Uist

I’m not religious, but . . .

/ posttenebrasluxweb / Leave a comment

If the recent discussion of Tesco’s proposed Sunday opening in Lewis is anything to go by, people are pretty selfish. It’s basically been a rehash of Lanntairgate and that perennial favourite, Swimmingpoolgate. Even the arguments are versions of the usual thing: ‘we need to be like everywhere else’ and, in the case of the sports centre, ‘we need to be like Uist’. Smaoinich. It’s on us the two days have come when we can aspire no higher than that as Leòdhasaich.

Now, it’s already been established that the mighty supermarket is a business and, as such, couldn’t really give a stuff what we islanders think. Though they don’t exactly have a monopoly, they also know that we don’t exactly have a lot of choice when it comes to buying the messages. Therefore, Tesco can do what it likes.

Tesco can change the character of the Lewis Sunday without so much as a by-your-leave. Keep that in mind for a moment.

Now take a look at the pitched battle on social media between the pro and anti-opening lobbies. On the pro side, you will see one refrain repeated often: move with the times. Ah yes, the times. The times we live in, which we have every reason to be proud of – the times in which wars are fought over land, the times in which little children die, fleeing their despotic countries, the times in which politicians lie and defraud us. The same times – closer to home – in which old ladies are terrorised by kids who should be at home, in bed; in which respect seems to have died the same death as shame; and in which parents abdicate responsibility for the feral conduct of their offspring. Mmm hmm, those times sure are worth living up to.

The counter-argument and, as far as some of us are concerned, the clinching one, is that Christ said the very opposite. And, even if you’re not a believer, his teaching is worth paying heed to on this. He told his followers not to be conformed to the world. In other words, he exhorted them to keep to the path of truth and right. If he was here at this moment, I am pretty sure he would be reminding us of something important: the Sabbath was made for man, not the other way round. 

What does that mean? Well, it means that the day of rest was created for the benefit of all humanity – not just professing Christians. So, think on that, if you’re one of the ‘you do you’ brigade. And perhaps also consider this from a different perspective to your opinion on whether or not YOU want the supermarket to open on Sundays. Think of the staff whose families will have to make the sacrifice so that you and I have the option of maybe, occasionally, if the need arises, perhaps, nipping to Tesco once in a blue moon if we want.

Is it really worth it? Are we so utterly sure of our own judgement that we are happy to end a particular way of life simply because a corporate giant wishes it. In fact, if their local manager’s statement is anything to go by, this is being proposed because Tesco is too tight to build a bigger store with more parking. The idea, the demand, has not come from the customers. Yet, we are content to allow a company which offers a cut-rate service to alter the very character of our community.

That’s what this comes down to. And the ‘what about visitors’ defence is an extension of the ludicrous way our islands are being run. Where else would you have business interests trampling so blatantly over the local culture with no one to defend it amongst our local leadership? It’s staggering to me that some islanders and island residents are content to let this just be imposed by commercial concerns.

But, then, I’m often fairly shocked by what islanders are willing to permit.

Like many commentators on social media, I’m not religious either. Religion is often the enemy of Christianity and of common sense. It is not religiosity that makes me wish to see the Lewis Sabbath unaltered, but my personal experience that its rest is a godsend. For me, that is a literal thing. However, whether you believe it was ordained by the Lord, or not, the benefit derived from a universal day free from the obligations of commerce is undeniable.

People, community, culture are more important than trade or mere convenience. But once those precious things are altered, they cannot be put back the way they were.

“Free trolley image“/ CC0 1.0

Hebridean Revolution, Anyone?

/ posttenebrasluxweb / Leave a comment

It’s a wonderful thing for a repressed, subjugated and delusional Hebridean woman like myself to know that the mainland has got my back. There are tourists who have visited ‘the isles’ (and renamed them), maybe twice, who can confirm that we’re talking nonsense about the ferries. Much like the chair of transport (I refuse to use ‘transportation’ until he’s in charge of actually sending folk to Botany Bay) at the Comhairle, our mainland protectors can confirm that Calmac are actually doing a brilliant job. So, presumably those Uibhistich marching in Glasgow were labouring under some mass shared delusion.

