Leading from the front:
18 years of stunning Sunday Herald covers
SO IT’S Happy Birthday to us. We’re 18. All grown up. Eighteen years ago, as the crime and investigations editor of the Sunday Herald, I was part of the launch team of this paper. Today, as editor, I have the pleasure of leading one of the hardest-working, most talented and dedicated teams of journalists in the business. I joined the Sunday Herald after leaving Scotland on Sunday – a paper which was tired, staid, a stick-in-the-mud, with a Thatcherite line out of sync with modern Scotland. I was intrigued by what I was told by the Sunday Herald’s launch editor Andrew Jaspan: that this new paper would be exciting, young, vibrant – in touch with the aspirations and concerns of this great country of ours.
And exciting and young it was: we were the first paper in Scotland to embrace the internet. When we launched we were the only paper in the UK to run email addresses under reporters’ bylines. It seems banal now, but it was revolutionary then – we had reporters who actually wanted to engage with their readers. The launch team may have been holed up on the top floor of the Herald and Times’ Black Lubyanka building on Albion Street, above the grotty old Press Bar, but we were the first newspaper office filled with shiny green and blue iMacs (remember those?) and it made the team feel that we were really creating something new – which we were.
We were creating a paper that would take positions no other paper either had the integrity or the wit to take: we championed devolution from the start. Not for us any Scottish cringe.
Inevitably, I was told by journalists on other papers that I was making a huge mistake. “The Sunday Herald won’t last the month out,” they told me. How wrong they were. Many of the folk who warned me the paper wouldn’t last later came knocking on our door for a job, keen to work for a paper they found exciting, fresh and different.
But back when the paper launched, the world was at a strange juncture, and many of the positions we would subsequently take as the years rolled by could never have been envisioned because such a future could not be envisioned. The fag-end of the 90s was the era of “The End of History”: the Cold War was over, the Third Way as envisioned by Blair and Clinton had seemed to draw all passion from politics which had become a technocratic enterprise stripped of purpose and belief, there was peace in Northern Ireland after 30 years of civil war, and the UK was riding a high cultural tide, toe-curlingly called “Cool Britannia”.
Within a few years of our launch, however, the attacks on America on September 11 happened, and the world changed forever. Here’s an interesting story about the Sunday Herald and 9/11, by way of a quick aside: one Saturday in the summer of 1999, I was asked to ring round my intelligence contacts (I covered terrorism and intelligence stories for the paper). It was a quiet weekend and we had no splash. I spoke to a CIA contact in Islamabad and the best info he had was that he’d heard al Qaida and Osama bin Laden were planning an attack on America. He added that he’d heard something about planes potentially being used. I took it to the editor. There was some debate among executives about whether al Qaida was really that important (some of the team hadn’t even heard of AQ back then, and few of the public knew of its operations) but we ran the story on the front page anyway. So, two years before September 11, we, unwittingly, predicted it.
After 9/11 the world entered a tailspin that it has not righted itself from. Soon, the west – or at least America and Britain – were moving toward war in Iraq. With a few notable exceptions, the Sunday Herald was in the vanguard of leading voices against the war. Back then – this was late 2002/ early 2003 – we were getting a million readers from America online every Sunday. These American readers wanted the truth, and they had to turn to a Scottish newspaper to give it to them because the American press was failing. Like Britain, the American media parroted and amplified the lies of the Bush and Blair administrations and shamefully helped frog-march the people of the UK and the USA into an illegal war. Today, our opposition to the Iraq War stands as one of my proudest professional moments.
As Iraq turned the Labour Party into a toxic mess, and out of control bankers reduced the nation’s financial assets to a playpark for the City of London, we picked up the baton against austerity. What a ghastly manipulation of the truth to make ordinary, and oftentimes the most vulnerable, people pay the price for the failure
of super-rich amoral speculators. The poor should not be driven deeper into poverty, we believed, while jail cells are waiting to be filled by bankers.
