Edinburgh Notebook
After more than two months' extra drinking tune (Scotland finally won an extension from 10 P.m. to Ii p.m. last December) there is an air of puzzlement about So far, no police force, nor even any of our myriad moral pressure groups, has been able to report the forecast rise in drunkenness, drunk driving, alcoholism, or late night violence. Of course, the going rate for all these things is much higher here than in the south—the bald figures for drunk driving accidents suggest that we are twice as prone as are the people °Is south-east England—but nevertheless, we do not seem to have abused this latest grudging measure of liberty. Cynics, like my local publican, suggest that this is because the Government failed to arrange any additional income or employment to finance the monstrous bender that some expected; oPtimists, that we have passed this first tiny test of readiness for self-government.
Even in Edinburgh, the very fountainhead of new financial angles, an occasional entrepreneur, a visionary of fiscal opportunity, Can go bust. We have for some weeks now been regaled with the unfortunate saga of one such modern Law or Patterson, a Mr Robert Sutherland, whose burgeoning insurance and mortgage empire has crashed, taking with it some small part at least of the fortune of Lord George-Brown Lord George, Chairman of Robert Sutherland and Co. Ltd, was first attracted tO this enterprise by his well-known interest in simplified conveyancing. It now seems that the only product of this philanthropic scheme has been to convey large sums of Money (some say as much as £200,000) from the original owners—banks, building societies, insurance companies, businessmen and even a misguided mink farmer— through the books of Mr Sutherland's companies, many of which have now ceased trading. Unhappily for Lord George, his involvement is twofold Not only was he shown as chairman of Mr Sutherland's
Principal company, he was also apparently
shown as a director of First Fortune Ltd, one of the nation's newer banks, and a sub stantial creditor of the Sutherland empire. he reverberations of this unhappy tale are unlikely to end at the Edinburgh city boundary.
The Peerage are of course vulnerable to the aPproaches of businessmen whose zeal outruns their subsequent performance. Lord osebery has trouble enough, God knows, With Mentmore, and the Revenue; but here at home, on the doorstep of his Dalmeny estate, poor Lord Rosebery is currently struggling to make sense of an investment
which has gone spectacularly wrong to the tune of almost half a million pounds. A distinguished theatre buff, Lord Rosebery was intrigued some six years ago by a scheme to set up a Scottish company specialising in theatrical lighting. It shut its doors at Christmas, with debts of about L4()(),000, leaving his lordship as the guarantor of a £250,000 bank overdraft. A cursory examination of the books of On-the-Spot Northern Light Ltd conveys the impression that it had for some time been losing several hundred pounds on each day that it traded.
Lord Rosebery himself was not of course an active force, restricting his contribution to the regular signature of guarantees and salary cheques, and the chairmanship of board meetings held in the nursery of his stately home. He is currently attempting to buy back the ruins of his enterprise from the Receiver, while, at the same time, endeavouring to placate a gaggle of unsecured creditors who took the feudal view that they only extended credit to an uncommonly brave venture because there was a Lord, and a fortune, in the wainscot.
Agee and Hosenball are scarcely names to be found on even the most optimistic Edinburgh haberdasher's list of those entitled to wear (and buy) a tartan. Nevertheless, it now. seems that Philip Agee is destined to feature in the long and complex history of the law of Scotland. Crossing the border one skip ahead of Mr Merlyn Rees's deportation order, he has promptly become the latest in a long line of aspirant Dreyfuses to challenge the legality of the Home Secretary's writ in Scotland. Carpet-bagger though he is, once within the jurisdiction of the Scottish court, he has found respected Counsel who disputes the right of any Secretary of State save the Secretary of State for Scotland to deport a Scottish resident.
The merits of the case, if tested to the full, will eventually be. resolved by the House of Lords; but the precedents are on Agee's side. For two previous post-war cases, those of Pincus Haimovici and James MacDonald Reid, were won de facto, if not de jure, by the government's sudden abandonment of the fight, and there is good reason to believe that nobody in Whitehall much fancies taking the dispute to a conclusion. For if the court eventually found that the Home Secretary had no authority to deport from Scotland it would make the Waverley station the Mecca of every illegal immigrant.
Ian Sproat, the assertive Tory MP for South Aberdeen, seems at time to be competing not with his Labour or SNP opponents, but with his equally reticent Tory colleagues from Kinross, Pentlands and Cathcart in a private contest for the maximum press coverage, sparing almost no cost in consistency, thought or research. Having come a generally applauded cropper over his campaign against social security scroungers, he is now the source of wider satisfaction as a novelist. Mr Sproat was prominent in the fight to cheat authors of any Public Lending Right ; nevertheless, to demonstrate perhaps his incorruptibility, Sproat has recently offered Chatto and Windus a full-length sample of his genius for fiction. With a rush of decency seldom met amongst those who lunch in Bloomsbury, the publishers have apparently sent it back, unread, with this stirring message: 'Even if your name was Proust, we would not read it.' They should take care; Sproaty, if not unduly bright, is always willing to learn, and is quite capable of re-submitting his oeuvre under the appropriate anagram.
There is no telling what further injustices to Scotland may be done in the ensuing pages —which I have not seen at the time of writing—but one perpetrated last week in this journal must be set to rights. 'The Scots lost their inherent visual invention many centuries ago' wrote John McEwen (obviously a Saxon now de travestie); and so are the Adams, Thomson, Gowans, Bryce, subsumed as British, shoulder to English shoulder with Raeburn, Ramsay, Wilkie, MacTaggart, Nasmyth and Alexander Calder. The fault is not McEwen's (he may not actually like any of the last two centuries of Scottish architects, painters, sculptors and designers) but the system's. The 'Scotland is British' movement here is thought to work on the traditional assumption that Scotland is British, British is English, ergo, Scotland is English; and Sotheby's plainly share that view. In this week's catalogue of 'Silhouettes and English and Continental Miniatures,' Lot 19 catches the provincial eye: 'English school, circa 1815. A Pair of white wax profile reliefs. . . by T. Alexander
Hill, Edinburgh. (Sotheby's italics).
Colin Bell
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