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.
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