And then Scotland decided to walk firmly on to the world stage asking this question: “Should we be an independent nation?” It wasn’t a difficult decision for the Sunday Herald to take to support that proposition and say, “Yes, Scotland should be independent”. We had followed a familiar and similar political trajectory to many of our readers. We are at heart a liberal and progressive paper. We believe in decency, fairness, equality and opportunity. The Labour Party had once seemed to offer the only hope of cre- ating the society we wished to see created, but it imploded under the weight of its lies and duplicity over WMD. The Tories remained anathema in Scotland, and the Lib Dems sold their soul in the early days of coalition. By the late 2000s, it seemed to us that the SNP offered a progressive glimmer – but like many voters who put their X by the letters SNP on the ballot paper, we were not nationalist by nature. In fact, this paper remains firmly internationalist in its outlook. However, bit by bit as the grim status quo in Westminster showed no hope of changing, it became incrementally clear to us that independence was key to solving the array of problems that Scotland faced; problems which would never be dealt with adequately by a parliament in London on a radically different trajectory to the parliament in Edinburgh.
And so we became the only paper in Scotland – or the world for that matter (apart from Catalonia, I guess) – which supported Scottish independence. That fact alone should be enough to make the rest of the media in this country blush. We have one of the most crowded newspaper markets in the world, but in Scotland the views of 45 per cent of the population were represented by just one paper – this one. That was good for us, but very bad for democracy and even worse for plurality of the press.
Equally, in the face of the hectoring lies of the Brexit campaign we stood proudly, resolutely European and campaigned with all our hearts to remain in the EU. And our position to this day is simple: we want to see an independent Scotland within the European Union, as that is where we believe the best future lies for the people of Scotland.
IT does, however, become wearying when people routinely describe the Sunday Herald as “an independence paper”, as if that is all we do. Of course, we support independence but we do many, many other things which serve this country and journalism well. Calling the Sunday Herald an “independence paper” is like going out for a great meal and only talking about the coffee. The world is our palette.
We have always been a home for great investigative journalism. We’ve jailed terrorists and corrupt politicians, we’ve sent our reporters to the most dangerous places on earth to tell you what is happening in the world’s most fearsome trouble spots. Our lifestyle reporting is second to none – think of our food coverage, our TV coverage. Then there are our commentators – the best in the business, no question.
We are, quite simply, all about old-fashioned journalism: we hold power to account no matter who wields that power – left, right, nationalist, unionist – political position does not colour our reporting, we scrutinise the government and those who can control your life, we reflect the world around us, and we try to tell the truth every time we lift a pen or put hands to a keyboard. Journalism is an art, not a science, and mistakes are made, but when they are made in the Sunday Herald (and to be honest with you, that’s rarely) we apologise and amend.
In the era of fake news, authentic, honest and truthful journalism like ours is more important than ever before. That is what our hard-working team strives every week to bring you: the truth. The truth is our work, first and foremost. But we also try to entertain you. Reporting the truth can be a grim business, and we’ve always prided ourselves on a good old-fashioned Scottish sense of humour, so amid the dark, we try to give you plenty of light too. A good Sunday newspaper should make you gasp – in horror, in anger, in shock at what is happening in the world – but it should also make you smile at times too, at the bite of our commentators, the wit and intelligence of our writers, and the sheer zest for life that ordinary Scots have and that we reflect in our pages every week.
It’s been wonderful standing up for Scotland and standing up for you these last 18 years, and we hope you continue spending a few hours in our company every Sunday as we grow older with you. Today, rather than you raising a glass to us on our birthday, all of us here at the Sunday Herald are raising a glass to you, because it is you, our readers, who have made the last 18 years possible. Thank you for your loyalty and thank you for believing in us. We believe in you too.
WHEN it comes to the traditional milestones of adulthood, Angela Murray is knocking them off early. By the time she turned 18 she had already been out of school for two years, having managed to get a job in a major company before she had even done her prelims. She’s already looking to buy her own flat, though she finds the prospect “scary”. At the time of her 18th birthday, she recalls thinking: “That’s me, I’m an adult now, I’m free to do what I want”.
But it was a brief thrill. Soon after, she says: “I realised that you’re just the exact same you were when you were 17. There’s a change of number. You’re free to do a few more things. But in terms of the way people look at you, you’re still, even in your family, a child.”
