Sunday, December 15, 2013

A humbling tale of everyday folk


Better Together recently announced that it had received further donations, amounting to £1,121,000, from six donors. Blair MacDougall, campaign director, is reported in today's Sunday Herald as saying that “we know the money that we have managed to raise ourselves is dwarfed by the almost limitless funds available to the Nationalists”. He is said to have described himself as “humbled” by the actions of supporters who have managed to scrape together a donation in these “tough times”.

Tough times indeed. I was listening to Radio Scotland's Headlines this morning to stories of one person deemed fit to work despite the recent discovery of a cancerous tumour and another who had her benefit stopped because she'd mistakenly applied for only 27 jobs instead of the targetted 28 (and this seems to be that woman's own story). And we are of course all in it together. So, who are the generous heroes, willing to hand over cash even when faced with these kinds of mind-numbing stresses and pressures? Who are the selfless six, fired by a sense of injustice, who will stand up for the poor and downtrodden against the vile Nationalist onslaught? Just how horrific are the stories of personal hardship and sacrifice that so moved even an old cynic like Blair?


  • Sir Chippendale "Chips" Lindley Keswick was born in 1940 into the Keswick tai-pan dynasty, which  had a long-standing association with the Jardine Matheson conglomerate. The Keswick family have been closely associated with the ownership or management of a number of Far East businesses. Sir Chippendale was educated at Eton College and the University of Aix-Marseilles and married Lady Sarah Ramsay, daughter of the 16th Earl of Dalhousie, in 1966. He is a non-executive director of DeBeers Société Anonyme and Investec Bank. Sir Chippendale is a member of the gentleman's clubs White's (whose 50 or so current members include Sir Run Run Shaw,  Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg and HRH The Prince of Wales) and The City University Club. He is a past supporter of "Business for Sterling", a donor to the Conservative party and sat on the board of corporate donors to the Conservatives.
  • The Hon. Andrew McDonnell Fraser is the son of Baron Fraser of Tullybelton. He graduated from St John's College, Oxford and worked in the City and elsewhere, before appointment as CEO of Baring Securities in the UK. In 2000, and following Baring's collapse, as absentee landlord of the 11,000 acre Corriegarth Estate near Fort Augustus, the Honourable Andrew sacked his shepherd, George Mathieson. Mr. Mathieson sued for compensation, a claim which the Honourable Andrew resisted. At the tribunal hearing, Mr. Mathieson was represented by his wife, Margot, a cookery student. The Mathiesons won. At present, The Honourable Andrew is “a director of an Asian hedge fund and a global investor”  .

Whatever side of the debate you are on, it would be churlish not to recognise that this heart-warming tale of altruism and struggle, by those whom fate has not favoured, ought finally to give the lie to the claim you sometimes still hear whispered, to the effect that Better Together is at base no more than a loose conglomeration of right-wing business interests, estate-owning aristocrats and romantic, occasionally shadowy, British nationalists, every last one of them fired by nothing more dignified than a grim determination to protect their position of power and comfort coupled with an increasingly desperate and disbelieving fury that anyone might dare to challenge it in the first place.

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