Let's share...or maybe not...

I know how old I am by the landmarks that my former students reach.

Last week, one had me - no, not chortling but guffawing at her description of what I call the 'jobby test'. You know the one: once you reach the age of 50 in Scotland, you're sent a wee bit of cardboard and some sticks and you're asked to put in each window of the wee bit of cardboard a specimen of your - well - jobbies. You send them to a lab which tests them and, all being well, boab's your uncle: nae bowel cancer.

It's a great idea, this test. It could have saved the lives of a few of my friends - and did in fact save the life of two of them. But the reality is kinda gross.

It's also scary for me that some of my former students are so OLD.

I write that with a fair amount of feeling, since on Monday I have an audiology test at the RAH (tinnitus caused by impacted wax in my left ear) and I then come home to preparations for a colonoscopy at Gartnavel the next  morning. I could have called off the colonoscopy but, having waited so long for an appointment and made such a fuss at having to wait 5 months, I think I'd better just get on with it. I will, of course, swallow the 4 sachets of revolting emetic. Avoid solid food. And look forward to being told (as I was last time I went through this): You have a lovely appendix!

I'm alarmed, though, to be told to bring a dressing gown and slippers, not to mention having to sign a consent form for a 'procedure.' I'm not staying in. Oh, no! My driver on Tuesday is the least patient man in the world, and he'll have me out of there as soon as I can walk.

I take it as a good sign that waiting lists in Scotland are getting longer for tests like these. I have one friend who was so repulsed by the idea of the jobby test that he binned the bits of cardboard, only to be told 8 months later that what he thought appendicitis was in fact bowel cancer. Lucky for him the NHS in Scotland didn't give up but pursued him till he delivered a sample.

But, oh, I'm dreaming of Port Ellen, which is where I'll be on the following Monday...

It's history, man

I'm on uncertain ground writing this, but there are plenty of people out there who can keep me right if I get the facts wrong:

I left primary school in 1960. Here is what I knew about Scottish history at that point: Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off; Robert the Bruce learned from the spider; James the Sixth became James the First when the crowns were united; David Livingstone 'discovered' Africa; Robert Burns wrote poems and collected songs. That was it. I swear to you I knew more about the history of Govan, where I lived.

By the time I left secondary school, I didn't know much more about Scottish history. I realised Scotland had a different education system from England (or was it England and Wales or England and Wales and Northern Ireland?) because I sat A levels in sixth year and was told these were English exams. I don't think I even knew Scotland had a different legal system, although I'd heard of the 'not proven' verdict, dismissed in my family as: we know you did it but we can't prove it. But we're watching you, ya wee B@st@rd.

By the age of 18, however, I could tell you all about the causes of the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848; the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; the Great Reform Act of 1832; Queen Victoria and the British Empire. I can also give you a pretty good list of the kings and queens of England and I know all about heroes like Nelson and Wellington.

When I went to France for the first time, in 1968, I realised pretty quickly that the French knew every step of their own history. The republic was an important part of their identity. People knew the dates and the people involved all through the existence of the state they had created. They were proud to be French but they had opinions on how their country had come to be as it was - and they didn't always like their past. They had different heroes and heroines from the Brits and were proud of them.

Me? Well, I quickly realised I knew nowt. Educated French people tried to talk to me about the great scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, mentioning David Hume and Adam Smith in the same sentence as Voltaire, one of my heroes. They talked about the role of the Scots in the American Wars of Independence, which the French supported, about John Paul Jones and about Scots who helped draft and signed the Declaration of Independence. I was, frankly, embarrassed.

It was only later that I began to look back into French history and realised that the French had created a unified state by driving many cultures in to the ground: Breton, Occitan, Alsacien, etc - and that's before we even look at the actions of the French in their 'colonies.' That's what my critical friends objected to.

From now on, what I'm going to write is my opinion about Scotland. I'm not a member of the SNP but I have strong views on identity and belonging, and if you think you might disagree, it would be better for your blood pressure if you don't read on. 

So...how come I - with 2 degrees and a teaching diploma - know so little about Scottish history? Well, I think it's not an accident. I could try taking you back to the Scottish Wars of Independence, but I can't do that with any conviction because of sheer ignorance on my part. So let's go back to the Union of the Parliaments in 1707.

