Glasgow

Wednesday

The Spectator

There’s no contradiction between cheering on Scotland and voting for the union

In choosing this September for the Scottish referendum on independence, the SNP was presumably hoping Scots voters would be basking in the glory of a successful Commonwealth Games. There is every reason to hope that the games, which opened in Glasgow this week, will emulate the London Olympics for organisational skill and, moreover, will help to sell an often-maligned city to the world. But why does it follow that Scotland needs to be independent of the UK to organise and enjoy such an event? If these games had been marred by pettifogging bureaucracy or financial constraints imposed by Whitehall, or if someone in London had trampled on Glasgow’s bid and

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The political implications of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow

Several people have asked me to write something about the politics and potential implications of the Commonwealth Games which open tonight in Glasgow. As is sometimes the case, I am happy to oblige. There aren’t any. To think otherwise is to insult the great Scottish public. I am often prepared to do this, not least because it often needs to be done but in this instance, and not for the first time, the people are liable to be more sensible than the pundits. Back in the day, it was sometimes claimed that the campaign for (modest) home rule in 1979 was scuppered by Scotland’s woeful (yet epic!) misadventure in the

Tuesday

Hugo Rifkind

Team Scotland’s Commonwealth Games uniforms are a headache waiting to happen

If you want a laugh, and I suspect you do, take a look at the Team Scotland parade uniform for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games. It’s awful. A kilt that looks like a picnic blanket (note to English: not all kilts look like picnic blankets) and a lurid blue shirt that looks like a headache waiting to happen. It’s an astonishing colour, at once mottled and shiny, like an old Magic Eye drawing. If you stare at it for long enough, and allow your eyes to go funny, you can totally make out exactly why you don’t live in Glasgow. Scotland being Scotland, and this being now, all of this

Friday

William Cook

I can’t recall a time when the destruction of a structure made so many people so distressed

It really is rotten luck, and also cruelly ironic. Just as Glasgow was done debating how best to demolish its hideous Red Road flats, its most beautiful building, Glasgow School of Art, goes up in smoke. No one hurt, apparently, which is a relief, but an awful lot of artwork lost, a unique archive and a precious library. However it’s the actual building which everyone seems most upset about. Indeed, I can’t recall a time when the destruction of a single structure made so many people so distressed. It shows we can love or hate a building, like a person. It shows architecture really matters. So why does Charles Rennie

Daisy Dunn

In pictures: Fire engulfs Glasgow School of Art

The footage of fire tearing through the Mackintosh building of the Glasgow School of Art on Renfrew Street is more than unnerving. Though it’s too early to say how much damage has been caused to the building, it is evident that much of the original architecture has been destroyed. No building is replaceable, but this one is particularly precious. It is without doubt the most important building Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) designed. We are more inclined today to think of Mackintosh’s stylish interior designs – the kind of monochrome-and-rose prints that remain ubiquitous in interior design shops – but his Art School has also stood the test of time. As one

Thursday

Chris Deerin

Scots and English are the same people, with different accents. Why pretend otherwise?

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Angus Robertson debate Scottish independence” startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]Sometimes it is easy to understand why countries break up. Some founder on the rocks of their internal contradictions. Others are historical conveniences that have simply run their course. Czechoslovakia was an artificial construct, a country with two languages and cultures, which split soon after the Iron Curtain fell. The division of Cyprus in 1974 marked the end of the fraternity between the island’s Turks and Greeks. The partition of India was driven by trouble between its Hindus and Muslims. It’s a constant, often tragic theme in history — people decide that what divides them is stronger than what

Monday

William Cook

Our infatuation with high-rise housing has been catastrophic. Good riddance to the Red Road flats

‘If you meet anyone in a pub or at a party who says he is an architect,’ advised Auberon Waugh, ‘punch him in the face.’ Typically, the late, great Spectator columnist articulated an important truth: modern architects have scarred our cityscapes with some truly horrendous buildings, none more so than Glasgow’s notorious Red Road flats. What better way to mark the opening of this summer’s Commonwealth Games than to blow them up? Five of the six blocks will be blown up on 23 July. These five are already empty. The sixth, which currently houses asylum seekers, is due for demolition at a later date. ‘We are going to wow the world, with the

