Deafened by the static: Separatists are listening only to their own noise

A slightly different version of this was printed in The Shetland Times published on Friday, in print only.  I tweeted on Friday, when one irate offline reader described it as ‘utter shite’ on social media, that I would not be blogging the piece until after I’d finished my weekend run of Morton Through (To) Midnight radio shows.

So here it is. Three days have passed since the column’s original publication; Sunday saw an old friend resign as writer for the local magazine I edit, Shetland Life, appalled by my ‘rant’. Judge for yourself. Oh, and there’s a piece by Ian Smart which covers similar ground  here: http://ianssmart.blogspot.co.uk/

It’s been interesting, over the past couple of weeks, to see some of the most strident MacMeeja Yessivists cautiously modifying their public stances as  the quiet majority for ‘No’ becomes more and more evident.

Even in the event of  a ‘No’ vote, Scotland has changed, changed utterly, seems to be the emerging line. A new political discourse has been born, and we are in the glorious sunkissed uplands of a country irrevocably bound for alteration. Just...not yet. Because there is the beginnings of an acceptance that on 18 September, Scotland will vote to remain part of a United Kingdom. The cover-up of exposed backsides, and their ‘Yes’ tattoos, has begun.

Still, some established chatterers are convinced that the Great Turnaround achieved by the SNP in 2011  could repeat itself, that the bookies’ odds against ‘Yes’ are a delusion offering potential profits to the daring (currently, we’re looking at 1/5 to 1/9, averaging at 1/7). I’m fairly sure the wishfully-thinking Yessers are confusing a low-turn-out  PR protest vote with a (hopefully) high-turn-out yes/no referendum. Also, remember the way the SNP focussed that 2011 vote on Alex Salmond as an individual? It’s notable that personalised Salmondism has waned drastically and the ‘Yes’ campaign has tried, strenuously, to keep his profile low. It’s surely the contemptuous giggle which offends most. 

But more importantly, I think the trumpeters of a ‘Yes’ victory have been deluded by something else: They have confused debate with the sheer blaring noise generated by their own internal conversations. They want it to be so. They say, loudly and at interminable length that it shall be so. Everyone on their online social media feeds seems to agree with them. Therefore it must happen. But those social media feeds are curated by their owners, with numerous blockings and dismissals. They’re all ‘friends’. And so the separatists have listened to their own chatter, deafened to everything else by their own static.

In the physical, public-hall-world, the so-called ‘debates’ have been packed with disciplined, briefed, crib-sheet armed Yessists. The ‘pre-discussion show of hands’ approach has frequently been traduced by those pretending to be ‘don’t knows’. The people who will vote ‘no’ have not bothered to turn up, are too bored by the whole thing to comment either audibly or online, or have been scared into silence. Either by sheer, unreasoning, bullying shoutiness or - a nod-and-wink official 'Yes' policy, I’m certain - by personal vilification: if in doubt, play the man (or woman), not the ball.

Please, don’t tell me ‘it’s just as bad on the other side’. As recipient of some foul-mouthed gibbering from The Worst of Separatism, and a long-time online observer of both camps, I can tell you it isn’t.

Of course, all the firepower, most of the action, has been in the central belt of Scotland. As one ‘Yes’ campaigner said to me, ‘that’s where the votes are’.  It was predictable that English journalists sent north to witness Scotland’s wasting of energy, resources, time and money on the independence ‘debate’ would be seduced by the Youth-Fellowship-come-and-have-a-caress evangelistic rhetoric. Much of it comes from shiny-cheeked organisations with ill-advised, all-too historically resonant  names such National Collective and Common Weal, Yestival (Smiley Face!) and, God help us, ‘The Third Force’. Does no-one read history books? Or see the parallels with mindless, happy-clappy  fundamentalist religion? If you’re creative and arty, comes the message, hands in the air, sway gently! You MUST support separatism. And if you don’t, better shut up or you could find it tricky getting a gig, especially in Oor New Caledonia. Cuddle and carrot, sanction and stick.

I had a journalist up here recently (one of many, it should be said; everyone’s fascinated by The Shetland Question(s), to which the answer is always, always no, we don’t want a separate Salmondland, and no, we don’t want to be part of £100-a-pint Norway).  He was genuinely appalled at my conviction that there will be a ‘No’ vote, probably near the long-standing Scottish UK/Nat percentage split of 60-40.  That was not his impression from talking to, well, other nationalists. And besides, remember 2011. Freedom!

He’s right in one sense. If those who have all along quietly supported a United Kingdom get complacent, if they fail to turn out on 18 September, there is a risk that the NatMachine’s ruthless ability to mobilise its central belt supporters  could actually bring us close to an irrevocable vote for separation. So it is absolutely crucial that those who hate borders, who stand for equality and justice for everyone, irrespective of creed, race, education or geographical location, comes out and votes ‘No’. And actually, I do not believe that those  Labour supporters who failed to turn out back in 2010, opening the way to Salmond’s appropriation of power, will fail to stand with the party’s policy on social justice for all. Which is, for me, the one moral choice.  