This was followed by the Jacobite Revolution of 1715 and the big one in 1745. There's a tendency to miss the connection but these 'rebellions' showed the Scots had not given up on the possibility of independence after 1707. And if, as a result, things were bad in Scotland in 1707 and 1715, they went  to hell in a handcart after 1745.

1745 was followed by a long period of repression. Some of us will tell you the repression was intended to reduce Scotland to a county to the north of Northumbria. Some of us argue that the repression never ended.

Here's one suggestion of how it was done:

First you divide the country. There's the Lowlands, Scots-speaking and about to be swept up in an industrial revolution that will make and break many communities. The Lowland Scots have already started moving off the land (their own clearances) and they will move to the urban areas of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. Some of them will be involved in the slave trade, in dealing with cotton and tobacco (which we will never talk about). Some folk will get very rich in the second half of the 18th century. The richest will have their children educated in schools that emphasise their Britishness, not their Scottishness. The aristocracy will go even further and send their children south to be educated. There they will no longer see themselves as lairds but as landowners. The aspiring classes will abandon the Scots language and then despise people who speak it. The age of Robert Burns (in my opinion) is a one-off: after Burns, poetry and song will be in English. Before we know it, the way to get on is to speak English. This in a country where till about 1750 the languages of the courts and the law were Latin, French and Scots. 

Then there's the Highlands. You start by calling the population 'the Irishers,' on the grounds that they speak Gaelic. You make them different from the rest of the population. You tell everyone their ancestors were not native Scots. Lies, of course. But they are different from the Lowlanders and they scared the crap out of the Lowland middle-classes in 1745 by how close they got to their doors. You use education to neutralise the danger from the Irishers: schools are set up where speaking Gaelic is punished. Highland dress is banned - as above. The people who had previously thought of themselves as clan chiefs with a responsibility to look after their own go away to be educated and come back unable to speak Gaelic or Scots, but every inch the English aristocrat and with the same ambitions: to make money out of their Highland territory so they can enjoy the lifestyle of their southern counterparts. The Highland Clearances then follow. 

And that - finally, I hear you say! - brings me to the matter of museum displays - or one in particular.

I have two beefs with the Arran Heritage Museum. Firstly, it misses an opportunity to promote Arran Gaelic. The people of Arran spoke Southern Gaelic. It had many links with the Gaelic still spoken in places like Gigha, Islay, Jura, Mull and Colonsay. It could so easily have been promoted in the displays at the museum. You know what I'm not saying here: are there any local people on the board who could give the rest a steer when it comes to authenticity?

The exhibit also glosses over the Clearances. Yes, there were 'clearances' or 'improvements' according to the Arran Heritage Museum, right across Scotland. These had to do with changes in agriculture that were happening across Europe. I know about this. I used to volunteer at the museum of Rural Life in East Kilbride and, in the absence of any direction from museum staff as to what I was meant to tell visitors, I read up. The agricultural revolution of the late 18th century encouraged landowners to mechanise, to plant different crops, to rotate - to be more scientific in their approach, in fact. It didn't necessarily mean kicking people off their crofts and smallholdings across Arran, forcing them to emigrate. That, I think, was a decision taken by the local landowners and needs to be investigated.

The good people of the Arran Heritage Museum should revise the cards they have attached to their exhibit. 

Do I take the same approach to - for example - the investigation of Glasgow's role in the slave trade? You betcha! 

Boots

I grew up in a solidly working class community in the 1960s. We were pretty radical in our own way: there were many Communists and Socialists among us, we voted and we often voted Labour, we went to union meetings and night classes and attended lectures by the WEA. We haunted the library. Family life was pretty tranquil. There was no divorce and what separation there was was spoken about in hushed tones. There were things we rarely talked about: violence within families was one; sex was another.

