Highlands could benefit from big-ticket sports facility
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
LAST week the news that a certain football manager was retiring upstaged the state opening of the Westminster Parliament. Not that the news from the Queen’s Speech has much positive news for Scotland. But it did get me thinking about sporting legacies. While Sir Alex Ferguson has a healthy pension pot what legacy can Caithness expect from the Olympic Games last summer in London and the Commonwealth Games to be held next year in Glasgow?
The launch of Team Scotland’s Go Scotland! public support campaign for the athlete selection for next year’s Commonwealth Games took place recently.
Team Scotland aims to have its largest and most successful team ever next year in Glasgow. With many of our athletes having experienced first-hand the excitement and passionate home crowd of a home Olympic Games at London 2012, Team Scotland wants to build that national feel-good factor right here in Scotland.
Go Scotland! will raise the awareness of the 17 sports in the games and give a greater profile to the athletes aiming for selection to the team. We know just how much Scots here in Caithness and across the country love their sport and how proud they are of their athletes, so I would encourage you to show your support by signing up to become an official team supporter at www.goscotland.org. You can also follow Team Scotland on Facebook and on Twitter @team_scotland or tweet using #GoScotland.
We need good sporting facilities in the north so we must seek our share from any legacy funds. Recently, I had a chat with Peter Budge, former Wick Academy manager and now SFA coach for Highlands and Islands, at a Midnight football session. He has seen training facilities from Lybster to Lochboisdale and knows how far-flung parts often need floodlights, all-weather surfaces or proper indoor spaces. And that’s just for football training.
I will be taking advice from the local sports councils across the three counties to see that each area’s priorities are weighed accurately. We can’t all have a velodrome, although the Highlands could do with such a big-ticket item as the new Glasgow one is already oversubscribed. Sir Chris Hoy as a role model for fast cycling boosts local demand. And the success of Wick Academy and Ross County getting their highest ever places in their respective leagues shows the north needs good training facilities like any other self-respecting part of Scotland.
Honouring brave men
LAST week the solemn commemorations of the valour of the Russian Arctic convoys of World War Two were held at Lyness on Hoy and at Cove on Loch Ewe where the naval escorts and merchant ships gathered for the "most dangerous journey in the world" as Winston Churchill described the supply routes to the ice-free port of Murmansk to aid our Soviet allies from 1941-1945.
I have had the privilege to meet convoy veterans such as Sandy Manson, from John O’Groats, Reay Clarke, from Edderton, and the late Jock Dempster, from Dunbar. So when the protracted campaign of nearly 70 years after the events finally achieved UK Government recognition last year we all cheered that the Arctic Star medal was finally approved by the Prime Minister. Indeed Jock received his at No. 10 Downing Street in March. Just as well, as he died only a few days before he was due to travel to Loch Ewe for last week’s events.
He would have been proud that over 30 surviving veterans received their medals from UK defence minister Mark Francois. Jock would have agreed with his friend David Craig, a young radio operator on the convoys, interviewed on the BBC, that the fight must go on so UK veterans can wear the Russian award for valour alongside the UK Arctic Star. While US, Canadian or Australian convoy veterans can do so, UK recipients are forbidden by rules that only medals for bravery bestowed by foreign powers can be worn if the events commemorated were within the past five years.
Plans to commemorate World War One will require careful assessment as military and political decisions are contested to this day. Churchill was widely praised as a World War Two leader but his party was ejected at the polls in 1945. His legacy is contested to this day in places like Tonypandy where as Liberal Home Secretary he ordered in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to put down a miners’ strike in 1910.
Survivors of Gallipoli in World War One knew Churchill was the author of what became a bloodbath. In World War Two much of the 51st Highland Division were left behind at Dunkirk in 1940. They have little cause to thank him for the decision that led to the surrender at St Valery and forced marches to imprisonment for the duration of the war. And finally, we all live with Churchill’s decision in 1925 to take Britain back onto the gold standard at too high a rate for those times of austerity and looming financial crash.
TV series are planned to recall the outbreak of World War One a century ago. So let’s not forget that Scotland was a close third behind Turkey and Serbia in the percentage of our population who paid the ultimate price. We need very careful analysis to get such a perspective correct when these past imperial calamities are recalled.
rob.gibson.msp@scottish.parliament.uk
