The Cafe

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Morelle Smith
The sincerity of Gordon Brown

In the little I saw and heard of the 'first two acts' of the debates I was reminded of the US presidential debate in 1980, which I watched when I was there. The two candidates were Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. It was blindingly obvious that Carter was a sincere man, while the latter was putting on a show, surprising nobody as he was an actor after all. But his show was dismissive, a smiling contempt for the words of the person who was both sincere and struggling with that, unable to put on the kind of glossy suave front that Reagan adopted so easily. But the nation voted for the actor.
     My sympathy for Gordon Brown as a person increased after his gaffe of forgetting to take off his mike before he made his comments. As Kenneth Roy says, it would be hypocritical to suggest that humanity acts otherwise. For me, it made him come across as more human and so, more sincere rather than less.
     But I think what disturbs me most is the allusion by Kenneth Roy to Mr Salmond's apparently saying that Act 3 should have been blocked from Scottish TV screens. Did he really say this, or was it just a joke? Anyone suggesting a 'block' on Scottish TV screens rings alarm bells in my mind. So we're to be deprived of choice? We're to be told what we can and cannot watch? Now what other governments in the 20th century decreed what people could not watch or listen to? Somehow that does not sound like the democracy that Mr Salmond felt was being threatened when he was not invited to speak along with the three others.
     I rather like having triple nationality – Scottish, British and European. And if any other countries were to offer me theirs I'd be happy to add them to my collection. But maybe as I said, his comments were meant as a joke – we should not after all take too seriously what politicians say under pressure, as it can tend to make them forget to remove the mike before making comments which were never intended to be public.

David Kinnon
He's been rumbled

I have read with interest and no small measure of agreement Kenneth Roy's various pieces on this current general election campaign.
     I have not watched any of the prime ministerial candidate debates from start to finish. I found them manufactured and tediously repetitive, going nowhere near the substance of each party's manifesto contents. The 'Daily Politics' programme's election debates which were live in the early afternoon and repeated in the small hours were much more informative, pitching minister, shadow minister and Lib-Dem spokesman head to head. These programmes reveal much more than the debates.
     Much as it irks me to agree with the lugubrious, ubiquitous and non-standing Salmond, it is only fair that with the prospect of a hung parliament, the minority parties such as the nationalists in Scotland and Wales should have been given every opportunity to let the UK electorate understand their potential influence in the UK parliament. I believe that right should extend to all parties in a democratic society. That reveals the flaw in the 'televised debate' mentality, and the never-ending hype over the latest poll figures. As soon as one candidate, prime minister potentially or not, appears as the single representative of his party, the matter personalises and the manifesto emphasis is lost. The party political broadcast system seems to me to have a more sensible basis of communication.
     However, other aspects of this whole trivialising of a serious political moment occur to me. 
     • Taking each party, how many paid-up independent individual members do they actually have?
     • Taking each leader, what percentage of these individual paid-up members actually voted for him to be leader?
     • Which persons were members of whatever party committee was responsible for writing and editing the respective party's manifesto?
     I think that the answers to those questions would be a real eye-opener for the voting public. It disturbs me that choices of great importance are put before us by leaders of parties whose membership is measured in thousands rather than millions, written by committees of perhaps failed or faceless political figures.
     So far as Gordon Brown in Rochdale is concerned, personally I see no invasion of privacy. In the public nature of the campaign, all is fair game; in the political nature of the contest, the character of the protagonists is important. Others have suffered. For example, Tony Blair suffered the indignity of George W Bush's 'Yo Blair' episode. I cannot recall Margaret Thatcher having made such a gaffe – I'm sure someone will. In a nutshell, Brown's been rumbled.

John MacLeod
Religious swipes all round?

Brian Fitzpatrick (SR 245) understands a need to respond to Alex Wood on the subject of child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps, however, his reply falls into some of the same traps as Alex Wood's original article.
     It's never easy to be a religious minority and that situation is compounded when the religious minority is, in the main, of traceably-recent immigrant origin (nothing whatsoever derogatory intended – I'm also one of a religious minority and I've been an immigrant myself).
     Mr Fitzpatrick states that:
     'As a headteacher, Mr Wood will also know that the incidence of child abuse is higher amongst his own colleagues in education and that child abuse levels in the Catholic church are no worse and, on some research, less than amongst other professions and markedly less than amongst teachers and, dare one say it, evangelical boy scout leaders.'
     Is he not, in those comments, descending to the level of making unsubstantiated side-swipes?
     Taking a more reasoned approach, would it not be better to point out that child abuse by teachers, social workers, doctors and police officers is extremely difficult to have addressed in Scotland under current child protection legislation? This is because individuals in those particular occupations are part of the system for policing child protection and those responsible for policing in any sphere are usually markedly reluctant to entertain allegations against any of their own number.
     Mr Wood, as a headteacher, is presumably a designated person. When designated persons deal with 'concerns' regarding a child the 'concern' becomes a 'professional opinion' which seems to be treated as the equivalent of a fact. Those organisations act in consultation with each other. When a child protection matter they raise is brought to a child protection case conference it is dealt with in a quasi-judicial manner, but with none of the protections offered to the accused in a normal court situation: it is frequently the case that the same individuals are acting as accusers, prosecution, judge, jury and executive agency.
     There are fundamental problems not just in the manner in which the Roman Catholic church has failed to deal with allegations of child abuse, but also with the manner in which the law of Scotland deals with allegations of child abuse. The underlying problem is in many respects similar: those who have power when it comes to administering the system are unlikely to deal effectively with allegations against one of their own number.  

Francis Young
A narrow escape

On seeing a newspaper report of the Kelvingrove and Burrell galleries being closed due to a union strike I thought of the probable disruption of many tourists' plans and was reminded of my own narrowest escape.
     Just after the war while working in Africa I bought a British car, nothing grand, just a 4 cylinder, and used it there for getting to work and at work. After three years my work came to an end and I arranged for my next assignment in western Canada. There was no market for used British cars where I was, so I arranged to ferry the car over to Italy, drive to Dunkirk, ferry to Dover, drive through England and Scotland to Finnieston and ship the car to Montreal on SS Laurentia (one of the few combined passenger and cargo vessels still plying the North Atlantic route) then drive to Saskatoon.
     I presented myself with car at Finnieston at the prescribed hour. The stevedores hooked up the car to the crane which deposited it in the hold. Immediately next, the stevedores' union called a strike, downed tools and left the remaining freight on the dock. By the time I walked to the gangway there was a picket line.
     If they had called the strike five minutes earlier the ship would have sailed leaving my car on the dock, I would have had to pay a huge customs fee for failing to promptly re-export the car, I would have been stranded in Glasgow or Montreal with no job and no money to get to Saskatoon where the job was waiting for me.