White noise

I DON’T want to venture into the minefield of just exactly what constitutes racism and anti-Semitism – Labour is more than capable of blowing itself up without my help – but I’ve come across a case which, if it goes ahead, will have enormous repercussions and, as a knock-on, will not only turn the law into an ass but a herd of braying donkeys.

For legal reasons I can’t go into detail, other than to give the main charge, which is denied – racially aggravated breach of the peace. That is that the woman concerned shouted racial abuse at one police officer, witnessed by a second. Racially aggravated charges increase the normal punishment tariff on conviction.

There are other charges connected with the incident which she admits, just not the main one. She’s alleged to have used the words “F*****g white c**t”. She’s admitting to using the middle word but not the bracketing epithets. It is true that the officer is white. However, it is also true that the woman is white!

How can it possibly be that using the correct designation of a person’s colour while of the same colour yourself is a racial offence? This mad reinterpretation of the law undermines the principle of the race relations acts. Or, in the words of one legal expert I consulted: “Blimey! Just blimey.”

Point failure

Scottish Labour has been handing leaflets to rail commuters about overcrowded trains which savage the SNP Government. Fair comment if you’ve ever travelled on a boxy ScotRail train with too few carriages and so many folk jammed in makes the Tokyo underground look like the Marie Celeste.

The problem is that the photograph is actually from a crowded English train. Aren’t our rail discomforts good enough Labour? Speak up Richard Leonard. It’s Scotland’s jam!

My chum Neil Mackay points to the 18.18 Glasgow to East Kilbride as the epitome of over-crowdedness, if perhaps too sardined for a snapper to raise a camera. Neil’s been off for a few weeks but he’s still got the bruising to the ribs as well as flashbacks to the time passengers cast lots to see who would sacrifice themselves to save the others if the oxygen threatened to run out before Giffnock.

Going large

Spotted at the top of the Empire State Building recently, it’s Pedro Caixinha (although I don’t know if the message above his head is a prediction?). Pedro was, by general consensus, a massive flop as Rangers manager, although a plea in mitigation must be that after four games of last season his team had amassed the same number of points, five, as wunderkind Steven Gerrard has this one. His present team, Mexico’s Cruz Azul, are also four points clear at the top of the league.

It was, of course, to go hideously wrong at Ibrox, no more so than in his recruitment of players at budget-busting wages. Bruno Alves, who lasted just one season and played few games, must surely qualify as one of the highest-paid ever in Scottish football, at around £25,000 a week. To qualify that I need to go back a bit. At the start of every season the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport publishes the wages of every player in Serie A. These are taken as gospel. At Cagliari, the season before he went to Rangers, he was on €800,000 a year after tax. It’s fair to assume he didn’t go to Ibrox for a substantial wage cut, because he’s now on €700,000 a year at Parma, net. Assuming, therefore, that Rangers were not paying players in the way that got them into trouble with HMRC before, Pena’s gross wage must have been in excess of £1m a year. One trusts that, since then, a more biscuit tin approach to money management obtains and that the raft of players Gerrard brought in, or resigned, are not on that kind of wonga, because we know where that leads.

Outlaw trail

Outlaw King is the latest period, big-budget blockbuster from Netflix, due on November 9, which premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s about the trials and tribulation and ascent to power of Robert the Bruce and no doubt the culmination will be the Battle of Bannockburn, with a few orgasms on the way. It’s directed by David Mackenzie who also created the stunning, and considerably lower-budget, Hell or High Water. It’s a remarkable film, which, like Outlaw, also starred Chris Pine, or Bruce as we now must call him.

Judging by the Outlaw trailer, while Bruce’s accent isn’t quite in the Dick Van Dyke mode, it shows his inability to roll his Rs, and I’m not talking about his hip sway. But I do understand why Mackenzie needed to bring in Pine as all major movies need to be star-lit, and a film about an ancient warrior in a wet country with hee-haw but scenery must have taken some selling.

But as my colleague Peter Swindon revealed earlier this year, £1 million of Scottish Government money has gone into it, which ministers will no doubt argue was justified in the tourism revenue it will bring in. Apparently, Outlaw tours are already being planned. At least it was largely filmed here, unlike Braveheart, which shot in Ireland (with an even worse lead accent). Incidentally, is there ever any Scottish film that James Cosmo doesn’t feature in? And, no, I don’t know who plays the spider.

Fright night

We venerate our serial killers in Scotland. Around 50 years ago Bible John was killing women he had picked up from the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, and 10 years before that Peter Manuel, who murdered at least nine people, was hanging by his neck in Barlinnie prison. Both men have featured in many books, articles and films. I recall a chilly morning in February 1996 watching police using pneumatic drills on frozen ground in a graveyard in Stonehouse to exhume a body they were convinced was John, based on DNA taken from a relative. It appears now that it wasn’t him and that the real killer may be Peter Tobin although, like all good mysteries, this one will run and run.

Fast forward to May 1978 in Hamilton where a room in a council house is being used as HQ for George Robertson’s by-election campaign. The Labour apparatchik operating from there is the party’s Dundee organiser, 24-year-old George Galloway. The householder he knows only as Theresa. A few days later she reveals herself to be the sister of Manuel. Galloway knew a bit about the case having worked with Alison Frew, the sister of Manuel’s first victim, and then there was his father who “was the only man in the country who believed Manuel was innocent”.

Several days later, when Theresa was having a bath and Galloway was alone in the committee room, the door flew open and there she was, stark naked apart from high heels, with her arms aloft saying, “Will this do?”. In the unlikely but true conclusion to this event Galloway made an excuse and exited sharpish.

A perfect home under hammer?

And finally, is this the property snip of the season? It’s perfect for those with a particularly large family, ambitions to run a guesthouse or, if an ambitious terpsichorean, to launch their own version of Strictly Come Dancing.

On Thursday, at Dalry, auctioneer Wilsons is selling a 20-bedroom property with loads of period features – and a huge ballroom – at a guide price of £18,000.

Judging by the photographs it seems in excellent nick, with a working kitchen, a parquet floor in the ballroom which has as huge, vaulted ceiling with a raised stage. It’s situated in a small town which even has a Renaissance-era castle.

Did I say it’s in Nossen, a howitzer length from Dresden in Saxony? If the place doesn’t have much history, one inglorious piece is that an annexe of the Flossenburg concentration camp was located there ... Oops, I think I just mentioned the war.