truth | Post tenebras lux

This time last year, I was wrestling prayerfully with a decision that I thought I had already made. I had concluded – entirely on my own flawed wisdom – that people like me did not have any business seeking election. Campaigning for others, yes, that was fine, but never chucking my own Free Church hat into the ring.

The idea of being a candidate for anything actually made me feel a little panicky. But, God often asks us to feel the fear and do it anyway, trusting that he will keep us.

I am not going to bore anyone by revisiting the way in which the ensuing campaign lived up to all my horrified expectations, and indeed, exceeded them on many occasions. Suffice to say that I saw both the best and worst of human behaviour, and still find it incredible how much vitriol five (unremunerated) seats on the board of a community landlord can provoke.

It has been an interesting year and I have achieved one personal goal at least: I have learned an awful lot about the Stornoway Trust and the community it serves.

And I can say without flinching, without fear, and definitely without favour (unless you count the brown envelopes, back-handers and holidays to France) that I am glad to have been persuaded into the fray.

I am proud to have been elected by the community I love, onto the board of an organisation that, no matter what the keyboard warriors may say, has consistently retained its dignity.

These keyboard warriors are, in many cases, the same ones who have been baying for a wicker man in which to put the Lewis Sabbath.

As a dyed in the wool Wee Free, it is with no small sense of irony that I say this: they are iconoclasts. Is it old? Has it been a long-established tradition? Can we say that it’s unique to Lewis? Might it even be classed as a local ‘institution? Yes? Oh well, destroy it. Stamp on it, smash it, burn it, change it – rebuild it in the image of something better. Modernise it, copy what they’re doing elsewhere . . .

Or, and here I make a suggestion which I know is doomed to fall on deaf ears: find out a bit more about it; try to understand it, even value it for its idiosyncrasies.

Please, though, before you do, understand one thing: it is completely unique. It is not like the post 2003 Reform Act community trusts – they were welcome political developments; Stornoway Trust was an ahead of its time oddity, which has had to run as a business since 1923.

It’s idiosyncratic as only an organisation of its vintage, and one-off constitution can be. The governing deed is, nonetheless, a pretty robust document and it permits the Trust quite a bit of latitude in terms of the kinds of activity permissible to – and please forgive the brutish, modern parlance about such a graceful old lady – keep the business afloat.

Folk obsessed with denigrating the Trust (yes, it appears to be a hobby for some and, of course, a paid enterprise for others) are falling into the usual trap that seems to dog the more negative Leòdhasaich: comparison. No, the Stornoway Trust does not conduct itself like those younger community-owned estates: it is not a membership organisation and therefore, has never held an AGM. However, and I know I’m repeating myself here, but it bears repetition:

Just because something is not done in the public gaze, that does not necessarily mean it is being purposely hidden from sight. And even if it is being purposely kept under wraps, why ascribe sinister motives?

I am more sorry than I can say at what is being fed to the public here in Lewis as news. This past week, we have seen gossip, hearsay and – at times – slander being elevated to the status of investigative journalism. The local paper even seemed to suggest that personal attacks on trustees are justified because people don’t know what happens at Trust meetings.

Well, I’ll tell you what happens. We are a board of nine volunteers. Many of us have full-time jobs, spouses, families, and additional voluntary commitments. On the last Monday of every month, we meet in the estate office. At 5.30pm, in fact, lest you suspect me of being evasive. The agenda contains a minimum of twenty eight items. (Obviously, the hidden agenda has quite a few more, but that’s the sort of thing I only discuss with my cronies).

The meeting may go on until fairly late. Several of the staff, therefore, have to work a very long day, but they don’t complain. Just as they don’t complain about the unforgivable way some people speak to and about them; or the nasty letters and snide online remarks, all of which conveniently forget that the recipients are actually real, live, human beings.

Once a month, we come together as a board – but it doesn’t end there. In any given week, there may be two or three additional meetings of our sub-committees, or with other organisations. Again, the trustees have to come away from their other commitments to be there; and the staff have to slot all of this into their own tightly packed schedules.

Four of us are rookies, all coming up to our one-year anniversary. I cannot speak for the others, but I can tell you that my learning curve, which I alluded to earlier, has not been of my own making. Yes, I certainly have committed time and effort to picking up the moves – but I have had good and (usually) patient teaching from more experienced trustees, from the ladies in the office (for whose presence I am eternally grateful) and from the only occasionally eye-rolling Factor.

So, as I reflect on all the challenges which we undoubtedly face as a self-financing community landlord, and on the historic legacy of which we trustees are custodians, do I resent the time commitment of which I speak? No, not one bit; at least, not when I’m allowed to get on with what I was elected to do.

The biggest frustration is all the energy wasted on responding to the negative and bitter narrative which consists of repeating sweeping generalisations like ‘the Trust is corrupt’, and other equally ill thought out remarks. But, as I have said before, and will go on saying, those who are bent on destroying the reputation of others only succeed in damaging their own.