Despite the direct action taken by our formidable deasach cousins, and despite the Annie Macsween MBEs, and Màiri Vs, and Cathy Bhàns, yet another patronising non-islander was decrying our inability to ‘step up’ as Hebridean women. We are, she opined, under the cosh of . . . yes, yes, the church. She had tried to persuade some girl guides to stand for elected office, she said, when ‘on’ Harris ten years ago, but they merely listened quietly.

Probably for the best. I can only imagine what they were thinking.

However, I’m not a polite wee girl guide, so I’m quite prepared to share my thoughts on all of this. In fact, despite being a Hebridean woman and a communicant member of the sinister man-cult that is the Free Church, I’m going to tell you EXACTLY what I think.

I think we have had it up to our submissive eyes with mainlanders who think they know better than we do how these islands should be run. In fact, as a demure Presbyterian, I stamp my sensibly-shod feet in frustration at the fact that we still play their game – everything run from Edinburgh and London, and a handful of us begging to be allowed on quangos that decide every last thing that influences life here in our communities.

We are a super-regulated region, the Highlands and Islands. Our language, our land use, our economy, our transport – but we have to scrabble for a seat at the table. How many Gaelic-speakers are on the board of HIE? Is one Crofting Commissioner from the Western Isles sufficient for the area with the highest concentration of crofts? Why is Bòrd na Gàidhlig’s main office in Inverness, and not Ness? How many islanders on the Calmac board?

Good grief, why don’t we wake up? While we’re defending ourselves for there being no women on the Kirk Session, and being told our ferries aren’t broken, these islands are being remade in an image that has nothing to do with who we are.

Earlier in the week, I broke my own rule and replied to an obnoxious comment on a social media post about camper van drivers feeling unwelcome in the Hebrides. The mainland-based expert in this case was pontificating that ‘islanders think the islands belong to them’.

Not so, sir, we don’t. No islander would ever talk about ‘my/our island’ in the sense of ownership. We belong to whichever island on which we were born, not the other way around. 

With that bond goes a sense of responsibility, of stewardship.

And it is to that we must step up – men AND women – so that our land, our language, our economy are shaped as we would want, we who love and understand this place, and who have to live with the consequences.

Besides taking over the boards, trusts and commissions that take the decisions, islanders and their Highland counterparts, ought to read up on the Crofters’ Party. I think, instead of being a minority voice in mainstream political parties whose HQs are invariably urban, the time is absolutely ripe to create a political party from within the region. It has been done before to great effect.

We are not a problem to be solved, we are a community on the cusp of finding its voice.

Sunday Swimming & the Flood to Come

/ posttenebrasluxweb / Leave a comment

It isn’t often that you see the Leòdhasaich clamouring for equality with the people of Uist, but there’s a persistent wee group that is making just that demand. What is it the deasachs have that we could possibly desire? Shoddy ferry services? Ropey Gaelic? Stinky Bay?

No, of course not: it’s their enviable public pool opening times. In any one week in Uist, you can swim for a few hours every day – fewer, that is, than if you were in Lewis. But the real object of the Green-eyed Leòdhasach monster is the one hundred and eighty minutes on a Sunday afternoon when amphibious types in the vicinity of Benbecula can enjoy splashing about in the municipal baths. Never mind how available – or otherwise – this activity is the rest of the week; the Uibhistich cannot be allowed to have anything their northern neighbours don’t have, no matter how small.

There’s something faintly disturbing about the article on the BBC Alba news site, which says that equality legislation prevents councillors voting against Sunday opening of the Stornoway facility on religious grounds. Call me pedantic, but I don’t think that’s equality, then, is it? I mean, Christians who are councillors are being told that they should vote against their faith because a minority in the community wants (not needs) a leisure facility to open on Sundays. If I was a councillor right now, I’d be faced with the prospect, therefore, of breaking the law, or of abstaining – how does that protect my right to equality?

