the ancient clans which is now so completely identified with modern Scotland is one of the few remnants of the past that remain to her, and it is remarkable that it has survived so long .”
 
2) The Elder Pitt. “a hardy and intrepid race…..they served with fidelity as they fought with honour, and conquered for you in every part of the world.” 

It’s clear from Grant that in e.g. Canada, it was useful to have one bunch of savages to cope with another bunch. He’s very good on tomahawk wielding natives, scalping away.(He’d spent his teens in Newfoundland getting his education in the barracks). The chilling order was given (probably in Gaelic) ”Sling your muskets! Dirks and claymores!” That’s what Scottish soldiers were for - extremely vicious hand to hand fighting.
 
I got very upset at the exhibition,which shows how the poor buggers were integrated into the British army. (Grant is VERY good on the Black Watch Mutiny.)
 
But the most upsetting thing of the lot was walking back down the esplanade behind two young squaddies, in camouflage  uniforms, black hackles in their bonnets, and boots glittering in the sun. Slim, tanned, fit, arrogant - very, very beautiful. And sexy as hell. 

And I thought of barbed wire and bullets and roadside bombs. Or at the very best, peching up stairs with your arthritic knees giving you gyp.
 
 It’s the criminal waste of it. 
 
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by Ian Hamilton

I sit here in Argyll, wallowing in common sense, remembering with incredulity that twenty years ago I was a judge. Most judges are judges for life, or until their private life catches up with them. Ad vitam aut culpam people used to call it. I was lucky. I gave it the chuck before death or disgrace brought me down.

Now I sit and read in my local paper words of wisdom from the bench such as, ‘There is far too much of this going on.’ (There is always far too much of it going on.) Or, ‘I take a very serious view of this sort of conduct.’ (I bet he does, but not half as serious a view as the poor bloke before him.)

Being a judge is like being Mother Goose in a pantomime. Certain lines are expected from you. I tried to avoid them. I have so often sinned that I know what it’s like to be in the dock, and it’s not funny. Society is on the side of the bloke up there and in the dock you have to put up with whatever rubbish he slings at you. The sentence is bad enough but the insolence of petty jacks in office is infinitely worse. Power without humility is power abused.

Sitting in the sheriff court is a rotten job. Most of the people who come before you need help, not punishment. I knew one sheriff who sat in Oban many years ago. Dealing with a persistent offender he used to shout at him and fine him an astronomical sum he had no chance of paying. Then when the wretch came before him in the means enquiry court he would modify the sum to nearly nothing. The press don’t attend the means enquiry court so they never rumbled it. The Oban Times even praised him for his ‘firm sentencing policy.’ Of course the neds knew of the scam and went along with it. By and a large it worked. When someone went over the top he jailed them. He was a wise old bird. To this day I remember his cynical observation. ‘A sheriff,’ he said, ‘is paid to make decisions. He’s not paid to make the right decisions. Only appeal court judges are paid to make the right decisions and they’re not worth the money.’

He hated jailing people. So did I. There are some people you can’t punish. The very poor are among them. Society is helpless against them. Prison? You’re putting them on the merry-go-round. Back they come before you. Prison sentences please the mob, but a judge isn’t there to please the mob. He’s there to stand between the mob and the bloke in the dock. I presided over a court of law, not a court of vengeance. The public should have no say in the administration of justice except through Parliament. The only people I would punish are the red-top editors who dared to criticise my sentencing. I’d give them six months bread and water and then castrate them.

The independence of the justiciary is a precious principle. In return the judiciary should recognise the humanity of every man and woman who appears before them. Sometimes it’s not easy. There is a class of person known only to Tommy Sheridan and sheriff court judges who have so little of the wealth of this country that they seem scarcely human. Make no mistake Maxim Gorki may have been right when he plumbed THE LOWER DEPTHS but Jesus Christ committed a mortal sin when he said THE POOR YE SHALL ALWAYS HAVE WITH YOU.

