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The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
You're evil if you're not a socialist after reading legendary trilogy
By the third volume it was being accused of Stalinism, though the author never became an official Communist 'as they won't let me in'. He never lived to see the full horrors of Stalinism nor the morphing of socialism into a movement obsessed with lavatories. In his day, wrongs to be righted were clearer, more elemental. The ruling peeps, the economic elite, were transparently bad. All the brainy bods were on the Left, marrying morality to intellect, seeking to tip the balance towards equality, to equilibrium, and not – as now – past it to perpetual disharmony. Today, with a ruling elite more left-wing than the workers, no one knows what socialism means beyond something to do with minority rights and yonder environment. Among the proletariat in the schemes it's about as popular as Viz magazine's Leo Tolstoy action figures. As economic theory, i.e. more then mere cultural complaint, it prevails only among boomers, like the present writer, too embarrassed to revisit the certainties of their youth and still insistent, when drunk, that it could work if it weren't for human nature, bad people, lazy people, greedy people. Ye ken: real life. But here we're talking fiction, as set out in three beautifully lyrical volumes. We're talking about a pivotal work of 20th century Scottish literature, one whose first volume has not unnaturally been dropped as a set text in the school curriculum. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon described it as 'one of the first books that had me utterly captivated by the lyricism of language and the power of place'. Its heroine, Chris Guthrie 'spoke to, and helped me make sense of, the girl I was'. That was back in the day when she knew what a girl was. On 13 February 1901, a boy was born into a farming family at Hillhead of Seggat, Auchterless, Aberdeenshire. From the age of seven, that boy, James Leslie Mitchell – Grassic Gibbon's real name – was raised in Arbuthnott, in the former county of Kincardineshire. Educated at the parish school and at Mackie Academy in Stonehaven, he departed the latter precipitately after arguing with a teacher. h Novel approach Outside school, he upset the Mearns folk with opinions deemed inappropriate to their way of life. He'd stick his head in a book than into the soil. In 1917, aged 16, he ran away to Aberdeen, became a cub reporter on a local paper, and tried to make the city a soviet in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. Moving to Glasgow, he got a job on Farmers Weekly, where presumably he kept his doubts about agricultural work hidden, while the city's slums and Red Clydeside movement only intensified his zeal. This got him sacked – for fiddling expenses to make donations to the British Socialist Party. Attempted suicide followed, so his family took him back in, hoping rural life might steady him. It did not. In 1919, more for food and lodgings than patriotic duty, he joined the Royal Army Service Corps, serving in Iran, India and Egypt before enlisting as a clerk in the Royal Air Force in 1923, leading to more time in the Middle East. In 1925, Mitchell returned to Arbuthnott to marry local girl Rebecca (Ray or Rhea) Middleton. The couple moved to cheap lodgings in London, where the going was tough until they moved to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, several million miles from the Mearns. Here, James began writing full time, producing 4,000-odd words a day, including journalism and travel literature. His first book, Hanno: or the Future of Exploration, was published in 1928. Drawing heavily on diffusionism – aye – it investigated the origin of cultural traits, contending that the North-East was full of Picts. READ MORE Rab McNeil: Get your Boots on, we're going shopping for unicorn hair gel Rab McNeil: No wonder the whole Scottish nation loves Nicola (no, not that one) Scottish Icons: William McGonagall - The poet who right bad verses wrote still floats some folk's vessel or boat Scottish Icons: There is a lot of tripe talked about haggis – so here's the truth Going ape In 1932, he used the pseudonym Lewis Grassic Gibbon, from his maternal grandmother's name Lilias Grassick Gibbon, for the first time, when Sunset Song was published. It was the first, and best, in A Scots Quair, which made Gibbon's name. Written in earthy dialect, Sunset Song begins the story of Chris Guthrie, described by Paul Foot in never popular magazine Socialist Review as 'more remarkable than any female character in Jane Austen, George Eliot or even the Brontes'. Her common sense, good nature and level head steer her through life's enervating tragedies, with a narrative matching her progress to the Mearns farming year. The First World War ruins everything, a way of life, the actual lives of young men, even the soil-securing trees (cut down for the war effort). On top of that, the economy had already been moving from rural agriculture to urban manufacturing, from past to future. Not that the old way of life was perfect, in a community riddled with lust, feuds and gossip. Grassic Gibbon was, to put it mildly, ambivalent about agricultural and rural life. Chris shares that ambivalence, drawn towards education and away from the drudgery and narrow horizons of a farming community. She has first to escape the clutches of her father, an ill-tempered, bullying, pious, hypocritical fellow. Men, eh? She marries one, Ewan Tavendale, but the War sees him off too: shot as a deserter. Sunset Song has a political message, but one shot through with humour: ' … Ellison said he was a Bolshevik, one of those awful creatures, coarse tinks, that made such a spleiter in Russia. They'd shot their King-creature, the Tsar they called him, and they bedded all over the place, folk said, a man would go home and find his wife commandeered any bit night and Lenin and Trotsky lying with her.' Grey outlook A Scots Quair moves from village to town to city. Often seen as Sunset Song's poorer companions, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite contrast the Christian socialism of Robert Colquhoun (Chris's second husband) with the hardline Communism of her son. Chris, a grounded quine, focuses more on the eternal verities, where only the land endures, however much subject to change. 