A quiet word on Sunday ferries

"A personal comment by John MacLeod"

I'm grateful to Angus Nicolson for coming to my cheerful defence in a recent thread. Angus is perfectly entitled to run his interesting blog as he sees fit and to his 'various local bloggers' to post anonymous or unmoderated comments under anonymous or pseudonymous styles. In the blogosphere, in any event - excepting a site like Hebrides News, which is run as a virtual newspaper, with an active and conscientious Editor - it is very difficult to insist that all who choose to comment are identifiable, and quite impossible to guarantee they are whom they say they are.

I'm not sure I agree with him that it furthers debate on contentious local topics. Apart from the tasteless, malicious or lunatic fringe - the sort of folk who like to speculate on the sexuality of prominent island figures - nothing is really debated on this site that is not debated elsewhere. I choose to write under my own name because, in my day-job - most visibly as a writer and weekly columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail - I am paid to do so; it seems silly to go under cover in any other context and on any other issue.

On this issue, though - as an islander quietly but conscientiously opposed to the imposition to Sunday ferries on this community by Caledonian MacBrayne and their political wing, the present SNP administration of the Scottish Government - I am especially happy to write under my own name. That immediately gives anything I say here enormous weight and is a signal advantage over Anonymous this and Dr Evadne that, especially under the gaze of the general public. When anonymity becomes but the cover for puerile abuse or the sublimely ignorant, such a position is even stronger. When you think that this is essentially a local issue and that 'Anonymous' is as likely to hail for Carluke, Callander or even California as from, say, Callanish, it is incontestable.

Abuse? Well, I'm not a racist - especially not an anti-English racist. In this local debate, some of the most vociferous voices for Sunday sailings come from home-grown, home-reared Lewismen; some who publicly oppose them are quite recent arrivals (like, for instance, Rev. Andrew Coghill.) The public life of these islands owes much to incomers - most of our local doctors; very many of our teachers; a great many senior officials, especially in the Comhairle and on Western Isles Health Board, and a surprising number of our ministers.

Anyone who lives on this island is at entire liberty to express an opinion on anything, as they are at entire liberty to cast a vote or even to stand for public office. One can, though, quite fairly point out that the right to free speech should not be confused with the right to be heard. The community is quite entitled to weigh the worth of a contribution by its author. If someone has arrived on these islands recently, if he is agitating vociferously for Sunday ferries (or Sunday golf, or Sunday shopping) and especially if he explicitly attacks local religion and showers its defenders - and anyone who dares argue against him - with epithets like 'bigot', 'zealot', 'extremist', 'racist' and like invective - one is perfectly entitled to ask obvious questions.

If you dislike the traditional Lewis Sunday so much - it is, after all, quite famous - why did you move here? We welcome incomers - these islands have always welcomed refugees - but why start to campaign to turn this community into the ones you have fled? Why should we give quite the same weight to your offerings in this debate when you only came here, say, four years ago and may well be on your travels again in four years time? Why should we, in the most theologically and biblically literate corner of the kingdom - even Angus has memorised more Shorter Catechism than most incomers will ever bother to read - sit by respectfully while the latest arrival from the Home Counties lectures us pompously about religion?

Again, he has a right to do so. But we are not under the least obligation to listen. I don't doubt that Paul Blake is a very affable man. I once had the Blakes in my Tarbert kitchen (though I thought Mrs Blake much the sharper and more impressive.) But when Mr Blake stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate in the 2007 Comhairle election - less than three years after arriving on Lewis with a U-Haul van - the good people of Pairc agus Na Hearadh granted him but a pretty derisory vote. If even his neighbours won't listen to him, I am at an entire loss as to why I should be expected to listen to him - though, let me repeat, he has an absolute right to express his opinion: the issue is only whether he has a right to be heard. (And he's even less likely to be heard when he damns local Christians as the voices of 'bigotry.')

As for the other joys of 'Anonymous' and 'Pseudonym', it scarcely advances debate to call me an 'inbreed'; I have no intention of ever using Sabbath sports facilities or Sabbath ferries; I have a Blogger account because it is the easiest way to post here and on other blogs - that does not mean I am obliged to have a blog; and, even if you like to call my father and myself the author of 'evil rants', it is as unwise to to lecture me on church history as on West Highland ferries: the Church of Scotland abrogated absolute commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1905, not 1986.

In any event, 'Anonymous', I would be very happy to see a referendum on this issue - as I have made very plain elsewhere; but when you write, with no evident sense of irony, 'It is still anonymous, but at least everyone will know everything I say and can hold me to account over it,' then you really have brought us to a place where words no longer have meaning. How can you possibly be held to account when we have not a clue who you are or even where you live? This is the sort of blogosphere inanity which reminds one that, on occasion, we are dealing less with people than with plankton.

