Fighting for a rebel's cause INTERVIEW INTERVIEW It has taken Hector

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Nov 6, 2005 | by Alan Taylor

The court, in short, was of the kangaroo variety, a beast Muir was soon to see a lot of.

In MacMillan's opinion, irrespective of the reliability of the witnesses, the conduct of the trial, and the compelling nature of the evidence, Braxfield and his cohorts rightly judged Muir to be a danger to the status quo. He was a revolutionary who was determined to change society. "I think it obvious that Muir had decided to use the High Court in Edinburgh as a Reform platform. He clearly knew he had no hope of succeeding against Braxfield's packed jury. He also knew that, win, lose or draw, he was intellectually capable of wiping the floor with the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas. No reading of the report of the trial can arrive at any other conclusion."

What is striking about Muir's case is how much it resonates today. Guantanamo is our 21st century Botany Bay. Civil liberties are curtailed because of a vague, unspecified threat. Individuals - pace Muir and George Galloway - are vilified by the powers-that-be and charged with unprovable crimes. Paranoia is rampant. Nobody trusts anyone any more. Exile or imprisonment is the knee-jerk reaction.

MacMillan's sympathies, personally and politically, clearly lie with Muir. Given his upbringing and background how could it be otherwise? Born in 1929 in Tollcross, Glasgow, he left school at the age of 14 and went to work for an auctioneer. After that, he joined the merchant navy with the aim of seeing the world. For many years he worked in electronics, including spells at the University of Strathclyde and in Switzerland. Eventually, however, he returned with his wife and two daughters to Scotland and began to carve out a career in writing. He once sold a house and used the profits to buy another in what he describes as the cheapest town in Scotland, Leadhills, where he could write free from financial anxiety. "We all now think it was about the best time we ever had, " he says.

From the way he talks, one suspects the good times have been punctuated with periods of emotional trauma. Money - or rather the lack of it - has been at the root of many his problems. His most popular play, The Sash, which focused on religious bigotry in the west of Scotland, played to full houses but did not bring him the rewards it ought, either because a theatre's management was negligent or the contract was not watertight. Orangemen flocked to see The Sash, which was a mixed blessing. Once, he recalls, he turned up at a theatre to find Orange memorabilia on sale in the foyer. To say he was not amused is something of an understatement.

His lowest ebb came during the Thatcher era when the phone stopped ringing and commissions from TV and radio dried up.

Back then, he says, "an awful lot of careers got side-tracked and lost. On a personal note, commissioning of new plays in Scotland just collapsed. For five years, which unfortunately I didn't see coming, I could neither get an existing play on nor a new play commissioned." He believes that BBC Scotland, which he delights in calling the League Of Frightened Men, succumbed to censorship and would not commission anything "that dealt with anything worth dealing with".