The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain

Product Information

As Hobbs later told the audit committee, once you put a ship in the water, everything you do to it costs more money. I hope this reassures you [McMillan] that, in line with the 2012 Ferries Plan, the Scottish government is continuing in its commitment to vessel replacement and providing potential work for the shipbuilding industry in Scotland. His departure from the Independent on Sunday meant no more Fleet Street: he went to edit the literary magazine Granta, itself an exercise in the long form, where new writing flourished. Under Ian, from 1995 to 2007, the writers included Monica Ali, AL Kennedy, Andrew O’Hagan and Zadie Smith, still flourishing.

Soon after he moved to Oxford to do research for his DPhil under the formidable Helen Gardiner at Merton College: this, I suspect, is where much of his academic rigour came from. He went on to become a lecturer at Brasenose College in 1950, and senior research fellow in 1955. In 1961 he moved to Cambridge, becoming a fellow of Pembroke College and a university lecturer. He became a reader in 1973, and was appointed to a personal professorial chair in 1976. He retired in 1989. More evidence of secret dealings and irregular conduct has emerged in Scotland’s celebrated ‘ferry fiasco’, to add to the details I described last month in the LRB. A BBC Scotland documentary, ‘The Great Ferries Scandal’, broadcast on 27 September, revealed a remarkable level of co-operation between the Scottish government and the shipbuilder, Ferguson’s, to make sure that the Port Glasgow company won the contract against competition from shipyards in Germany, Poland and England. On the evidence of hundreds of documents leaked to the BBC, the principles of transparency and fair-dealing embodied in the procurement law of Scotland and England – and of the European Union, to which in 2015 the United Kingdom still belonged – look almost certain to have been broken. He won a number of accolades throughout his career, including reporter of the year at the British Press awards in 1988 and editor of the year at Newspaper Industry awards in 1993.In 2003 there was a ruling by the European Court of Justice about subsidy or state aid for a German bus company, Altmark. CalMac, which had not been broken up at that time, received legal opinion that the Altmark ruling definitely applied to CalMac and allowed tendering to stop without legal consequence. The UK Department of Trade and Industry appeared to agree. Ministers in the Labour/Lib Dem Scottish executive, however, were advised by officials that Altmark did not apply to CalMac. The hugely expensive tendering process went ahead. CalMac was split up into different companies, including the newly created Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL). He believed this with particular fervour in relation to the intended audience of a work; and he explored this thought with skill and insight in his book The Poet and His Audience (1984), looking at Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and Yeats, and exploring the ways in which their voice, choice of subjects and tone were influenced by an awareness of the audience for whom they were writing. Some of the complaints were reasonable, others less so. The island of Colonsay had nine sailings to and from the mainland every month, when the steamer called on its journey between Glasgow and the Outer Hebrides. In 1931, Colonsay had a population of 232 and the government estimated the average traffic per trip totalled half a dozen passengers and a few dozen boxes of rabbits and lobsters. Nevertheless, Colonsay’s owner, Lord Strathcona, a former Tory minister, consistently agitated for more steamer calls. John Lorne Campbell, described by Andrew Clark as ‘the ever-whining proprietor of Canna’, more often remembered as a historian and folklorist, was outraged when MacBrayne’s substituted a smaller boat on the service to the Small Isles. Mallaig, the mainland port, was only two and half hours away and Canna’s population was 24, but Campbell felt they deserved the cabins and the full catering service offered by the previous vessel. The mollifying response, Clark writes, ‘was the provision of soup’.

truly began to pervade the national consciousness. It filled doomy books ... It became a melodramatic staple for newspapers, magazines and television programmes. It darkened the work of artists, novelists, dramatists, film-makers and pop musicians. It soured foreign commentary on Britain ... And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In 1948, Ian married Jane, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. After a divorce, he married Elizabeth in 1972 and had a son. The last three decades of his life were a period of particular contentment, living with them in a beautiful house in Fen Ditton, Cambridge. He is survived by Elizabeth and his children. Nettles, willowherbs, brambles: nothing suggested that ocean-going tablecloths had once been woven there or a girl's cheese sandwiches had warmed on the hob. In 1959, Mathewson's end hadn't been so long ago – 1930 was closer to 1959 than 1959 is to now – but such complete ruination, weeds replacing work, was one of the things that made my parents and so many others of that place and generation seem like survivors from a previous British age. Of course, nobody then had any idea of how much of this there was to come. I’ve never stopped thinking about this article, written by Ian in 2016. It is a short masterpiece about national identity, and how the then-recent vote for Brexit had changed how he felt about his Britishness and his Scottishness. Its emotional power is heightened by a touching and unexpected anecdote about his family’s relationship with a German prisoner of war he never met. Ian’s sense of bitter betrayal at the end of the piece makes you shiver, with a sense of dread. Katharine Viner, editor, the Guardian ‘What is sometimes overlooked is what a brilliant reporter and researcher he was’ Charles III is a disappointment. Many thought he would be unable to restrain himself from meddling in politics and expressing his contentious opinions on architecture, education and medicine. But he has made it clear that he accepts the restraints of his new role.In 2006 the routes went out to tender and one of CalMac’s offshoots won. A year later, in response to an inquiry from the SNP MEP Alyn Smith, the European transport commissioner Jacques Barrot said that if the Altmark principles applied, CalMac’s subsidy would not be regarded as state aid. He made it clear to a delegation of Highland councillors that he thought the Altmark principles did indeed apply. He was born in Lancashire, but his Scottish parents returned to North Queensferry when he was seven. He started work as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965. The obvious explanation, that these were the paranoid delusions of a crumbling mind, needs to be revised in the light of later disclosures that sections of MI5 and the CIA had determined that Wilson was a long-serving Soviet puppet, if not actually a spy. Williams now believes that there was ‘a real attempt to try to undo him of a non-constitutional kind’. But really there was no need to supplement the exhaustion, alcohol and poor health that were already undoing him. When another sterling crisis hit Britain in 1976, Wilson’s biggest worry was that dealing with it might affect his plans for retirement. McNeill: We became aware that FMEL could not provide a Clyde Blowers Capital guarantee on 21 August 2015. We were not aware until about 25 September that it was also having problems producing a guarantee from a bank or an insurance company, and it gave its final position in relation to that on 7 October, by which time it was already the preferred bidder and we had stood down the other bidders.

As Ian points out, this mess is ongoing - and people trying to make a living, and carve out a decent life, are dealing with the government's sheer indifference 'all the time'. N one​ of this did much good in the long term. By 2019, relations between the two had broken down, and construction work had come to a near standstill. In early summer that year, CMAL reported to the steering group at Transport Scotland that both ships were years away from delivery; that no more than six people were working on vessel 801 and no more than two people on vessel 802 at any one time.Chancellor, Alexander (9 September 2010). "A lost civilisation". Spectator Book Club. Archived from the original on 26 October 2009 . Retrieved 17 October 2010. We reached the cemetery and drove around its avenues. We found the gravestone of my aunt and uncle easily enough, but what had inspired Spencer was more difficult to discover. The cemetery is well situated – there’s a view across the Clyde as far as Ben Lomond – and its slopes are planted with yews and cypresses, which I fancied gave it an Italian look and therefore the flavour of biblical scenes in Renaissance paintings. But Spencer described its attractions more mystically. ‘It was a hill gently sloping on three sides to the level roads and tenements surrounding it,’ he wrote to his confidante, his ex-wife Hilda. ‘Hemmed in by houses and streets and not rising as high as roof tops made it seem not only part of the place’s life but a wonderful final expression and realisation of it.’