I know, because this argument has been rehashed many times, that the unbelievers who persist in campaigning for Sunday opening think that’s acceptable. They fall into two camps: those who say Christians should keep out of elected office altogether, and those who say that Christians who ARE elected should abstain from voting on anything which is liable to be coloured by their faith.

But, here’s the thing – Comhairle Nan Eilean is still a representative democracy. Tough though this concept seems to be for some keyboard warriors, elections sometimes produce unwanted results. The inability to accept defeat is what leads to nonsense like ‘#NotMyPrimeMinister’, and the sort of silliness that suggests this or that person ‘doesn’t represent me’.

Maybe we need to go back to school and relearn how democracy of this variety is meant to function. Councillors are elected to represent the generality of their ward; no elected member, no matter how chameleon-like, can possibly be representative of each individual voter, and it is childish in the extreme to deploy that argument.

So, bearing this in mind, the Comhairle is representative of the community. Every voter has an opportunity to express their views through the ballot box – and the fact that we in Lewis persistently return a conservative council, many of whose members have an active faith, speaks to the will of the people. It isn’t an accident, it isn’t a sinister and highly improbable collusion between the Free Church and the returning officer . . . it’s the voters.

There’s a rag-tag remnant of the local secular society which turns up every so often on social media, making wild claims that corruption and theocracy are rife in this island. They seem to have the idea that the Free Church, the Comhairle and the Stornoway Trust are all working together to suppress ‘progress’. Yes, three male-dominated organisations cooperating seamlessly and following a plan, that’s plausible – as long as you’re not getting them to assemble flat-pack furniture, obviously.

If we can’t put this stupid fantasy to bed once and for all, though, how can debate about local issues ever rise above the juvenile?

This reopening of the debate about Sunday swimming is destined to play out along the same tired lines yet again. Those who so desperately want to see swimming pool attendants forced to work on a day that most of us – including the petitioners – take for granted as a day of rest, will argue that this is progressive. They want ‘family time’, but they don’t see any inequality in causing others to forsake Sunday at home in order that they can have the option of a heated swimming pool if the fancy takes them, now and again. It is, they argue, their right, under equalities legislation.

Their right. How absolutely hollow that sounds in an island where home care provision is pared to the bone, where lifeline bus services are under threat, where village schools are closing, where many roads are more potholes than surface, and where the local hospice is under threat of closure.

How petulant, how trivial, how utterly First World does it sound to you? It’s a miracle that we have a swimming pool at all, given how harsh the cutbacks have been.

The reason the swimming pool will not open on Sunday is threefold. First of all, there is no money. Secondly, there is no need.

And, finally, there isn’t even much appetite for it. Yes, there are undoubtedly some very vocal people who want it, and probably quite a few strong, silent types as well. Ditto Sunday golf and Sunday anything you care to name – cinema, shops, cafes.

How, they will howl, do I know there isn’t much demand? Surely they have made themselves abundantly clear on Facebook – blimey, they’ve been insulting and personal enough, surely the message has penetrated by now?

Well, here’s the message. If you are a Christian in Lewis, or even just someone who likes Sundays the way they’ve always been, take heart. It would be easy to let the mob rule of social media con you into believing that things are worse than they are. But, read what they say – it is mostly bluff, bluster and the occasional towering rage. Battles are not won or lost on either Facebook or Twitter; these have become somewhere for the politically impotent to vent their fury.

Be encouraged by the fact that our community consistently returns a council that reflects the values of the many, not the few. Candidates who criticise our island and who profess shame in relation to our heritage do badly at the ballot box.

But these same people then become frustrated and embittered by the proper function of democracy, even calling it ‘tyranny’. They hiss and spit, and try to subvert the work of organisations like the Comhairle. Most alarming of all, they are aided and abetted in this by daft laws about equality.

We Leòdhasaich have a conservative and fairly traditional set of councillors – and we came by them fair and square. If a minority can demand the sort of ‘equality’ which mutes the very characteristics for which many of us actually voted them in, it is way past time for action.

If legislation for equality actually can stop our democratically elected councillors voting with their conscience, then that is surely a hint to Christians in our island that the tide is indeed lapping at our feet, and we have received all the flood warnings we have any right to expect.