Murray describes being 18 as “like being in limbo”. She feels, she explains, “like I’m an adult, but at the same time I’m not. I’m at the stage in life where I don’t know what I want to do, where I want to go. But you feel there is such an expectation, this is it, you’re an adult, what do you want to do?”
We do our growing up a little earlier in Scotland, so by the time you are 18 you have already been able to vote (in Scottish elections), get married or enter into a civil partnership without parental consent, hold an adult passport and stand for election for the past two years, and you’ll have been eligible to be tried in an adult court since you were 12 (although should you find yourself there, you can’t be sent to an adult prison until you’re 21). But the age of 18 remains in our culture a huge turning point and milestone, the year when we officially become an adult – when we can add gambling, voting in UK elections, buying drinks in the pub, getting a tattoo, and serving on a jury to our list of rights and privileges, and celebrate that by legally buying fireworks to boot.
But for most of those actually turning 18, the idea of adulthood hovers around the date rather hazily. It can seem like a threat. It can seem loaded with possibility. When the day itself comes it can seem like many others, though marked by a big party, in effect an excessive legal drinking session. That, after all, is how we do rites of passage in Scotland.
The truth is that where people are on their passage to adulthood varies wildly at the age of 18, as it does, frequently throughout their 20s. Some, like Murray, have already been working for years, others are still at school, some at university, others are on gap years. Some are living at home, some setting up in their own flats or in shared houses. Though we can identify milestones, or assign a specific age, there is a more elusive concept of adulthood which young people are moving towards.
Researchers frequently refer now to a phase, often called emerging adulthood, between 18 and 25, in which young adults find their own paths. Within this span of years there are rites of passage – the gap year for instance. There are ceremonies – the graduation from school or university. There are even, for some, huge life events – having children, getting married. Culture and socio-economics play a major part in the different paths people take.
While young people revel in the freedoms that adulthood brings, for many it is daunting. Partly that is because of the weight that society puts on it. Cara Brodie, who turned 18 in May last year recalls: “I knew that this was going to be the year that everything would change. I would move away to uni. I knew it marked the beginning of adulthood in that sense.” For Brodie, studying sociology and anthropology at Edinburgh University, this has been the year when she has moved out of her family home, and as she says, had to “be responsible for myself and independent”. That is not, of course, the case for everyone. “For some of my friends it has been completely different. They’re still at home. Their lives are still very much the same”.
For her, one of the big moments of growing up came when she sat around the table on her first night at university “with loads of people I didn’t know and thought how I was going to be living with them for the next year”. “I was in shock,” she recalls, “taken aback. Because getting to know everyone was quite scary. That summer I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of two years as well. That was a huge change. A huge part of my life had ended and I was going to another huge part of my life.”
If one of the freedoms of adulthood is drinking, then many young people today, as generations did before them, have passed that threshold beforehand. They have sported their fake ID cards and acted out being 18. A 2014 study showed, for instance, that 45 per cent of teen Scots had experienced binge drinking by the age of 14.
One of the features of the cohort of young people who are 18 this year is
that they are part of Generation Z, the generation after the Millennials, who have grown up with connectivity as a ubiquitous feature in their lives. Coming of age in 2017 also means entering adulthood in a world where everything is digital, porn has been made easily accessible, and there has been huge anxiety about how they communicate and represent themselves online.
Characteristics of Generation Z include a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality – only around 50 per cent of young people surveyed in the United States said they were heterosexual. They are more likely to practise safe sex. And they are less likely to have babies. Though teen pregnancy rates were slashed by around 50 per cent in the decade leading to 2014, it remains the case that teenage girls from the poorest areas are five times more likely to become pregnant than their wealthier peers.
But also one thing that looks likely, given trends, is that they will hit some of the key milestones of adulthood later than previous generations. As Vernon Gayle, Professor of Sociology and Social Statistics at the University of Edinburgh observes, “the youth phase is expanding”.
