Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Nicola Sturgeon | Ilan Pappé | Avi Shlaim | Jim Swire
In our latest-round up from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Nicola Sturgeon has a robust conversation with Kirsty Wark, leading historians Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim lay bare Britain’s role in creating the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and veteran campaigner Jim Swire discusses his new book about the Lockerbie bombing.
A warm atmosphere greeted Nicola Sturgeon in the McEwan Hall on Thursday, and not just because of the soaring temperatures outside. When questions were invited from the audience, several people took the opportunity to thank her for her leadership.
Nonetheless, as book launches go, the first official event for Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, felt odd. The book has been combed over extensively in the press in the past week, leaving the question: what is left to say?
One person convinced that there was still plenty to say was interviewer Kirsty Wark, who took Sturgeon to task on a wide range of issues. For the most part, she responded robustly, explaining that her aim in the book was to be honest about her achievements and her regrets, and - most importantly - explain the reasons which accompanied her decisions.
Regarding regrets, she named a few, including not “hitting the pause button” on gender recognition to “find a more collegiate way forward”.
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Wark circled back more than once to Sturgeon’s relationship with Alex Salmond, her mentor from whom she was later estranged. Sturgeon refused to accept Wark’s suggestion that there was “coercive control” in the relationship but said: “I did realise that his approval mattered to me, and his disapproval knocked my confidence - that was my fault”.
Asked if she regretted working opposite her husband, Peter Murrell, as SNP chief executive (something Salmond advised against doing) she withdrew behind the issue of live legal proceedings (against Murrell, from whom she is now separated) but said: “The reason I include it in the book is that I do recognise this is probably something I got wrong.”
On her personal life, she refused to say anything beyond the book’s headline-grabbing admission that “I never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary”. Adding: “I’m just out of a marriage, I’m enjoying the single life,” she spoke of a new-found freedom since leaving office.
“I was in politics so young, I was so focused and single-minded, a lot of the things people do when they’re young passed me by. I’m having a delayed adolescence.”
On Wednesday night, a large crowd gathered at the Book Festival to listen to Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, two distinguished revisionist historians of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Their calm, clear contributions to this most contentious of subjects was a salve in these difficult times.
Understanding the historical context of current events in Gaza, however, brings us uncomfortably back to Britain, the colonial power which divested itself of Palestine after World War II when it became (in Pappé’s words) “a liability rather than an asset”.
The colonisers withdrew, having made contradictory promises both to the Palestinians and the Jewish people, and did not intervene in the first expulsions of Palestinians, despite being responsible for law and order in the region until 1948.
Britain, they concluded, is “largely responsible” for today’s conflict. Pappé said: “Israel is a European project. Instead of dealing with racism against the Jews in Europe, Europe decided to help build a Jewish State at the heart of the Arab world, at the expense of the Palestinian people. It could only be done by force, and needs continued violence to sustain it.”
And Shlaim added: “Britain and America are not just complicit in Israeli war crimes, they are active partners in the genocide happening in Gaza.”
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Their event followed a fascinating hour in which Jim Swire, the veteran campaigner on the Lockerbie bombing, was interviewed by Allan Little along with Peter Biddulph, with whom he has written a new book.
The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice brings together in one volume, for the first time, Swire’s own story (he lost his daughter, Flora, on Pan Am flight 103) and the complex evidence he has gathered about the case - too complex to detail here - pointing to inconsistencies in “the official version of events” explored in the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in 2000.
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