'Change … whose right hand was Death and whose left hand Life might be stayed by none of the dreams of men …' Life's trancience ever haunts her: "Their play was done and they were gone …' Life was cruelly transient for Lewis Grassic Gibbon. On 7 February 1935, he died in Welwyn Garden City after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer. He was 33-years-old. His ashes were buried in the Mearns.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
The Scottish ‘tartan turf war' that went global
With a three-hour 'happy hour' and four big-screen TVs, Monaghans Bar in the Spanish resort of Fuengirola is a popular spot for those who like a night of soccer after a day of sun and sand. But on Saturday night, after drinkers watched the UEFA Champions League Final, a showdown of a less sporting sort unfolded outside. Just as the bar was emptying around 11.30pm, a car pulled up outside from which a black-clad gunman emerged. He shot dead the bar's Scottish owner, Ross Monaghan, and his Glaswegian friend Eddie Lyons Junior, before fleeing into the night. The double murder was the latest in a series of recent shootings on Spain's southern coast, long considered the 'Costa Del Crime'. Yet the hit may have been ordered from the rather less balmy climes of Glasgow, where a quarter-century feud between the city's two most powerful crime families is now spiralling out of control. In scenes that resemble an over-hyped episode of Taggart, the rival Lyons and Daniel gangs have been in open warfare for the past three months. Scores of homes and businesses, including garages, cab firms and beauty parlours, have been firebombed. Suspected associates have been attacked with machetes. Masked thugs behind the mayhem post videos of their handiwork online – shattering decades of painstaking PR in which Glasgow reinvented itself as a 'City of Culture'. The so-called 'tartan turf wars' are a throwback to the rougher Red Clydeside movement of the 1960s, when razor gangs terrorised the city. Today's Glasgow hard men, though, wield much deadlier weaponry than long-handled shaving blades, and their fiefdoms are no longer confined to council estates like Easterhouse. Attacks have taken place all over central Scotland, spreading to well-heeled districts of Edinburgh too. The feud reportedly dates back to the Lyons gang stealing a drug stash from the Daniels some 25 years ago, but onlookers fear it has become a battle to master the entirety of urban Scotland's lucrative drug trade. 'These groups have grown obscenely wealthy, preying on communities of very vulnerable people,' says MSP Russell Findlay, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, who says the government has been complacent about the rising threat of organised crime. 'These two individuals who were killed were prominent members of organised crime, and while it's still unclear who was behind their deaths, it seems they are paying the price for the lifestyle they led.' Mr Findlay is well-qualified to comment on the subject, having previously worked as an investigative crime reporter for Scottish TV and tabloid newspapers. In 2012, he wrote a book about the Daniel-Lyons feud, chronicling the misery it inflicted on Glasgow's Milton housing estate, the Lyons' original stronghold. The book's title, Caught in the Crossfire, was to prove horribly prophetic: three years later, Findlay himself was attacked on his doorstep by a knifeman who threw acid in his face. It was the kind of brazen intimidation more associated with Latin American narco-states – something that Scotland will come to resemble if more is not done, he warns. 'I remember thinking at the time: 'Why is nobody else saying enough is enough?'' he says. 'This is what happens when organised crime becomes too powerful: they try to take on mainstream society.' Spanish police have yet to identify the Fuengirola gunman, who some reports claim was a blonde-haired man presumed to be a fellow Scot. Scottish police, however, are likely to have no shortage of suspects already on their files. Both Monaghan, 43, and Lyons Junior, 46, were members of the Lyons gang, and no strangers to the art of the gangland hit themselves. Monaghan had been arrested then acquitted of the 2010 murder of Kevin 'Gerbil' Carroll, a notorious Daniel-gang enforcer. He then moved to Spain after being shot in the shoulder in Glasgow in 2017. He and Lyons Junior both also stood trial for attacking three men outside a bar in Dunbartonshire in 2016, the case only collapsing when the alleged victims claimed they had no memory of what happened. Indeed, those caught up in Lyons-Daniel violence have a marked tendency to 'forget' their testimony, much to the frustration of police. One incident that neither gang ever seems to have forgotten, though, is the theft of £20,000 worth of cocaine back in 2001 from a Daniel safe house. Nicknamed 'Morningside