“Teenage attitudes,” he says, “behaviours, and acts of consumption are evident in younger kids who would previously have been considered as children. The other end of the youth phase appears to have an ever-lengthening tail. Adults in their 20s and beyond routinely maintain attitudes, engage in behaviours and live lifestyles that have both striking and persistent similarities with younger counterparts in the youth phase.” In other words, pre-teen kids are acting like teenagers and so are young adults. However, he notes, that there is no “homogenous” youth phase. It is “shaped by multiple factors including social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity”.
Turning 18 might not be so very different for Generation Z than it was, say for Generation X, but it has changed over the centuries. As Gayle describes: “Horatio Nelson had spent a third of his life in the Navy by the time he was 18. Before the war the school leaving age was 14 and even as recently as the early 1970s most pupils left school before they were 16.”
What do today’s 18-year-olds want out of life? Few of them yet have very rigid plans. “I want to be happy,” says Emilia Di Ciacca, who turned 18 this month and is studying fashion and business at Fife college. “I don’t really care about anything else. I think to be happy I’d have to have a stable job. I want to have kids and I don’t know if I want a dog or not. But I want to have a life first before I have kids. I want to travel, like my mum did, before I have kids.”
Very few of the young adults I spoke to said they actually feel like an adult – hardly surprising given the number of people in their 30s and beyond who still struggle with the notion. “I still don’t feel like an adult,” says Cara Brodie, “but then when I think about the things that I’m now doing for myself that I wasn’t before, I feel like I’ve matured a lot.” Yet already she is living away from her family home and making her way towards some sort of financial independence, with a job as an usher at the Lyceum theatre.
Often they see adulthood as lying, not in tangible milestones, but self-development. As 19-year-old Lauren Gage, student of philosophy and maths at the University of St Andrews describes: “I think it’s figuring out who you are as a person. When you figure out what sort of behaviour makes you happiest and you don’t have to think about it, that’s a real sign of adulthood.” Gage says she doesn’t yet feel like an adult. “How would you really? Being at university makes you feel quite childlike. You still feel like you’re very much part of an institution where you’re lowest of the ranks.” Even, she observes, her boyfriend, who is 24 and studying medicine, doesn’t see himself as an adult yet. “He’s technically an adult but he doesn’t feel like one because he’s still in the whole education process. He reckons that to become an adult is to be independent and not have to rely on anyone. When you can support yourself without relying on parents or family that’s a definite sign of adulthood. ”
HOW people feel about being 18 depends a little on where they are on their journey with it. Michael Robertson, still at school in Edinburgh, only recently turned 18. He recalls that he was given an “18 years old” balloon which floated in his room, taunting him with its ominous sense of change and responsibility, till it drove him to pop it after five days. An aspiring actor, who has developed his skills with the Strange Town theatre company, he hopes to gain a place at the Conservatoire in Glasgow, but this would mean moving city, and living away from home. “I’m daunted by moving out of home. I think leaving school is bigger than turning 18 – it’s about leaving my comfort zone.”
All that change seems as yet ahead of him. Exams loom; pressure mounts. “I feel I’m already on the path now to adulthood. I think the path started when I hit secondary school but now it’s got a lot harder. You’ve got to take a lot more responsibility now.”
For Oscar McIntosh, a student in TV production at Glasgow Kelvin College who turned 18 much later than all his friends, the arrival of the date was a “relief”. “In terms of becoming an adult I think turning 18 is not as important as other things,” he says, “I would say a more accurate passage into adulthood is moving out of home, successfully managing money and staying on top of everything, that is far more of a landmark that being ‘legally’ allowed to drink booze.”
Although for Emilia Di Caccia, that particular milestone is more than the sum of its parts. “When you’re 18 you’re able to socialise in a lot more places. The world opens up.”
SOMEWHERE in Glasgow – or perhaps further afield? – there’s an 18-year-old whose name includes all the names of the Rangers team. Not just any Rangers team, either. This was the Rangers of 1999, the domestic treble winners, of Lorenzo Amoruso, Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Rod Wallace.
Thus the lad has this mouthful to live with: Lionel Sergio Lorenzo Colin Giovanni Barry Ian Jorge Gabriel Stephane Rod. His father strangely omitted to tell the boy’s mother at the time. Six weeks after the deed she was still trying to come to terms with it.
