Everyone

has BCCI

jokes.

There's a

fellow

selling

badges:

Give us a

quid --

I'm from

the

Western

Isles!

I WRITE these lines late at night in a comfortable guest house on the

west side of Lewis, with nothing but the Atlantic between me and

Labrador and a howling wind rising from the east. It tugs at the slates

and whistles mournfully in the cables. This gale has blown constantly

for three weeks and nightly reaches high fury: outside church last

night, it whipped off my bonnet and hurled it joyfully into the ditch

before blasting my glasses in after it.

I am staying in the village of Shawbost, which brings me neatly into

the current tangle of the Isles. This is the ward of councillor Donald

Macleod, the new convener of the Western Isles council, enthroned in the

wake of the BCCI fiasco. His accession excited much anger with

rent-a-quote politicos fighting to be first on Reporting Scotland and

the West Highland Free Press almost psychotic with rage.

Scarcely surprising: after all, convener Macleod is neither a

Freemason nor a member of the Labour Party, and how anyone without such

august qualifications can take charge of Comhairle nan Eilean is beyond

the comprehension of your average Hebridean statesman.

BCCI! Everyone here talks about BCCI: it is several months on since

the event, mind you, and this is my first visit since June, so perhaps I

am over-alert. Actually, everyone is taking it very well. My taxi driver

cracked jokes about it on the way across from Stornoway Airport.

Everyone has BCCI jokes. I'm told there's a fellow in Stornoway selling

wee badges: Give us a quid -- I'm from the Western Isles!

In the shock of the bank collapse the initial local reaction was

incredulity -- so much money? -- followed by witch-hunting ire. This

winter, everyone is much calmer. The disaster is regarded stoically as

''one of these things'': a mishap, a turn in Providence, for which

perhaps no-one may be blamed.

The real anger is reserved for council incompetence after the crash.

Its hapless public relations made the islands look ridiculous. The

national media were given the run of the council buildings and rapidly

orchestrated officials into a farce worthy of Brian Rix -- though the

inevitable comparison with Compton Mackenzie was drawn not by a hack but

an ambitious local councillor.

Even more maddening was the row over convener Macleod's election.

Despite his colourful past, councillor Macleod is a man of charming

affability and a gruff stoical attitude to life. When one thinks of some

of the members on Comhairle nan Eilean we could have done much worse

than Domhnuill Easy.

But there is fear and worry out here too. From my brother, a young

schoolmaster at the Butt of Lewis; on a short-term contract, his job

will be one of the first to go if post-BCCI cuts are as savage as many

fear.

''Whatever you've been told about cuts, they will be worse than you

can possibly imagine,'' sighs a local journalist as he gives me a lift

into town. ''We are talking perhaps a 12% budget-slash, and about 200

initial redundancies. Another 100 jobs will be lost as a direct result

on the contract and service front and then there's the knock-on effect

on the community. The loss of spending power, shops closing, social

problems . . .''

He changes gear savagely. ''The Government will have to bale us out.

It'll have to, because this thing is utterly artificial. Do you know

that the BCCI's assets in Britain actually exceed its British

liabilities? The nice old Bank of England has gone its own way and

declared it over, playing by the Queensbery(correct) rules and the rest

of the world is out there laughing at us.''

He tells me something else. Apparently council officials had become

worried about BCCI in the autumn of 1990, after hearing of the American

charges, and had contacted their Edinburgh brokers, R. P. Martin. Up to

Stornoway beetled director Iain Macleod and Norman Scott, who held

council hands over dinner and told them everything would be all right. I

expressed surprise, but ''the whole island knows that,'' says my friend

witheringly.

Normally I write this column with vitriolic merriment: but it is hard

to say anything either vicious or funny about the Western Isles this

winter. There is solemnity in a Hebridean November.

Some aspects of the press coverage of BCCI make me very angry. Perhaps

most fatuous was the insinuating emphasis placed on the discovery that

Iain Macleod of R. P. Martin is related to council finance director

Donald G. Macleod -- as if there was a sinister significance in the

blood tie.

Actually they are only second cousins. I, too, am a cousin of Iain

Macleod and also of Donald G. Macleod: for that matter, I gather I am

also a cousin of the council's chief executive Doctor George Macleod,

and -- inevitably -- of convener Donald Macleod.

And if it comes to that my mother's first cousin married a neice of

the wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson -- so, if Reporting Scotland is

to be believed I should be held responsible for the war in Vietnam.

Island relationships are complex and extensive: but we memorise them

with careless ease and operate happily in the wide network of extended

family. I am in contact with second, third, and even fourth cousins, and

the oral tradition in my family reaches back to seven and eight

generations.

Accidents happen: people make mistakes. Yet, as I recently wrote after

the death of Robert Maxwell, we seem strangely unable today to accept

such bizarre twists of Providence.

The latest calamity in the Western Isles cries out for Government

intervention. Whitehall might well have intervened by now, had not our

councillors made such fools of themselves. A civilised society cannot

stand back and allow a local economy to collapse for the folly of its

ruler. There is widespread public sympathy for the Hebrides, the

Highland language and garb have long been expropriated as symbols of

national identity, and Governments have long wooed the Scottish vote by

being generous to the teuchters. Ian Lang ignores us at his peril.

Out here on the edge of the world life goes on, in its customary

gaiety of ceilidh and party and gossip. Oh, the gossip. I'm told that

the Free Church Presbytery of Lewis is now being invoked to discipline

five young members who attended a recent Runrig concert. The Stornoway

Kirk session has apparently proved oddly reluctant. Two different people

have confidently advised me that a Comhairle official -- prominent in

the BCCI farrago -- has just bought himself a hotel in the Borders in

his wife's name.

I plan to dine well tonight: the restaurant here offers prawns and

lobsters and wild salmon and peach cardinale. It will not be without a

twinge of guilt. A mile further down the village my grandfather was born

in an old thatched cottage exactly a century ago. He has been dead now

for many years, but I often wonder what he would have to say on the

strange ways of our modern world and the pathetic struggles of our

latter-day politicians.