I opened my campaign for the Trust the same way that we open our meetings – with prayer. When I was persuaded that this was the right path for me, I committed to it utterly. ‘Whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might’, as Ecclesiastes says, which does not, however, give me licence to indulge in corruption or any other sin that Perceval Square might have on offer.

Of course I am not beyond doing wrong, nor can I claim to be immune to temptation. But – and I really don’t mean to sound disappointed – there has been precious little outlet for either at the Stornoway Trust.

I hardly have time to sit in my accustomed chair at the Stornoway Trust before a brown envelope is slid across the table to me. It’s such a regular occurrence now that I barely even notice. Wordlessly, I stow it in my bag, alongside my equally ill-gotten gains from the Free Church (two crumpled newsletters, a Bible study guide and an uneaten pan drop).

Normally our meetings commence with us bowing three times to a portrait of Lord Leverhulme, but if there are enough Trustees present from the Free Church (and, I mean, how many is enough?), all that idolatrous stuff goes right out the window. I make the tea, while the men take snuff and talk about the price of bales.

‘A vote of thanks to the little lady’, the chairman will say, patting me on the head, and the others chorus, ‘Well done, a ghràidh – did you not do any baking?’ Then I cry and they don’t know what to do, and it all becomes fairly awkward for a bit.

We usually perk things up by discussing how to further sell the estate down the river to a French multinational. This is actually the raison d’ etre of the Trust, and although we haven’t yet seen a single turbine go up, our French vocab is coming on a treat. When we next go on one of our wee jollies to the mainland, I’ll be able to tell reception, ‘excuse me, there’s a naked man in my room’ in three languages if necessary.

When we’ve finished guffawing (the men guffaw, actually, I simper) about everything we’re inflicting on the poor peasants, the rent book is brought out, and we decide which widows are up for eviction. Last month we put a woman off her land for a range of infractions, including the heinous charge of looking at the Factor the wrong way, and failing to face Soval when saying her prayers.

It’s usually at this point I manage to settle them down with brandy and cigars, so that we can talk about which lies I should circulate on social media that week. Once, when I was very green, I suggested that we could maybe just tell them the truth.

‘Don’t be daft’, one of the older hands said, ‘who’d believe you?’

And, do you know what? He was right.

In fact, I don’t really understand why Lewis has not got a thriving film industry. There are more improbable conspiracy theories flying around than even Oliver Stone could cope with. I have had people demand to know what the truth is about a particular issue . . . oh, say, turbines, just plucking an example out of thin air. Yet, when they are presented with the facts, there are howls of derision, and cries of, ‘liar!’

It’s frustrating, to say the least. This, though, is the sad world that we are living in. There is little trust of our fellow human beings, and even less respect. That people imagine you are corrupt and a liar simply because you hold some kind of elected office – however humble – speaks volumes about what we have become.

The stick of choice with which most keyboard warriors now beat their councillors, MPs and even the lowly trustee is ‘transparency’. If you are doing something away from the public gaze, it naturally follows that you are wilfully – and with malice aforethought, as all the best courtroom dramas have it – concealing your actions. My own, undoubtedly flawed, understanding of representative democracy, however, led me to believe that we elect people to do a particular job on our behalf so that we don’t have to be troubled with it ourselves.

It may be a matter of personal taste, of course, but I have heard enough public sector jargon to last me a lifetime. I don’t want my councillor, or member of the local health board knocking on my door to show me their working-out. Just give me the bottom line, fellas, and I’ll trust the rest to you.

But not wanting to know every detail of every decision made in my name does not extend as far as some council members seem to think it should. Those of us discussing our very valid concerns about the underfunding of Bethesda, our local hospice, on open forum this week, were chided by an elected member. His reproof ran along the lines of ‘we’re sorting it in our own way behind closed doors; you’re not helping matters by discussing it here’.

Now, I know that Facebook is cynically used by some for blatant rabble-rousing. You know how they operate: chuck a verbal hand grenade, sit back and count the ‘likes’, pretending their own hands are clean. Must we assume that every discussion which takes place there will descend to that level of puerile insult and name-calling?

In fact, I think that social media, used responsibly, can highlight concerns which go unnoticed – in this case, for a worryingly long time – by public and politician alike. I would like to see it being used in this way more frequently. Every contribution to the thread on Bethesda was respectful and measured, but I cannot blame the councillor in question for blanching at the sight of it, because many local people have discredited Facebook as a forum for rational debate by using it mainly as a space in which to defame others.

We have to be able to talk over the things that concern us as a community, but not in ways that demean ourselves – which is all we do when we resort to character assassination in place of reasoned argument. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion – but not to bandy them about like weapons to the detriment of truth and reason.

I think we need to show less tolerance of such behaviour. When it comes to our use of social media, how about we show a little less imagination, and a little more respect?