The Alex Salmond of Despair

This was first posted on Facebook on 24th February 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

TW: sexual harassment at work.

Let me see if I can very briefly bring light to this. In some ways, it seems entirely unimportant – the last-ditch struggle of an ambitious man who sees his political legacy disappearing – and in other ways, it could affect Scottish politics for years to come.

Creative Scots

The Creative Scotland Gala Awards Ceremony will be held on Thursday 13th December 2012, at Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, from 6.30pm til late. (Dress: Black Tie) Sponsored by The Daily Record, Creative Scotland, Event Scotland, YoungScot, and Education Scotland.

Creative Scotland puts equality at the heart of its activity, and we aim to acknowledge and reflect the diversity in Scotland today in all our work … Providing leadership through best practice in our own organisation.

The Judging Panel for the Creative Scotland Awards 2012:

• Allan Rennie – Editor, The Daily Record
• Iain Munro – Director of Creative Development, Creative Scotland
• Paul English – Arts & Entertainment Writer, The Daily Record
• Andrew Lockyer – BBC, Executive Producer of The Culture Show and The Review Show
• Sanjeev Kohli – Writer, actor, comedian
• Tom Pow – Poet
• Aaron Shorr – Royal Conservatoire Scotland

All men. Nobody responsible for putting together the panel of judges evidently thought it matters if Creative Scotland’s awards “acknowledge and reflect the diversity in Scotland today” in the most simple and basic of ways: by having a panel of judges that included representatives from half the population.

Acknowledging that it was pretty much inevitable that Allan Rennie and Iain Munro must be asked to be judges, since sponsorship has its due rewards, that leaves five places: for an evenly balanced panel, three or four of those places should have gone to women.

The general areas that appear wanted were a newspaper’s arts and entertainment writer, a TV producer, two creative Scots (writer, poet, actor, comedian), and a representative from further education in music, dance, or drama.

Specific issues about finding a senior TV producer who isn’t male are discussed here.

But no organisation in a modern Scotland should think it acceptable to come up with a panel that’s all male.

Creative Scotland’s response on Twitter was A broad range of arts & culture professionals were invited to form part of the judging panel. Female judges were selected but were unable to take part.

This is an initial list that it would be great to expand on. Tagged #CreativeScotsWomen on Twitter, or add as a comment here. (The Women’s Room UK is doing a similar and much more broadly-scoped project to list women experts for the BBC and other media.)

If Creative Scotland asked even half of the women on this list and they were all unable to take part on that Thursday evening, I want to know what party they’re all invited to, because that would be the best evening out ever.

Investigative journalism on the cheap

Lyall Duff, as probably everyone in Scotland knows by now, posted some stupid crap on his Facebook profile under the mistaken impression that he’d made it private.

When the Daily Record (8th April) published some tweets from a couple of years ago made by Josh Wilson (@joshyyw) when he was 17, identifying him as an “SNP activist” I saw this criticised on my twitterfeed even by Labour activists protesting that this was unfair – a young man being blamed for “crude and sexist” comments he’d made two years ago.

Before I read the Daily Record story I agreed. Everyone says the odd stupid thing when they’re 17: this shouldn’t necessarily be held against you when you’re older. And it seems to me that newspapers are getting worked up about scandalous stuff from social media because it is the cheapest and least-effortful form of investigative journalism.