But, you, know, we have been here before - and not so long ago either.

It occurred me the other day that, by a fascinating coincidence, the present campaign for Sunday ferries was launched in the summer of 2007 - just after the election of the SNP government and, effectively, the end to any prospect of a large onshore windfarm in the moors of northern Lewis.

It is also obvious - especially as more and more emerge from their Witness Protection Programme - that many who now clamour for Sunday ferries were also very vocal in that campaign against the proposals of LWP/Amec.

Now this can be pushed too far. Quite a few people who presently oppose Sunday ferries - one immediately thinks of John and Annie MacSween in Ness - were passionately opposed to the LWP/Amec scheme; some, like Angus Nicolson, who do campaign for Sunday ferries were pretty enthusiastic about the wind-turbines.

But, once you start thinking about it, the parallels are striking.

You form a very shadowy campaign group with no clear constitution, organisation or officials and - especially granted a deliciously lazy local paper - issue statements from unnamed and mysterious 'spokespeople'. (It was only last summer, when a sub-committee of the Scottish Parliament ruled that Sunday sailings could only be 'resolved locally' that the first spokesmen came out in public and were named in the local media.)

You then start making a great deal of Noise. You prefer words of emotion rather than assertions of fact; you turn what is basically a controversy over some matter of public or planning policy into an avowed moral crusade; you make as much fuss as possible and you flash-mob public meetings with a ranting crowd. (In Ness, if memory serves, two entire Community Councils resigned in not as many years, in the face of text-a-mob.)

But what if some named, brave little chap does stand up to you in the public domain? You then abandon Noise for Vilification - moral censure, sweeping insults, gross generalisation and childish abuse. Rather than debate, you overwhelm with a perfect storm of invective and bluster, eager not to prove that your opponent is mistaken, but that he is at least deranged and probably wicked. If that lazy local paper is happy to publish anonymous letters, so much the better. A happy by-product of this strategy is that, within a few weeks or months, the vast majority of ordinary people are too terrified publicly to disagree with you. (It takes formidable courage to face waves of vitriol and mountains of mockery; and, as Bonhoffer observed, one cannot expect ordinary men to be heroes.) Once the general public are silenced, you can them claim that 'we speak for the great, quiet majority of local people.'

Meanwhile, of course, you raise the banner of Democracy. This is nothing so boring, though, as fighting an election or putting up a slate of candidates. Rather, you monster your own democratically elected local authority; you paint its councillors with vituperation (unless they agree with you); you connive with Parliamentarians for its decisions to be set aside by Edinburgh; and you throw out words like 'dictatorship, 'despotism' and 'our intolerable situation on the Western Isles.'

You can also float the possibility of a Referendum. This has to be done carefully. For one, there was a Comhairle election just two years ago; you do not want to make it too obvious you didn't like the result. For another, if you talk up a referendum too much, someone might ask you to organise one. (After all, all you need is the phone number of the Electoral Reform Society and a couple of grand.) Worse, if you actually get a referendum, then people will expect you to declare you will abide by the result; and that would never do. After all, The People might get it wrong. (Only last week, on Radio nan Gaidheal, a spokesman for 'The Campaign for 7-Day Sailings' refused repeatedly to answer the plain question: would they undertake to be bound by the outcome of such a referendum?)

If push comes to shove, of course, it all hinges on the question. Preferably 'Are you a black-clad Bible-bashing homophobic racist bigot so stuck in the mud you oppose Sunday ferries and want to destroy the local economy and empty this island of its young folk?' against 'Are you a hard-working taxpayer who wants the freedom to drive to the mainland on any day of the week?'

Finally, there is the strong arm of the Law. This is especially tasty as it allows you to raise the cry of 'human rights!' Not that it particularly matters which law.

The Race Relations Act can be used if anyone points out that your most vocal support includes rather a lot of recent incomers. The Equality and Human Rights Act might be useful against those who point out they actually like the chance to walk the pooch around Lewis Castle Grounds of a Sunday afternoon without the usual enfilade of whizzing golfballs. The European Court of Human Rights will always sound wonderful and at least one gentleman has suggested the Charter of the United Nations. (I can just see the troops storming Kenneth Street now. 'Put down your English Standard Versions and come out with your hands up!')

It certainly gets the MP and the MSP off the hook, quite marginalise the democratically elected local authority and would make a fool of all the councillors and the tedious rednecks who voted them in.

You never know. Things are so crazy, these days, in modern Scotland, you might just pull it off. You might well destroy a way of life now unique in Britain, or fatally discredit a local authority won only in 1974, after decades and decades of being run by an Old Etonian lairdocracy in two different County Councils run from the other side of Scotland.

Yes, you might win. But you will have accomplished it not by debate, but by the politics of personal destruction; not by argument, but by intimidation.