KATHLEEN Nutt reported in Monday’s National on another call, by filmmaker Roderick MacKenzie, for a new inquiry into the shady death of Willie McRae (New call for probe into McRae’s death, January 11). Let’s hope it probes deeper than other failed attempts at an inquiry. The late Dave Leadbetter was at an advanced stage of completing his well-researched book on the subject and has left two boxes of his research with a friend in Edinburgh, in a safe place. Dave was a full-time worker for the (English) Civil Rights Association and was employed by Brent Council to lay constitutions for local authority organisations etc.
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MSP hopefuls from the Alliance For Unity, George Galloway and David Griffiths have engaged in sustained attempts to paint Nicola Sturgeon as a fascist dictator MSP hopefuls from the Alliance For Unity (A4U) party, founded by George Galloway, have been engaging in sustained attempts to paint the SNP as “Nazis” and Nicola Sturgeon as a “fascist dictator”. The slurs include one Holyrood candidate affiliated with the party promoting suggestions the SNP will make Unionists wear a “badge to identify them”, like “another nationalist party”. A4U are a grouping of people with varying political allegiances that hope to stop pro-independence parties gaining a majority in May’s Holyrood election. Leader Galloway has also been promoting falsehoods about connections between the SNP and Nazis.
Died: December 6, 2020. JIM HAYNES, who has died in Paris at the age of 87, was a bon vivant, an ever-generous host and a flamboyant character who forever had a twinkle in his eye. Formidably well-connected, he was a counter-cultural polymath who recalled introducing David Bowie to the mime artist, Lindsay Kemp, and was once described as being, in the early 1960s, the unofficial agent for the beat generation in Scotland. He founded the UK’s first paperback bookshop, in Edinburgh; when he relocated to Paris, in 1969, he kept an open house, and his Sunday-evening dinners became the stuff of Parisian legend.
Review by Dani Garavelli AT the beginning of Luckenbooth – Jenni Fagan’s much-anticipated third novel – Jessie MacRae, daughter of the devil, sails into the Water of Leith in a coffin. Her horns hidden in a tumult of hair, she walks along Constitution Street towards a city that is dark and unheimlich; a city populated by beggars, glowering gargoyles and men of the cloth who swoop down the High Street like crows. The year is 1910, but it is an Edinburgh Kidnapped’s David Balfour would instantly recognise: a place of hubbub, and of tenements, both multi-storeyed and multi-storied, “standing sentinel” around the Tron.
SNP Bo’ness branch vice-convener David Mitchell designed the informative page RECENTLY we asked for examples of “best practice” by Yes individuals and groups and we’re delighted to present the story of a cracking idea brought to fruition by the Bo’ness branch of the SNP. The branch has just launched its new online timeline, which covers the history of Scottish nationalism in the town from 1944 right up until the present day. Going far beyond the history of the SNP itself, the timeline looks at the wide variety of groups located in Bo’ness which helped bring about the Scottish Parliament – the Scottish Covenant of the 1950s, the “Bo’ness Rebels” ceilidhs and songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, and the impact that historic events such as the return of the Stone of Scone had in Bo’ness.