An Impressive Start for SNP
During the First Hundred Days
By HARRY McGRATH
GLASGOW - In the first column I submitted to The Celtic Connection after returning to Scotland, I wrote that even the Scottish weather had changed in my years away. I now need to retract that foolish notion unreservedly.
This "summer" Scotland has re-established its reputation as the only place in the world where Spring melds seamlessly into Autumn. In Leith I heard the situation summed up by an old lady who, after much discussion concerning the absent summer, said to her friend "Ach well, at least we wurrnae flooded oot."
The relationship between the weather in Scotland and the spirit of the place has long been a subject of speculation. I recently passed a convivial evening in the Abbotsford pub on Rose Street in Edinburgh, where the company included poet Alistair Reid who penned one of the great modern expressions of that relationship.
His poem Scotland was written in 1971:
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. 'What a day it is!'
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
'We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!'
Alistair has lived most of his life furth of Scotland especially in New York where he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. He told me of his last visit to his native land where he was one of a hundred poets who read at St. Andrew's University on the same day.
As always, he came under pressure to read Scotland which he did before taking out a lighter and setting the poem on fire. He then told the audience he would never read it again.
Reid says that his poem is no longer relevant; that the Scotland of 1971 when it was written is not of the Scotland of 2007 when it was read. The spirit of the place has undergone a transformation.
I am in Edinburgh now for the world's biggest arts festival and it is not hard to detect what Reid was getting at when he reduced his poem to ashes. The city is abuzz. Apart from the main arts festival, there is a fringe festival with over 2,100 different productions, a book festival featuring many of the world's leading authors, a film festival, and an international television festival all running more or less concurrently.
A striking feature of the Edinburgh Festival is the way the best of Scotland's artistic talent is presented alongside the best of the rest of the world. At the Traverse, Scotland's new writing theatre, I saw a play called Damascus by young Scottish writer David Greig which is one of this year's big hits.
From there to the book festival and a talk by James Kelman, Scotland's only Booker Prize winner, his books finally re-released after he had to draw welfare to survive. Two days later it was back to the book festival for American author Richard Ford who showed up in a heather coloured sweater and, remarkably, started his talk by reading Alistair Reid's Scotland.
One event I was not able to get a ticket for was the book festival's Question and Answer session with Alex Salmond, Scotland's new First Minister. His Executive agreed to double the festival's funding, one of many things that has created a generally positive public response to the Scottish Nationalist Party's first hundred days in office.
Other elements of those hundred days include the saving of certain Accident and Emergency wards, the cancellation of bridge tolls and student graduate tax and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, the floating of a proposal to bring broadcasting powers back to Scotland from London.
Nor is the past forgotten. Salmond recently unveiled a statue called "The Emigrants" at Helmsdale in Sutherland to honour the Highland people who were cleared from that area. A 10-foot replica of the statue known as "The Highland Settlers Monument in Canada" has been raised in the centre of Winnipeg to commemorate the arrival of the people there.
All this and the declaration of a "national conversation" on Scotland's constitutional future which is to include all points of view from independence to increased powers for the Scottish Parliament short of independence to leaving things the way they are. The last of these now seems unlikely as the so-called Unionist parties have coalesced to call for increased powers in the hope of "cawin the feet" from the Nationalists.
How much the first 100 days of the Alex Salmond's administration has contributed to lifting the spirits of the country depends, to some extent, on the political persuasions of those making the assessment. However, even many of his opponents have been forced to agree that it has been an impressive start.
This is not to say that the woman from the fish shop has disappeared completely. Already there are voices, both in Holyrood and Westminster, asking "Who'll pay for it?" and others who say that 100 days is nothing and only in the long term can conclusions be drawn.
For now though these are good days on this piece of the planet due in no small part to an articulate and statesmanlike First Minister and a profusion of action, discussion and planning.
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