There was evidence all around us that people were having sex. The schools were full of the children of the wartime generation and there weren't enough teachers to teach us all. (The best teacher I had in primary was a woman called Mrs McNab, who had retired years before but came back to help deal with the shortage of teachers. She was so frail, we took it in turns to meet her at the top of the road and carry her bags for her every day). If there was a sexual revolution going on in the 60s, it reached Scotland a lot later than it did Carnaby Street. Contraception was not spoken about above a whisper or in jokes among adults, but from an early age girls knew that pregnancy meant the end of childhood as many young couples then 'had to get married' if the girl got pregnant.

I remember teenage girls in my school and later at university getting agitated because they were 'late.' I remember a few leaving school, their education at an end. A few of my fellow students disappeared, to return months later to take up their education again with no explanation of where they'd been.

And if anyone thinks it got to be easy to get hold of the contraceptive pill, let me tell you that right up to the late 70s, unmarried women were told by their GPs to 'go away and come back with your mother and we'll talk about it.' Just the thing you want to be talking to your mammy about in a highly repressed society. Luckily the family planning clinics didn't take that view.

It is, frankly, a relief that times have changed. Divorce is common and not regarded as a scandal. Living together is the norm. People no longer 'have to get married' and girls and women don't leave their place of education because they're pregnant. Contraception is available from many outlets. In Scotland we used to have a huge problem of teenage girls having babies. I can't find any figures for this online, but it seems to have become less of a problem recently.

Which brings me to Boots. Boots kept the price of Levonelle, the 'morning-after' pill, very high, when retailers (and that's all Boots are - not doctors or pharmacists - just retailers selling us stuff) dropped their prices by half recently. The reasoning of the company was that they didn't want to be accused of "incentivising inappropriate use, and provoking complaints, by significantly reducing the price of this product". So what use, I wonder, would be inappropriate? And who would complain?

We know fine well giving women the right to determine the use of their own bodies has always upset some people. It looks better if we can disguise it as a way to protect 'under-age' girls, although there is absolutely no evidence that girls are using Levonelle. So who is using Levonelle inappropriately? Daft lassies who have had one-night stands? But they're not daft if they're turning up looking for Levonelle next day. Quite responsible, in fact.

That was yesterday's statement, and today Boots rolled back from that position: their spokeswoman (smart move that, putting a woman upfront) seemed to suggest that it might not be safe for women to take Levonelle too often. What's the evidence for that? And it was also suggested that women who need emergency contraception should be tested for STDs. Really? Even in stable relationships? Aren't Boots making a judgement there - again with no evidence? Very paternalistic.

Is this all meant to put women off even asking for Levonelle?

Underneath all this flim-flam there's a serious point to make. I can't say this too often: it's nobody's business how a woman uses her body. So it matters not one bit if there are people who think women should not be having sex outside marriage or one-night stands or even sex at all.

It's time we moved on. We still have a problem with violence inside marriage. The sexual abuse of children. Sex trafficking. All of them a lot more damaging than letting a woman choose to take Levonelle.


PS I haven't mentioned homosexuality here, but I would like to remind people if women hadn't forged the way with feminism from the 80s onwards, there would probably be no equal marriage.

A cold call

I get a lot of cold calls to my mobile. So many that these days I don't answer the phone and don't call back unless I can be sure who is calling. Usually it's an 0161 or 0191 number. I don't know anybody with these dialling codes so I delete the calls. Today I got one that started 0141 and wondered if this was someone I knew. Not wanting to appear rude, I called back. And anyhow, I was sitting in the car waiting for somebody and it passed the time.

The person who answered said: Good morning, you're through to (buzz) from (buzz) and (buzz). I asked him to repeat that and he did. I was none the wiser but it was clearly some kind of cold call from a company. I asked him again what company he represented. He told me. Still none the wiser, I asked what the company did. He said something about 'trust.' I repeated my question: but what does your company actually do? Turns out they re-finance debt.

Debt? said I. I've been retired nearly 10 years and the first thing I did was to make sure I had no debt. First time ever in my life. Feel free to hate me, because you sound like a millennial and that means you're in the group of poor sods the Tories are trying to reduce to poverty with austerity, low wages, high rents, no hope of buying a house, minimum wage, short-term contracts and now they're taking the UK out of the Common Market so you can kiss your rights goodbye. Need I go on?

He was silent for a few seconds and then said: I hope you manage to stay debt-free.

