It’s been splendid golfing weather. For weeks now there’s been no rain. There’s been a mild, light, westerly wind and temperatures in the high 20s. The British Open Championship course at Muirfield on the West Lothian coast has been looking its best. And then we go and spoil it all by realising, too late, that you cannot really stage a major sporting event at a men-only club.
Muirfield – Men-only Club
The men at golf’s governing body, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, have been made to look….well, ancient…by failing to spot in advance that someone would object to Muirfield as the venue for the Open because of its male-only membership. That “someone” turned out to be Alex Salmond, an indifferent golfer but a championship politician.
His refusal to attend Muirfield has thrown the golfers into an embarrassing silence while they look for their ball. To the rest of the world his gesture signalled that while Scotland is proud to have invented the game of golf in the 15th century, it aspires to play it by 21st century rules.
Peter Dawson
R&A Chief under fire over
Muirfield choice
The men at the Royal and Ancient have been trying to argue that a private club like Muirfield is not discriminating against women in the same way as clubs used to discriminate against the working class or Catholics or blacks or gays. “It’s just how things are,” said Peter Dawson, the R&A chief executive. “ But we will have a good look at what people are saying…and find the most sensible way forward.”
After this week in the baking media sun, I guess the R&A will not be holding the Open again at Muirfield or Troon until they allow women to join their clubs. The issue is too much of a distraction from the game itself.
And speaking of distractions, we’ve been seeing a lot of film footage this week of a Trident submarine ploughing its way up the Clyde.
The Royal Navy base at
Faslane on the Clyde
The issue of nuclear weapons has now entwined itself around the independence debate, with the SNP arguing that the only sure way of getting rid of “weapons of mass destruction” on Scottish soil is to vote for independence. It’s a powerful argument in Scotland where public opinion is fairly evenly divided over nuclear weapons.
The Westminster government’s review of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, published this week, has brought the Conservatives out in favour of a full replacement of Trident but the Liberal Democrats want a scaled down version. Labour have yet to make up their mind. The issue – like men-only golf clubs – poses the question the SNP are asking more and more: what kind of country do you want Scotland to be?
Mr Salmond was in the Isle of Man earlier this week to make the point that an independent Scotland could flourish within an informal Sterling currency zone. Like the Isle of Man it would have a better credit rating than the UK, he claimed, and escape some of the austerity measures being imposed from Westminster.
Shetland and other islands
Asking awkward questions
Meanwhile, Scotland’s island communities have been thinking about independence too. Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles have written to Alex Salmond and David Cameron asking 10 awkward questions. Whatever the result of next year’s referendum, could they have more say over their own budgets ? Could they have a share of the Crown Estate revenues ? Could they be exempt from the “bedroom tax” ? Could they have their own constitutions ? Could their island cultures be protected ? We await the answers.
The summer sunshine has not been reflected in the latest unemployment figures. There has been a sudden increase to 7.5 per cent, the first time the figure has risen for the last seven months. The economy is still scraping along the bottom, with many new jobs being only part time and more people giving up looking for work altogether. Scotland is still doing better than the UK where unemployment is at 7.8 per cent and youth unemployment is nearly 20 per cent, 3 per cent more than in Scotland. But the graphs are so indecisive that this could all change next month.
There’s word that the SNP is looking for a senior literary figure to help put some passion and poetry into their white paper on independence, due to be published in November. William McIlvanney has been mentioned. I’d like to suggest Robert Galbraith, author of the sensational new detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling….. though this week Robert turned out to be a woman, an Edinburgh lady calling herself J K Rowling.
I have a feeling his/her next book will be about a female golfer who disguises herself as a man to get into the Muirfield Golf Club. But she is discovered when she runs onto the final green, dressed only in the Saltire flag which she then waves behind the winner of the Open. She escapes in a nuclear submarine and ends up leading an independence movement in Shetland. Oh dear, the sun has gone to my head.