Kenneth Roy
The eternal struggle

David Martin, who died last July, was one of the brightest people I knew at the BBC. Although he was widely respected, he was not universally popular. Ambitious, driven personalities seldom are, and David was both. He was shrewd and knowledgeable about how it was, who knew what, in the Scotland of the 1970s. He was also supremely professional: no one worked faster or harder. As an inexperienced reporter, dabbling in television when what I really wanted to do was go on editing a bankrupt theatre magazine, I was in awe of him. He was everything I was not: a dedicated broadcast journalist, a craftsman.
     There was another side to David, a philanthropic hinterland, that most of his colleagues never glimpsed. I learned only recently from his wife Christine that after he left the BBC he did important charitable work overseas. Also, he and Christine were – Christine still is – deeply attached to the ideals and work of St Margaret of Scotland Hospice. He was there as a volunteer a few days before he died.
     There are two reasons why I always thought fondly of David and went on thinking fondly of him long after we lost touch. First he gave me a break; then he taught me something valuable. The break was an opportunity to do a half-hour programme of my own choice in the weekly current affairs series, Current Account. It was an opportunity offered to few. I would be assigned a producer (a lovely man called John Coleman) and a film crew and, within reason, I could go anywhere I fancied.
     Given the choice of any topic under the sun, you would he hard pressed to select anything duller than the state of the boring old, catatonically tedious old, clapped out old, falling apart old, Church of Scotland. But that was what I chose to do and, all these years later, I still haven't the faintest idea why. It was, I now realise, a form of professional suicide. I remember Ken Cargill, one of the regular Current Account reporters, expressing polite surprise, masking a genuine horror, when I confided the dismaying news.
     To his credit, David Martin went along with it. He had made the young man an offer and he wasn't going to renege on it. But the result was, if not disastrous, as pedestrian as you would expect it to be. We looked glumly at the half-finished work in the editing studio and David gave me a verdict that has stuck with me for 30 years. It was so searingly obvious and yet it had never occurred to me.
     'Ken,' he said, 'this is a subject, not a story.'
     A subject, not a story – when journalism is all about stories and not much about subjects. He was right. There was no story here. If I had to choose the Church of Scotland I should have focussed on some Kirk controversy, got a hook to hang it on, instead of this worthy overview of a failing institution at work. David was, as ever, a man in a hurry. He asked the film editor to spool back to one of the interviews. It was with an idealistic young minister, a socialist called Erik Cramb.
     'I think there's a story in him,' David said brusquely. 'Let's have more of him and less of everybody else.'
     He was right again. The passionate concern of Erik Cramb, his angry vision, had human possibilities. We reconstructed the film around Erik and it worked better. The night it was broadcast, Ken Cargill phoned me at home and said that he wouldn't have believed that a film about the Church of Scotland could be made interesting. But I never worked with David Martin again. Instead, when I was not presenting Reporting Scotland, I worked a studio audience for Ian Mackenzie, asking questions about the meaning of life. Mackenzie and I were always quite comfortable with the meaning of life. It seemed more fun than stories.

I wonder what David would have made of what is going on in Scotland now. The journalist in him would have relished much of it – he would have adored the Purcell affair. But I doubt that he would have found the battle for the hospice other than troubling.
     I am keener on stories than I was in the 1970s. I think I may be turning into a reporter at last. When it entered my life just before Christmas, the Blawarthill Hospital land deal and the impact on hospice funding was just that: a story, an interesting enough story. It was a challenge to piece together the evidence of 10 years, and present it as skilfully and concisely as possible. But over the weeks, and as the weeks have turned to months, I must reluctantly acknowledge that the original story has metamorphosed into a subject. Would David have approved? Perhaps he would have made an exception in this singular case.
     I believe that this is one of those classical struggles between right and wrong. It is really as important as that. I know none of the board members of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde personally, but have no doubt that most are honourable people motivated by what they consider to be the public benefit. The worst to be said about the non-executives is that they are misguided or compliant. As for the executives, having committed to a certain course of action, they will not be easily dissuaded from it. They may be guilty of corporate arrogance in the face of intelligent cross-party political opposition to their policy; but that is about as far as it goes.
     The corporate deed, however, is another question. We know where the right resides. It is to be found in the hospice, where there is love and dignity.
     Where resides the profound wrong?
     It is partly to be found in the inconsistencies of the board, whose director of communications writes in late January that the hospital development will involve the 'transfer' of patients from the hospice but whose chairman writes barely a month later that there is no connection between the hospital and the hospice.
     It is partly to be found in the obstruction encountered by a member of the board, John Bannon, when he attempted to discover the truth.
     It is partly to be found in the claim being made by the chairman, Andrew Robertson, that the hospice is safe in the board's hands when, as everyone knows, the plan to convert it into a care home would destroy its ethos at a stroke.
      It is partly to be found in the breathtaking statement of the same Andrew Robertson, in a letter to East Dunbartonshire Council: 'As you will be aware there is a marked move away from large numbers of in-patient accommodation. The emphasis is progressively towards encouraging independent living and hospice care at home'. Says who? When was the public consulted on the idea that people in the last stages of a terminal illness are to be encouraged to live independently? I have asked the cabinet secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, to tell me whether this is the policy of the Scottish Government.
     It is partly to be found in the proposal that a commercial outfit dedicated to making a profit for its shareholders should be preferred to a charitable organisation, graded excellent in every department by the Care Commission, in which the community has a major financial and emotional investment.

And I ask myself whether right will triumph over this profound wrong. I am unhappy about the answer I get: I don't know. We are dealing with a monstrous bureaucracy. We are dealing with the exercise of power, and the powerful do not care to be disturbed.
     They will, however, continue to be contested and challenged.

So, once more, I have tried to find a story and produced a subject instead. To make matters worse, it is the oldest subject in the book; the eternal one. But it will have to do. Somewhere out there, perhaps, David is appreciating the irony.