O, I will, said I. And I hope you manage to remember the generation before yours didn't get ripped off the way you are - there is a better way to live - as long as you never vote Tory. Ever.

Thank you, he said.

At that point, the person I was waiting for turned up and we ended our conversation.

These blood-sucking public sector workers

Right enough, I always felt when I was a public sector worker that as a teacher I was overpaid. Like police officers, doctors, nurses and paramedics, fire staff, council staff. Of course, there were bits of the job we loved but the hours and the pay were not the reason we signed up.

I mean, I got paid for being a principal teacher in a secondary school. Spent my days trying to make sure the department was working smoothly, managing staff and resources - and taking my own personal work (preparation, marking) home to do Monday to Thursday evenings between 6 and 9. I had Friday night off to unwind and Saturday to do the essentials like the shopping and cleaning, and then wound myself up for the new week by working on Sunday from 12-6 and sometimes later. I did the school shows and the school trips abroad in my own time.

When I went to work in a local authority job, I worked on improvement with school managers, wrote and ran training sessions for school staff, arranged study visits to and from European partners, interviewed people for jobs, supervised staff, got working parties together to provide teaching material for pre-5 to Higher and arranged cooperation with colleagues in other councils to save council tax payers' money. The pattern I'd started in school just carried on. Except email was now available and the council IT department had arranged that people could get me any time, and my Sunday routine sometimes had me working from 11am till 11pm, depending on what was happening.

I remember our boss telling us on one occasion that he didn't think he was getting 'value for money' from us, although he was unable to tell us what it was he wanted us to do to prove we were doing a good job. A travel agent who had been unable to get hold of me for 3 days was annoyed to be told I was 'out in schools' and didn't like being interrupted when I was doing pre-inspection checks, and then went on to tell me how easy life was for people like me because we weren't 'in the front line.' (Tell that to colleagues who dealt daily with impossible parents - not to mention HMI). I'd just put thousands of pounds of business his way but he seemed to think working in the public sector was a skoosh. If only.

Now it's Phillip Hammond who thinks public sector workers are overpaid. Let's just make sure we all understand what's going on: The Tories resent the fact that public sector workers sometimes (not always) have permanent contracts, agreed terms and conditions and sometimes the backing of a trades union which will defend their rights. They also have pensions which they pay into all their working lives.

In other words, they're not part of the 'gig' economy in which workers have no status and few rights. The 'gig' economy suits the Tories just fine. When we are out of the EU, our rights as workers will be further eroded. The UK will join some of the poorest countries in the developed world as a place where we have no protection. Already, we see education is now out of the reach of many young people in England (and to an extent in Wales). Workers with a grievance, including women sacked or forced out of a job because they get pregnant, now have to find huge amounts of cash to take their case to an industrial tribunal. Many people have workplace pensions that won't give them any kind of decent life in retirement. People are now expected to work longer - the state pension age will shortly go up to 70. And pensioners face the prospect of having their financial situation - not all that great if you look at other countries' provision for the elderly - damaged further when the 'triple lock' is abandoned. The Tories are also rumoured to be trialling 'cash for GP appointments.' They are running down the NHS, starving it of cash, so that they can then tell us it doesn't work (though it did till the Tories took it over) and privatise it.

So what do we do? I can't say this often enough or vehemently enough: stop voting Tory! Stop being conned by the Tories' attempt to blame the poor, foreigners and public sector workers for everything that's wrong in the UK. Ignore their claims that the only way forward is austerity. That just plays into their desire to have a workforce desperate for work and living on the minimum wage, with no rights and no hope of improvement. Don't let the Tories continue this 'dumbing down' of society in which working people get no respect from anyone, are kept short of housing so as to force rents up (do any of the private renters vote Tory, I wonder?), and where homelessness is now an epidemic among young people in some parts of the UK. And only those who start with money can make money.

Have a good look at the Tory cabinet. Do these people represent us? Have they any understanding at all of what's it's like - for instance - to lose everything - absolutely everything - in the Grenfell Tower fire or to be living fearfully in a tower block with the same cladding or to be shuttled around from hotel to B&B - and end up on the streets?

Most of all, are these politicians competent to do the jobs they've been given? Take a look at them and get back to me.