Monday

Anna Baddeley

Under the Skin: one second of tits to every three minutes of glen

‘I thought it was supposed to go on for another half hour!’ said a man in the foyer on the way out. ‘When the alien got burnt to death I thought thank fuck for that.’ Before you get annoyed with me for giving away the ending, let me explain that this is one of those films where plot takes a back seat. More than that, it’s been tied up, gagged and locked in the boot. I can’t stand it when people give away the ends of films, which is why I never read reviews before going to the cinema. Too many reviewers have no respect for plot. So I didn’t know that

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Riding back from Scotland with Ron Burgundy in the privy

When the ticket collector asked to see my ticket, I took the opportunity to ask what time my connection left Birmingham New Street. ‘Are you travelling onwards with the Vag?’ he said. ‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘The Vag! Virgin!’ he said, irritated by my ignorance. I laughed at him. His expression remained official. He touched the screen on his portable machine and presented me with a card printed with the information. Then I went to the lavatory, one of those spacious ones with a curved door that slides back with a hiss at the touch of a button. As I lifted the seat, a voice said, ‘This is Ron Burgundy

Thursday

Alex Massie

George Galloway’s one-man mission to save the Union

George Galloway is unhappy. One of his interlocutors on Twitter has told him to ‘Fuck off back to England’. Gorgeous George is in Glasgow for the first in a series of roadshows in which he sets out his case for Scotland remaining part of the Union and he’s not going anywhere. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not even to England. This will disappoint his many critics. But Galloway has a new, higher calling: saving whatever remains of the British left. To do that he must first save Britain. Which means persuading his fellow Scots they should remain a part of the United Kingdom. Like a latter-day Othello, he loves

Wednesday

Alex Massie

I see no ships (on the Clyde)

The sorry truth of the matter is that Glasgow has been in decline for a century. 1913 was the city’s greatest year. Then it produced a third of the railway locomotives and a fifth of the steel manufactured anywhere in Britain. Most of all, it built ships. Big ships and many of them. A ship was launched, on average,  every day that year. In 1913, 23% of the entire world’s production of ships (by tonnage) was built and launched on the river Clyde. It was an astonishing achievement and the high-water mark of Scottish industrial prowess. Ship-building, more than any other industry, became part of Glasgow’s essence. The locomotives and

Thursday

Kirsty Wark

Kirsty Wark’s diary: On the Caledonian sleeper, the new Donna Tartt, and a week of Edinburgh shows

There isn’t a Scottish politician in living memory who hasn’t been on the Caledonian Sleeper. I always imagined Donald Dewar folding himself up in his berth, he was so tall. He was notoriously sniffy about the company he kept in the bar and once recounted the horror he felt when — stuck in snow — he was forced to fraternise with practically the rest of the Labour front bench for 22 hours somewhere south of Carlisle. Journalists tend to be more comradely. The other night, I took the sleeper in tow with an old family friend, the BBC reporter Allan Little. Over Glenfiddich and cheese we exchanged scurrilous gossip and

Thursday

Allan Massie

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney – review

Laidlaw was first published in 1977, 36 years back from now, 38 on from The Big Sleep. Like Chandler’s classic it has survived the passage of time. William McIlvanney did for Glasgow what Chandler had done for Los Angeles, giving the city its fictional identity. Hemingway used to say that all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn; all Scottish crime writing — ‘tartan noir’ — comes out of Laidlaw. Two years before Laidlaw McIlvanney had won the Whitbread Prize for fiction with Docherty, a novel set in a mining community. This established him as the best Scottish novelist of his generation, and some of his admirers were dismayed when

Friday

Alex Massie

The greatest scandal in Britain is the failure to give poor children a proper education.