Also: As the likelihood of a ‘No’ vote grows, elements on the lunatic NatFringe have begun muttering about (a) vote rigging and (b) preparing for ‘direct action’. This is (a) the empty posturing of the daft, and (b) threatening behaviour which clearly implies, under Scots Law, a Breach of the Peace.

After the ‘No’ vote, there will doubtless be sackcloth, ashes, rending of garments, petulant screeching. There could be closures of and mergers of newspapers and doubtless, a few flouncings-off to holiday homes in the Dordogne and Algarve by huffy pop stars and pundits alike. The SNP Holyrood administration  will be exposed as a one-issue campaigning sham, and I expect that any ‘completely altered political environment’, will come down to an utter loss of appetite for the dangerous romantic delusion that is nationalism.

Journalists: working for the clampdown?

A slight variation on my Spaekalation column from The Shetland Times of 4 October

Journalists. According to various polls, right down there among the least trustworthy members of society, along with social workers and prostitutes.

And sometimes the most cavalier with the truth, too. Especially those traders in tittle-tattle and loose-mouthed opinion, columnists. Take that 'according to various polls' phrase in the first line of this article. I have no idea what those polls are, or were. I was told that stuff about journalists and social workers in the pub, and it stuck in my mind. I added the prostitutes in for effect. 

This, however, being the age of internettism, I can Google 'journalist+trustworthy+poll' and discover that a survey by the Royal College of Physicians, no less, found in 2009 that journalists were considered the least trustworthy creatures on earth (well, in Britain), even less than politicians.  Most trusted were doctors, funnily enough. They scored 90 per cent against the hacks' 19. But as I'm married to a doctor, I reserve the right to average out our score. Even though Susan may object.

So, that was 2009, long before the grisly horrors revealed by the Leveson Inquiry. Goodness knows how low public opinion of reporters has now sunk. And this week, it all got a whole lot worse.

The Daily Mail – for which I have, I will admit, written in the past – is one of the last newspaper success stories, widely bought and read in print and online, making money, employing large numbers of staff. Yet it is despised and derided in left-to-liberal circles as a cruel, prurient, sexist, racist, hopelessly biased organ of the right. And most hacks would give their right arms for a job there. Members of the NUJ? Hell, yeah. 

It's always filled me with both amusement and despair, that the National Union of Journalists would strike to the last sub-editor sitting to defend the employment rights of its members, some of whom work happily or unhappily for organisations with the toxic morality of not the gutter, but the sewer. In the case of the Daily Mail, with its 20^th century past including Hitler-supporting Nazi sympathy, its present-day,borderline racism, its ghastly, preening self-satisfaction, I look back on my freelance news-gathering self and am appalled that I ever had anything to do with it. But I needed the money. Proprietors? It wasn't our job to worry about proprietors. They were all The Forces of Evil, after all. We took the money and, err...undermined the system. Man. In a subtle, intellectual fashion. World War Two Bomber Found On Moon!

But there are other papers, worse ones and better, and there are, as well as evil journalists, plain bad ones, wilfully careless or personally vindictive. Good ones too, and sometimes good ones working for bad editors or against scary subs. I have the dubious distinction of having both written a front page splash for The Sun (headline, not mine, SCABNOST! about blackleg labour unloading reefers at Shetland Catch) and being the subject of one, the result of a vicious, anonymous letter sent by a well-known Shetlander.

In the latter story's case, the fact that it was untrue ('we know it's not, Tom, but my editor says I have to write something') did not stop the Sun's management from splashing it with addition of the word 'slur' to keep things 'honest', in red-top moral terms. If you've forgotten, it was to do with the supposed existence of gay orgies in the village of Voe involving various weel-kent Zetlanders.

Now, as at the time I was hosting a national daytime radio show, this was the kind of rubbish I suppose I should have been able to shrug off. Not that it matters, but it was all invented, vindictive nonsense. However, my elderly father, despite being quickly warned about the whole business, was upset and confused. For him newspapers still had power, still had authority. The idea that they might print something untrue was anathema to him. Even The Sun. Even with 'slur' in the headline.

My assorted bairns just thought it was funny. But the anger really took hold when I thought of my father, filling his car with petrol as The Sun's disposable headlines blared across the forecourt, and his pals gossiped.

Lately, I've watched one of my own offspring navigate the celebrity waters with remarkable assurance. Not that it owes anything at all to me. The tabloids have never been anything but kind. Only one newspaper has traduced him, inventing quotes and misrepresenting his views to reinforce what was obviously journalistic bias. And that was a Scottish 'quality', one apparently proud of its broadsheet past. So that's all right then.  

This week, Ed Miliband had to read the most scurrilous, pathetic vicious portrayal of his late, eminent  father's views in the aforementioned Daily Mail. He hit the roof. And on his behalf, we had the fantastic spectacle of Alistair Campell returning to full-on Malcolm Tucker Terminator mode on Newsnight, ripping the Mail and Lord Dacre apart like pieces of soiled tissue. Gone was the cuddly, calm Campbell we have learned to live with on Twitter and telly. Tony Blair's Rottweiler was back, and for once he had the moral high ground.

