History and legend 114
Posted on
January 04, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘history’
To our English brother 166
Posted on
January 03, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re enormously grateful to the alert reader who uncovered this little gem. “The Claim Of Scotland” is a book published in 1968 and written by one Herbert James Paton, a philosopher and a senior civil servant at the Admiralty and Foreign Office, who sadly died the following year.
If you click the image above, you’ll find a scanned PDF of the foreword, contents and first chapter, which at just 14 pages is a modest task of reading. Prepare yourself to marvel at how little times have changed since this pre-North Sea oil age, and to smile ruefully at a few of the sentences you’ll encounter.
Information retrieval 85
Posted on
December 18, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Someone asked us yesterday for some facts and figures to help them with a debate, and it got us remembering one that we never see being brought up, perhaps because it’s buried in the archives of the Herald under Sport > SPL > Aberdeen (no, really).
It’s a piece that pre-dates the Scottish Parliament (and is written in a style that makes it seem older still), but it’s a complete mess of broken formatting, clearly the victim of numerous website redesigns, and painfully hard to read even when rescued from behind the paper’s paywall.
So we’re going to preserve it for posterity here in a cleaned-up, more user-friendly presentation, because it’s pretty much dynamite.
A man of foresight 30
Posted on
December 13, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Baron Wallace Of Tankerness on Spain, in 1997:
Yeah, because devolution killed Catalan nationalism stone dead too, right Jim?
A statute of limitations 130
Posted on
December 12, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The wording of that headline isn’t strictly accurate, because the Claim Of Right For Scotland – signed in 1989 by over 80% of Scottish MPs, and many other politicians and representatives of “civic Scotland” – isn’t a law, and has no binding force.
Nevertheless, it’s a document that carries a certain amount of political weight, as an open acknowledgement by Labour and the Liberal Democrats that the people of Scotland (not Parliament and the monarch, as is the case in England) are sovereign and are entitled to determine the form of government they want.
Up to a point, anyway.
How things change 98
Posted on
December 04, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Well done to the alert reader who spotted this 2006 Q&A with Jack Straw MP, former Foreign Secretary and then Leader of the House Of Commons, on the BBC website:
Suppressed Memory Lane 87
Posted on
November 27, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s been quite the week, so to celebrate smashing our all-time one-day pageviews record twice in succession, here’s a wee And Finally… bonus extra.
You’ve probably already seen this on Twitter today, after alert reader “Corstorphine Craig” knocked up an inventive graphic from some old material and sent it to us, whereupon we retweeted it and it went rather viral. But it deserves a front-page spot.
Viewers of a certain age will of course recall how well the coal mines, Ravenscraig, Linwood and Bathgate all flourished in the safe hands of the UK when Scotland was swindled out of its Assembly despite voting in favour of it.
But as the parties of the Union and their tame media fall over themselves to rubbish the sensible, achievable vision laid out in the White Paper this week, it never hurts to remember how their scare stories usually end.
The ghost of devo past 71
Posted on
November 20, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve already had a message from the future today. Here’s one from 101 years ago.
Click to see the full story, and heed the tale well, jam-tomorrow fans.
Knowing our place 207
Posted on
October 02, 2013 by
Stewart Bremner
When I was a child I was taught of a long-ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were somehow both bad men and good and the defenders lost, their king dead in sight of the sea.
When I grew up, I realised that the defenders were not of my country, they were of what was then my country’s neighbour; the attackers from yet farther still. I felt a degree of confusion, that I should have been taught something that was not of my country’s past, but the past of my country’s neighbour.
The Sunday matinees 58
Posted on
August 18, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As we’ve already noted today, Wings Over Scotland has the internet’s most excellent readers. Two of them have been working together over the last week or so, after we put them in touch, to share some fascinating Scottish history with the rest of us.
Click the two images in this post for an intriguing hour-and-three-quarters.
Echoes from history 62
Posted on
August 05, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’d never heard of this until a reader mentioned it this morning in the comments, and it seems worth bringing to wider attention. The article we’re about to (re)print below is a transcript originally created by the now-defunct www.alba.org, along with a couple of extracts from the Scottish press of the time.
The original version is still visible on www.archive.org, but we’ve tidied it up a bit and added a few notes and comments of our own in red.
Forbidden fruit 36
Posted on
April 24, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s funny what you find when you’re not looking for it. As a result of a piece we wrote yesterday, we found ourselves tracking back through some older posts to check a couple of facts, and stumbled across something quite interesting.
Within certain limited parameters of “interesting”, of course.
