New Statesman Scotland
The recently revealed fact that Glasgow is the sickest city in Britain will do nothing to assuage the old enmity between Scotland's biggest city and its capital. Particularly as the medical evidence comes hot on the heels of an academic report that pointed out that Edinburgh is booming while Glasgow is in the industrial and economic doldrums. None of which makes the job of Glasgow's top spinmeister, John Brown (big brother of Gordon), any easier. Brown senior is unhappy with both reports but is particularly irate at the economic one, which he regards as an expensively researched comparison of chalk with cheese. He is probably right.
But every cloud, as they say. Sticking the "sick city" label on Glasgow has lent more power to the elbows of those on the Scottish executive who are keen to rejig NHS funds in Scotland so that an extra £14 million a year finds its way along the M8 to Glasgow, starting in April 2000. The trouble is, to boost Glasgow's funds the annual health spend on Edinburgh and the Lothians will have to be trimmed by £27 million, which has raised hackles in the east. Now Holyrood's cross-party health committee is demanding that the refunding be postponed until September.
Glasgow is reported to be mustering its forces for the battle. This prospect does not exactly cheer this diary up. Arguing over resources is the stuff of real politics, of course, and NHS funding is an important issue. But if the argument fuels the old - and often bitter - rivalry between Scotland's two most important cities, we could be in for a rocky future. The idea of Glasgow and Edinburgh working to undermine one another is not a happy one. And the inter-city acrimony could scunner the rest of Scotland into losing any enthusiasm it had for Holyrood. That would be a tragedy.
The news that far-right militia groups in the US have taken to hijacking Braveheart-type symbols of Scottish nationalism will come as no surprise to anyone with a smattering of American history. Scots may pride themselves on their "man's a man for a' that" leftism, but out there they do things differently. Scots Americans are notorious as being the most Waspish of the Wasps. One of their number - Steve Forbes of the Forbes Publishing dynasty - has pitched his tam-o'-shanter into the ring for the Republican nomination for next year's presidential race.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the original Ku Klux Klan of 1866 was a creature of disaffected Scots and Scots-Irish confederate officers. And that it owed its 20th-century resurrection to a novel published in 1905 by a Scots-descended Presbyterian minister called Thomas Dixon. Entitled The Clansman, the book formed the basis of the notorious 1915 film Birth of a Nation by D W Griffiths. Both book and film celebrate the Klan as a defender of white civilisation in the spirit of the "clans of old Scotland". It was the modern Klan that made the crann tara, the fiery cross, into the symbol of vicious racism. Like every "ism" ever devised, Scottish nationalism has a way of turning lethal.
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