The n word

Let's just check. The n word came to the UK from the USA, as many things do. The word has such awful racist connotations that it can't even be said or written in the USA.

But how many people have actually heard the n word used as an insult here in the UK? I haven't.

In my youth, I heard the n word regularly, in a series of expressions, none of which had racist overtones at the time: nigger brown was a colour, Ten Little Niggers was a book by Agatha Christie before the title was diplomatically changed, and then there was the nigger in the woodpile, the expression this MP is said to have used as a racist insult:

I've listened to what she said and I don't think she used the expression as a racist insult. I think her manner of speaking is many things: old-fashioned, not very fluent, but racist? No.

So what we have here is false indignation by the press and TV who, having tried very hard to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn because of all his politically-incorrect activities - and failed - have now turned their attention to Theresa May's very rocky government and are now using any weapon to further
destabilise it.

Don't get me wrong. I regard the Tories as the enemy of everything that matters to me and I don't want them in power for a minute longer than necessary. But I want them out of government by legitimate means. Not deposed by the UK media. The media, unelected, subject to corruption (as we know from the phone-tapping scandal among other things), and controlled by a small number of billionaires with little commitment to life in the UK. Let's not be fooled here.

'Government' Money?

I don't care if the Conservative Party puts up a statue to Margaret Thatcher. I was sickened by the influence she had as PM but she's been gone a long time now. Under her government, life in the UK became much worse. Her government was cruel and narrow-minded and if you want to know where the 'nanny state' originated, you need look no further: the Tories started interfering in life our bedrooms and classrooms 30 years ago and successive governments haven't stopped since. Any attempt to portray Theresa May as a worthy successor to Thatcher has been well and truly blown out of the water since the general election.

I doubt if I would cross the road to see either of these people but I do care very much who pays for the planned statue. I get annoyed when I hear people talking about funding things with 'government' money. The government has no money. The people with the money are us - you and me. We pay for government and just about every service we have through income tax, vat, stamp duty, airport duty, duty on petrol and alcohol, etc. Given the state of the UK right now, a statue of a former Tory PM is not top of my list of essential spending. How about yours?

The billion pound bribe paid to the DUP is a different matter. I keep wondering if removing that kind of cash out of the national budget to keep a political party in power is even legal. It's certainly not ethical. Did anyone ask if we thought it was okay? Has anyone in government explained where the money is to come from? Whose budget is to be robbed? Health? Education? Social security? Or has Theresa May in fact got a magic money tree in the Treasury that she can shake from time to time? Is Philip Hammond burrowing away with his Letraset printing the money?

Are the Tories accountable for how that money is spent in Northern Ireland? Arlene Foster has a very poor record in that regard. How much did the DUP lose over 'Cash for Ash'? £400 million? It was £490 million, to be exact.

We are so far from transparency in government in the UK that I wonder how politicians have the nerve to complain about how other organisations like the EU, the United Nations or NATO spend their funding. As for the endless complaints by politicians and the press about how foreign aid from the UK to countries round the world is spent, I'll bet few of them can tell us any of the good projects that foreign aid pays for (clean water, education, providing basic health care such as vaccination). It's as if the whole world is getting rich on the back of the UK government, whereas the reality is that the UK pays 0.7% of its gross domestic product in foreign aid, the very minimum recommended by international summits - and we only reached that target in 2013.

I've been reading today about people despairing at referendums and wanting no more of them. I look at it differently: I've visited places in Europe where there are rarely national votes taken on anything but where a population of 5 million would be seen as unmanageable, so power and budgets are devolved to much smaller communities. There seem to be fewer local politicians with the power that our elected representatives have and they have to give an account of how every pound of their devolved budget is spent.

I'd like to try accountability. But then, I'd like to try a lot of things: turning Westminster into a museum and housing our elected representatives in a modern building somewhere outside Manchester, where there are enough seats in the chamber for everyone and the equivalent of a travelodge beside it for accommodation. I'd like our representatives to pay for their own meals out of their wages and to have a cap put on their other expenses. I'd also like them to endure the same pay freeze as other public sector workers. And our representatives should have one job: if they take our money, they can give us 100% of their attention.