True, Ed and the Labour Party had political capital to make, especially during a Tory Party Conference which has seen the Conservatives portrayed, or portray themselves, as frankly and happily repellent in policy and style. But my heart was with Ed. And I wondered about the reporters who had to work on the Mail stories, the anonymous newshounds digging through poor old Ralph's memoirs, the  kid researchers on work experience or Bank of Mum and Dad subsidy, the desperate hackers at the newsface, harangued by newdesk dictators, trying to hang on to their jobs, holding fast to the Mail line.

          And I thought: journalists? Prostitutes? Which is the less hypocritical profession?

Anyone done a survey?

Copyright Tom Morton/The Shetland Times 2013

For Peat's sake: My Shetland Times Spaekalation column on burning local biomass...

I am bored with windfarms. Tidal energy? Wave power? The Orcadians have stolen a march, or a tidal race, on Shetland even though our tides and waves are of course far, far better and racier than those belonging to the inorganic beef farmers of the southern isles.

Who needs salt water? For the last few weeks I have been consumed with thoughts of a far more immediate, less engineering-heavy source of energy. I speak, of course, of peat.

As I write, I have just returned from  the first of what will probably be nine visits to the hill, there to load the already raised and mostly dry peat onto the trailer of my Goldoni two-wheeled tractor (Mediterranean Merry Tiller, known as Lascivia and an evil, vicious machine from hell. Or to be precise, Italy). Our peat banks are a tortuous and boggy 100 metres or so from the nearest passing place, and easier access has been denied us by the SIC’s Ditch Department, back in the days (two years ago) when it was intent on digging enormous trenches beside every Shetland road and eradicating all forms of wild flower infestation. Fortunately, the council no longer has a ditch department. It has been ditched,  so that the money saved can be ploughed into the maintenance of consultative iPad trials and    the insertion of communications devices into the skulls of councillors. Putting a flea in The Flea’s ear, I believe this has been called.

Anyway, what I have to do is put the tiller/trailer on a  road trailer, tow it to the peat bank, unload it, trundle my way to the raised peats, fill it, wrestle my way back to the passing place, transfer the peats, and repeat six times in all until the big trailer is full. That’s about two and a half hours of work. Back to the house and, peat by peat, stack the brown horrors. 

Now, I know that something is missing from this scenario. And that something is bags. Plastic fertiliser or sheep or salmon feed bags, the classic method of transferring peats home. I hate them with a great hatred. I hate the way the grow brittle and break, but only once you’ve filled and are lifting them. I hate the way they fill with water, re-soggifying the dried peats. I hate the fact that they add several more processes to the already ludicrously human-heavy business of using peat as a domestic fuel (pleading with somebody for bags, fetching them,taking  them to the hill, unfolding and filling them, lifting the full bags onto a barrow, barrowing them to the road, stacking the bags, lifting them onto a trailer, lifting them off a trailer, emptying them). Admittedly we have a neighbour who has offered to quad-bike-and-trailer our peats to the road but that still involves hand-bagging. As opposed to handbagging which is totally inefficient. The leather  just won’t take the strain.

Two years ago, I crazily bought several hundred net sacks designed to carry logs; These proved even more susceptible to light than plastic feed bags. They had the tensile strength of toilet roll after a few days on the hill. I wept peaty tears of rage as they failed time and time again. Scraps of these horrendous items still blow up and down Ronas Voe, and may even have been swallowed by salmon and incorrectly identified as parasitic orange worm infestations.

Anyway. Six wee Goldoni trailerfuls of peat make one big road-trailerful. I estimate nine more Ifor-Williamsfuls to get the rest of the peat home. I am treating it as a penance. I am contemplating ponies and kishies. And of course, while engaged in this work, I have been thinking. And the future of Shetland is of course, not wind, not wave, not tidal, not the ridiculous notion of imported wood. It is peat.

Back in the 1970s, just pre-oil, it was suggested that Yell, 55 square miles of which is covered in peat to a depth of at least five feet in old money, could become the site for a peat-fired power station. This was in the end rejected in the face of black gold’s arrival. Now, peat power stations are nothing new, though it is generally argued these days that burning peat is a heinous environmental sin, second only to eating dolphin-poodle stew, as is common in Faroe, where the ceremony of the mass poodle slaughter is  a much loved annual event. And dolphin farming is common.

But Estonia has a modern peat-and-biomass fired power station, so does Finland, and there is a sneaky way in Scandinavia of planting your used peat bogs with Reed Canary Grass which can be harvested, turned into briquettes and used as fuel, or processed to produce the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine, which is like LSD and makes you feel like you’re inhabiting an alien planet. Some would say that’s entirely unnecessary in Yell, but who am I to comment?

You must admit, this is a much more interesting prospect than awful oil, tedious tidal or woeful, bird-chopping windfarms. Hallucinogenic electricity, made from peat and plants! The aroma of peat reek, wafting across Yell Sound! And just think of the spin-off industries, like tushkar manufacture, kishie-making and pony breeding.

Because obviously Goldoni two-wheeled tractors wouldn’t be appropriate. Besides. They’re rubbish, and I hate them. Want to buy one?

First published in The Shetland Times