Martin Hannan: Leith is a Lamb for the slaughter

Published on Tuesday 10 November 2009 08:31

CALLING all who call themselves Leithers. You know yourselves – canny folk, chippy perhaps, proud to be a community, different and set apart in your historic working people's enclave, and definitely not and never, ever known by the name of Edinburgh.

Leithers, you should be thinking black burning shame of yourselves this day for the sin of inactivity in the face of an attack-by-stealth on the pride of Leith.

You do not deserve to award yourselves the great name of Leith, and your forefathers and mothers would disown you for your tacit acceptance of a truly scandalous blot on Leith's escutcheon.

Better still, let us just eradicate the name of Leith altogether, for clearly nobody living there would care enough to fight for it, given their passiveness about what is happening around them.

From now on we'll call Leith something like Edinport, East Granton or Lesser Portobello, because Leithers plainly don't know their history and seem unprepared to defend the essence of Leith.

All I have to do is mention Lamb's House, and those Leithers "in the know" will cringe and squirm at the name and realise why I write what I do.

It is probably misguided to take one building as emblematic of a place, but in past decades, Lamb's House was indeed that totem for Leith, a magnificently preserved 17th century townhouse that had become for many a symbol of both the traditions and the revival of Leith.

Now it stands in a sordid state of dilapidation, boarded up and seemingly ready to fall apart when the winter really bites. I visited last week and was shocked at how badly it has deteriorated.

In July, this newspaper reported on local councillors' and Leith Community Council's anger at the failure of the National Trust for Scotland – it's not had its troubles to seek, I know – and the EDI Group to act on the planning permission they were given to convert Lamb's House into flats.

That plan did not please everybody but at least it would have preserved the exterior of the home of old Andrew Lamb, where Mary, Queen of Scots, spent her first minutes under shelter on her return to reign over Scotland.

No doubt there's something going on behind the scenes to get the restoration project moving. If so, why haven't we been told? Doesn't EDI employ an excellent PR company?

Presumably, therefore, nothing is happening, so why are Leithers not holding vigils and besieging politicians, demanding action on this horrendous insult to the port.

Come on Leith. Mount the barricades. Get the protest flags out. March on Holyrood, the City Chambers and the Scottish Government – executive offices in Leith, of course – and demand that this scabrous disdain for a historic port and its most evocative building be rectified immediately.

Or else demolish Lamb's House and give up the name of Leith forever, because you won't deserve it. Edinport – yes, I can see it on the road signs now.

Losing moral marbles

I WEEP for America. After justice secretary Kenny MacAskill's decision to release Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, I suggested that, although I disagreed with MacAskill's decision, America had no moral high ground on which to lecture Scotland.

Last week, I had further proof that the United States has lost its moral marbles.

In the run-up to the vote by the House of Representatives on President Obama's health reform plans – which were approved by 220-215 votes at the weekend despite the hysterical and often mendacious campaign against the measures – a demonstration was held against the proposals outside the Capitol in Washington.

The Capitol protest was sponsored by Republican Party members of Congress. Given right-wing bias in the media, it took journalists as brave as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post to report what I and presumably many other people saw on the internet – pictures of demonstrators, as Milbank put it, "holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming 'National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945.' Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children."

If you really want to be made ill, Google "National Socialist healthcare banner" and you'll see what I mean.

Obama is a big man and can take the insults. But for people to label the reforms as Nazi and use pictures of dead innocent Jews to promote their cause, and for there to be no mass outcry about such imagery, suggests to me that a lot of Americans have clearly lost all sense of proportion in this debate.

The First Amendment to the American Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, yet with freedom comes responsibility to act in a manner that is not massively offensive, as these banners were.

As a huge admirer of the US, I humbly suggest that those responsible for such banners, and those who allowed them near the Capitol, should search their souls and question their conduct, for what they did was contrary to America's best values of tolerance and probity.

But no doubt they consider themselves God's appointed and will carry on their vile campaigning, using dead Jews to slander a President and a cause whose only "crime" is to try and make ill people better.

That's why I weep for America.