Speed' in honour of the posh Edinburgh suburb of the same name, cocaine was then relatively new to Scotland. Previously, heroin had been the drug of choice on impoverished housing estates – courtesy of smugglers like Jamie Daniel, the Daniel-gang founder, who flooded Glasgow with it in the early Eighties. Cocaine, though, was far more lucrative, and the theft of the stash, while relatively small in value, sparked a wider turf war over dealing patches. Escalating the violence was Carroll, who had allegedly been bullied by the Lyons' family during his schooldays, and was now a senior enforcer for the Daniel gang. He was infamous for so-called 'alien abductions', where rivals would be kidnapped, tortured and then dumped semi-naked on the street, too traumatised (or too terrified) to say what had happened to them. Not content with inflicting physical harm, he also vandalised a gravestone for Eddie Lyon Junior's younger brother, Garry, who died from leukaemia aged eight in 1991. Perceived as an outrage even by gangland standards, that act led to Carroll himself being shot dead in an Asda car park in Glasgow in 2010, in full view of horrified shoppers. So reviled was Carroll that police had nearly 100 potential suspects for his murder, and his death might have drawn a line under the feud. But it flared up again in 2016 when Jamie Daniel passed away from cancer – one of the few gang kingpins to die peacefully. His death left a power vacuum, which the Lyons' clan tried to exploit through five attempted murders in just five months. In one particularly savage case, Stephen 'Bonzo' Daniel was hunted down after a 100mph car chase through north Glasgow, before having his face macheted so badly that paramedics thought at first that he had been shot. 'His nose was hanging off on the left hand side near his ear', a policeman told a later trial of six Lyons associates, who were convicted of the five murder plots in 2019. Jailing them for a total of 104 years, a judge told them: 'You sought to turn Glasgow into a war zone for your feud. This is a civilised city, based on the rule of law.' With the violence now flaring up again, many Scots might well doubt that – not least those living in the streets where properties have been firebombed. While the gang kingpins often live in fortress-like mansions, equipped with CCTV, safe rooms and anti-ram-raid bollards, their footsoldiers often live on suburban estates. The precise spark for the latest hostilities remains unknown, although some believe it may be linked to the gangs' growing links to international drug cartels. The Lyons gang is said to have forged close links to Ireland's feared Kinahan cocaine cartel, whose senior members holed up in Dubai after pressure from the Dublin authorities. One Lyons family member has also lived in Dubai since an attempt on his life in Glasgow in 2006, and is said to have formed a 'Celtic cartel' with his Irish counterparts, whereby Lyons street dealers distribute Kinahan-supplied cocaine. Scottish police have already arrested at least 40 people over the feud, while Angela Constance, the SNP Justice Secretary, insisted that law-abiding Scots had nothing to fear. 'Scotland continues to be a safe place to live, with recorded crime down 40 per cent since 2006/07,' she said last month. Critics, however, complain the police service remains underfunded. For Findlay, the problems go even deeper. Far too much of Scotland's establishment, he says, has given the gangs the benefit of the doubt – from the Edinburgh professionals who act as their defence lawyers and accountants, to Left-leaning politicians who see them as victims of social injustice. He remembers how, in the mid-Nineties, Eddie Lyons Senior was given use of a former school in Milton for a 'community project', despite already being well-known to police. Objections, Findlay says, were overlooked by councillors who naively regarded Lyons Senior as a community activist. The centre was later shut down amid complaints it had become a gang hub. But Findlay cites multiple other examples where gangs are still flexing their muscles. In South Lanarkshire, a fellow Tory councillor, Graeme Campbell, quit his role after rows over planning issues led to gangsters attacking his house three times. And at jails across the country, prison officers' cars have been firebombed at least a dozen times. 'You've got attacks on journalists, councillors, prison officers: Scotland's isn't a narco-state, but this is how these things start. And, too often, the SNP's ethos has been to justify and explain, not to punish and deter – it is a social work mentality. The gangs must be rubbing their hands with glee,' he said. Meanwhile, in Spain, there are fears that violence could escalate further and Ana Mula, the mayor of Fuengirola, is calling for more resources to combat organised crime. She said: 'We live in a world and at a time where crime knows no borders. In places like the Costa del Sol, we're seeing developments that, as they spread, inevitable affect us. We need much greater involvement from the state on this issue.' Reports last month claimed the Lyons gang was seeking a truce in the feud. Given the recent events in Fuengirola that now seems unlikely. As Findlay points out, though, Saturday's shootings might not be connected to the Scottish feud at all, but rather the larger, global players that the Lyons gang is now part of. 'It could have been the work of their long-standing enemies in Scotland,' he said. 'But, out in Spain, they are swimming with much bigger sharks – who may be even more ruthless than they are.' 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