At the ejection court I was asked to eject people from their homes for the non payment of rent. I had to bear in mind the thousands of their neighbours who paid regularly. It was hateful putting people out of their houses with their pathetic bundles. I was rich and they were poor and what I did was this, God forgive me. I shouted at the first person to come before me, told him he would surely be put out today, that he was to wait in a side room until the paper work was completed. This so terrified the rest that they squeezed their purses and their pockets until they came up with some suggestion to pay off their arrears, sufficient to save me from putting them out on the pavement. Then I had the man back from the side-room and apologised. You’re doing society’s dirty work when you’re a sheriff.

What is the answer? The redistribution of wealth is the answer but society doesn’t want that. People who say they want it do the lottery in the hope that they too can be among the rich. Surely, surely we can do something through education. Infant and primary education is the most important yet little attention is paid to it. Universities turn out people who know a great deal about very little and **** all about a great deal. I would stop paying for these adolescent wretched students and pay a great deal more to those who teach children from a very early age. I swear it is not the lack of ability that makes people poor but the lack of hope. Give a child hope and that child will climb.

Ach tae hell! I stuck it for eight months and then resigned. No one had ever given up such a lucrative job before, and everyone said that would be the end of me but it wasn’t.

That’s why I give a little jump for joy every time I pass a sheriff courthouse. There are more prisoners than the ones behind bars and many of them are sitting on the sheriff court bench, prisoners of a salary and a pension.

by Mike Mackenzie

Iain McWhirter generally seems to have a balanced and clear minded view, which is what makes it all the more surprising that he uses the following phrases in his article in the Herald of 3rd Sep 07,
 
‘and who note with dismay that plutocratic captains of industry are paying less tax than cleaners. Many of our top companies are paying no corporation tax at all’
 
He is no doubt using poetic licence but these statements are just not true. I would challenge him to cite examples of this claim.

Yes, there are tax loopholes encouraging directors to award themselves obscenely large bonuses. Yes, there is a tax regime which provides positive incentives to plunder our companies for short term gain. Yes, there is a tax system which penalises profit retention as investment. We should change this because more than anything we need to encourage a climate of long term investment for long term benefit. You cannot achieve sustained economic growth in a business culture wholly committed to the quick buck.
 
There is also a clear distinction which must be made between corporation tax and personal tax which McWhirter seems unaware of. SNP policy of cutting corporation tax is the best way to revitalise our sluggish economy. Corporation tax paid in Ireland at much lower rates exceeds by far that taken in Scotland despite their smaller population and is why they are able to afford massive upgrading of infrastructure and improvement of services.

Lower corporation tax is the one measure that government can reasonably and effectively take to make our economy competitive. Lower corporation tax is the way to incentivise the retention of profits for research and development and for the expansion which empowers the dynamic of a healthy economy. We need to revitalise business so that small businesses can become big businesses and can compete on more even terms with global businesses who have core strategies of location where labour costs and taxation are low.

Today’s lean and hungry tigers always become tomorrow’s fat and lazy cats before they fade away. These need to be constantly replaced in the dynamic of a healthy and prosperous economy. What better way to replace them than by ‘growing our own’ and creating the financial and economic culture in which this is possible.
 
Compare this with successive Tory and New Labour policy of paying out huge grants as bribes to companies who locate here. How many of these companies have stayed when the grant aid gravy runs out?
 
Nevertheless, McWhirter is correct in suggesting that the gap between rich and poor has grown significantly under Thatcher and Blair/Brown. Rather than reactivating Old Labour mantra he should be signing on to today’s progressive economics. Rather than a return to the politics of envy we need to move on to an aspirational politics. Rather than banging on this old drum Iain needs to open his ears to what even right wing economists are now referring to as the ‘drag factor’ of the entrenched poor and realise that when people are in a hole what they need is a ladder.

In terms of fiscal policy this must be constructed in the form of simple, clear and progressive taxation that provides a commitment to and is a mechanism for delivering social justice. Instead Gordon Brown has grown a financial jungle teeming with snakes and with precious few ladders. Little wonder the disaffected poor opt out of the game.
 
If Iain McWhirter has any advice for Wendy Alexander and she really wants to make her mark and help those on lower incomes she should sort out Gordon Brown’s tax credit mess. I wish her luck. If she can sort out the cynical subterfuge of this system she will win my admiration if not my vote.

 

A new wind is blowing through our country. It is the wind of change. My mentor John MacCormick was jubilant when he saw a rare Saltire. He called his autobiography FLAG IN THE WIND after a single Scottish flag.