This was one of the news items that kept Scots intrigued in the first weeks of the year, prior to the launch in early February of the Sunday Herald.
Scotland was looking forward to its first Parliament in three centuries. A leader in our sister paper, The Herald, said: “Welcome to 1999. It will be a truly historic year for Scotland,” noting that elections would be taking place in less than five months’ time. Little did we know what path those elections would begin to pave for this nation.
Political commentators were already musing about the electoral fortunes of the SNP – or the “one-man band”, as some had it. The Herald’s Scottish political editor, Murray Ritchie, said the SNP would be put under greater pressure than at any time in their history. “Unlike Labour, which can muster the overwhelming firepower of the British state … not to mention vast spending from the trade unions, the SNP must face the enemy in classic Scottish fashion – being nimble and clever, using the thrust of the Nationalist rapier to dodge the slashing Labour broadsword.”
Cabinet papers released in early 1999 under the 30-year rule revealed that Scotland could have had its own Parliament almost three decades earlier “with the apparent approval of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, had it not been for the dogmatic stance taken by Scottish Secretary, Willie Ross”.
Scotland – and the UK – looked on askance as the Euro was launched. Mike Tyson was sent to prison for as- sault, King Hussein of Jordan died, Bill Clinton was acquitted in his impeachment trial, Eminem released The Slim
Shady LP and Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Öcalan was charged with treason in Ankara, Turkey.
On the football beat, Dick Advocaat’s team took on Celtic in a rousing New Year derby. Alan Stubbs put Dr Jozef Venglos’s Celtic in front. Gabriel Amato and Rod Wallace replied for Rangers, but Henrik Larsson made it 2-2. Rangers finished the game on 44 points, with Celtic 10 points behind in third. Rangers, a month later, would be revealed as 14th of the world’s 20th wealthiest clubs, with a turnover of £31.6 million. How times change.
The start of the year saw gales scouring Britain; an elderly man was killed in Cramond, Edinburgh. Glasgow was preparing to usher in its year as UK City of Architecture and Design, the launch marked by city buildings being lit up in what was described as a “dialogue of light”. There was controversy over the feared clean-up costs of the former BAE Royal Ordnance site at Bishopton. The Herald reported that it might cost between £100m and £300m to make the 2,600-acre safe for redevelopment and that the process might take three generations to complete.
Scotland’s health minister, Sam Galbraith, accused Scots doctors of “scaremongering” over the pressures on hospitals caused by emergency admissions.
RAF Lossiemouth welcomed the return of Tornado crews who had spearheaded Britain’s bombing raids against Iraq. The declared aim of the Cruise missile and bombing sorties was to “degrade” Saddam Hussein’s ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. Those were the fantasy WMD that never existed but helped Tony Blair take the nation into an illegal war.
A campaign was launched to highlight Ian Stewart, from Pittenweem, “a forgotten Scot who founded the Rolling Stones”. Stewart, who wasn’t hip enough to be allowed to continue in the band, had died in 1995.
THERE was a probe into alleged sleaze in South Lanarkshire and allegations of malpractice surrounding Labour in the Glasgow Govan seat in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament elections. Margaret Cook, former wife of Labour’s Foreign Secretary, Robin, published a book in which she claimed he was a heavy drinker and serial adulterer. Labour politicians were reported to be closing ranks around their colleague.
It was announced that 450 jobs were to be axed at the Wrangler jeans factory in Camelon, Falkirk, at the same time as it was disclosed that 200 would go at Mitsubishi Electric in Silicon Glen.
Scottish miners paid tribute to the former Scottish NUM president Mick McGahey, who died aged 74, at the end of January. Scottish football fans probably raised an ironic cheer or two when Glenn Hoddle, the head coach of the England team, was sacked after he made remarks about disabled people in an interview revealing that he believed that the “disabled, and others, are being punished for sins in a former life”.
A couple of other news items from those weeks still seem familiar today, 18 years after they were written.
A poll revealed that only six per cent of Scotland’s leading firms thought that independence would be good for business, while 75 per cent took the view that it would create problems.
And mobile phones, it was reported, were becoming the new pest in school classrooms.