Earlier this week, I was part of a panel on Newsnight Scotland discussing the latest – some would say, belated – efforts designed to improve Glasgow’s dismally underachieving state schools. That they need improvement is beyond doubt. In Scotland’s largest city, only 7% of state-educated pupils leave school with five good Higher passes. In Scotland as a whole a mere 220 children from the poorest 20% of neighbourhoods achieved three As at Higher (the minimum grades required for admission to leading universities such as St Andrews). As I said on the programme, this should be considered a national scandal. More than that, a disgrace. (Like Fraser, I wish more people

Thursday

James Buchan

‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh’, by Robert Crawford – review

Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these two cities cherish a rivalry and have followed different paths. Edinburgh, a royal capital until 1603 and a seat of parliament until 1707, and again in recent years, home to a great university and medical school and nurse to writers from Walter Scott to Joanne Rowling, has made almost as much history as Jerusalem. Edinburgh peers down from Castle Hill as if over a newspaper on its toiling rival to the west, besmirched with tobacco and slavery and laden with

Thursday

Alex Massie

I See No Ships

There are times when the SNP’s attempts to persuade us that there are no regrettable consequences to Scottish independence cross the line between worthy and absurd. The future of shipbuilding on the Clyde is one such case. According to the nationalists the suggestion that the Royal Navy (or what is left of it) might be less likely to place orders with Scottish yards is just the usual “scaremongering” put about by Unionist parties that want to put the frighteners on braw and brave Caledonia.  Aye right. It is, of course, true that an independent Scotland might have modest shipbuilding needs. True too that the Clyde yards, if they remained open, could

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Planet London & Planet Edinburgh

Sure, the Economist’s cover story has received heaps of attention these past few days but it’s not the most interesting or even the most important cover story published by a British political magazine last week. Though I would say this, Neil O’Brien’s “Planet London” article for the Spectator is the piece the Scottish National Party should be more interested in. O’Brien makes a compelling case that London is now, more than ever, a place apart. Its triumph is both magnificent and dangerous. Magnificent because London is, in ways scarcely conceivable forty years ago, a global behemoth; dangerous because of the distorting effect this must have on British politics. In significant

Monday

Alex Massie

Can Home Rule Solve Scotland’s Problems?

This is not a Question To Which the Answer Must Be No. I too saw the headline Now 51% Back Independence and thought, “Well, that’s interesting but implausible“. Then I noticed it was a Sunday Express splash and revised my appraisal to “That’s obviously cobblers”. And so it is, making it mildly foolish for SNP types to boast of a breakthrough on the back of a sample of 200 Scots that’s harldy more dispositive than polling, say, my Facebook pals. Nevertheless, Fraser’s post yesterday won’t quite do either. For instance, the boss writes: My hunch is that Cameron’s intervention will not have helped Salmond. The idea that an independent Scotland

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Up with the IRA and Down with the Pope of Rome

Joan McAlpine’s column in the Scotsman this week is uncharacteristically unpersuasive. Since she decided to defend the SNP’s plans for so-called anti-sectarian legislation she was backing a losing horse from the start. Still, it speaks well of her loyalty. Nevertheless, her piece is useful since, in large part, it outlines a kind of consensus that is deemed to exist and from which it is unwise to deviate. Certainly it is hard to think of many opposition politicians who have distinguished themselves in this affair. Even those who question the SNP’s plans do so on grounds of efficiency, not ethics or principle. If the government’s plans are woeful; the opposition remains

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Stephen Birrell’s Conviction Shames Scotland

Sectarianism, we are often told, is “Scotland’s Shame” though there’s also ample evidence it’s actually “Scotland’s Pleasure”. For some at least. The prosecution and conviction of Stephen Birrell for comments he posted on a Facebook page entitled “Neil Lennon should be Banned” marks a new low. Not because of anything Mr Birrell wrote – his fevered outpourings being merely the ravings of a disturbed mind – but because Scotland now imprisons people for the crime of disliking other people and making that dislike apparent in any kind of public forum. This is a shameful moment that demeans the country far more plainly than anything said, sung or written at or