Now we have SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT above our public buildings. Names are significant. Yon bloated unionist on the Scottish TV channel who said it was as significant as the White Heather Club doesn’t know the value of symbols. He should walk along London Road in the wrong colours some night. He would soon be taught about symbols.

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More than symbolic was Linda Fabiani’s visit to the set where STONE OF DESTINY was being filmed. This is the first time a Minister for culture has visited a set of a film about Scotland, or any film for that matter. It was also a film where SCOTTISH SCREEN put over a million dollars into the budget. It gave a chance for a lot of Scottish actors and film makers to take part in an international production.

Linda was wonderful. We were filming outside Paisley Abbey and she stayed for hours. She spoke to everyone. Rob Merilees the producer and Charles Martin Smith the director were charmed. They hadn’t believed that I could produce a cabinet minister for them, and certainly not one like Linda! She even had time to listen to the lowliest runner, breathless on her first film. Seeing the Government’s interest the Scottish Screen representative there and then stated they would provide a reception when the film goes to Cannes Film Festival next May. It premiers next Spring at a still secret venue. Thank you, Linda.

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While we thank Linda we send our condolences to Alan Cochrane, Scottish editor of the Daily Torygraph. Poor Alan! He’s anti SNP, anti Labour anti Liberal, and anti devolution. He’s against everything including the tide coming in but he still keeps cheery. Get a life, Canute!

The Scottish Tories, the only thing he supports, live in whisperland. None can hear the message they’re not allowed to give. That message is support independence or die. Alan would like to attack the Government but can find nothing to say. His usually interesting column has as much direction as a pig sprachling on an ice-bound pond.

Chuck it, Alan. You’d be better reporting flower shows for the Oban Times.

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Mike MacKenzie, who writes so vividly for this blog is seeking adoption as prospective candidate for one of the fifty-two Scottish seats in the English Parliament. This blog is strictly non political so we did not ask him which party he was standing for. Whatever party is lucky enough to get him has picked a winner. We often wonder how Easdale Island is big enough to contain him. It isn’t of course. That man can walk on water. 

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The youngest Scottish actor playing in Stone of Destiny is not long out of school where among other subjects he took Higher History. He told me he had never heard of the Declaration of Arbroath. Does the Scottish Education Department, or whatever name it now goes under, still stick to the fantasy that there is such a thing as British history? There isn’t.

It is an irony that the Declaration is better known in the United States whose own Declaration of Independence stems from ours of 1320.

Alan Cochrane is not the only person who should get a life. Our educationalists are failing the nation.

by Mike Mackenzie

“God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!”
George Bernard Shaw

I like the English. They know their place. They are much put upon and they abide it with hardly a grumble. As long as they have beer and cricket they are content and they have enough of that to dull even the sharpest minds.

There is much to commend this affable mindset. They are comfortable in their enduring class system; a place for everyone and everyone in their place. They care little about cash for honours or Trident’s big brother and not much about Iraq. It takes a lot to move them into discontent. A Napoleon or a Hitler threatening to invade, something of that order, is required to stir the sleeping bulldog.

Who can blame them? Theirs is a green and pleasant land, fertile and with the gentlest of climates. Why should they worry when Scotland dutifully sends them many of our most talented people to help them run the remains of empire?

Like old men sitting in the sun dreaming of former youth and glory they can take comfort in knowing that England, Old England, still has a seat at the top tables, even if this is achieved by hanging onto the coat tails of former colonial cousins in America. In this long sunny autumn of empire they can still rise above crude commercialism knowing that chaps in the City have things under control.

Why should they not be so contented and slumber on in mellow complacency? Why should things not go on as ever, as peaceful and unchanging as a Constable painting?

You must wake up now my English friends. Things are stirring in Scotland. Our Parliament has found legs at last and our sons and daughters will not much longer set off southward and tax their talents on your behalf.

We will not forget our friends in England for it is by setting an example and plotting a new course, into this twenty first century, that we can help you most. You too must do your bit as neighbours now and rise up and be a nation again and England will expect, as expect she must, that every man will do his duty.
 

Their website is

scottishindependenceconvention.com

Worth a look

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