Let the People Decide: The Autobiography of Dennis Canavan

Product Information

In early 2012 Mr Roddie claimed people had been driving on to the estate to have sex in their cars and on one occasion his daughter had been followed into the estate by a car late at night.

Courting praise and controversy in equal measure, the former maths teacher, who stepped down as Falkirk West's charismatic independent MSP before last year's Holyrood election, was also a key figure in several pieces of legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament. The SNP, as the party of government, must obviously be in the forefront of the campaign, but SNP voters alone will probably not be enough to win victory in the next referendum.However, I found the standard of NHS care to be excellent and the standard of palliative care in our local Strathcarron Hospice was first class.” Ministerial conferment would have come after the 1970 election but Labour unexpectedly lost. Donald Dewar was unseated by Ian Sproat of ‘dole queue scroungers’ fame. To pile personal misery on top of political calamity, his marriage collapsed when his wife left him for Derry Irvine, a future Lord Chancellor in the Blair government.

And by committing Labour to embrace a Constitutional Convention on Home Rule, he championed a cross-party approach in deciding the shape of a future Scottish Parliament. This was not done for reason of expediency. Dewar genuinely believed the project on forging an agreement on future governance should be owned by all of Scotland. In 2014, he was the chair of the Advisory Board of Yes Scotland, the campaign for independence in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. As a result, my children died in dignity and I do not accept the option of assisted suicide is necessary to ensure dignity in death.”He takes an active interest in international affairs and served as a member of the House of Commons select committees on Foreign Affairs and International Development. He is still a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Amnesty International and is interested in conflict resolution. A design competition would eventually choose the Catalan architect Enric Miralles to oversee a building which Dewar believed should be a piece of landmark architecture.

Gaitskell was a confrontational leader, who, rather than seek peace with those in the party he disagreed with, turned issues into high principle and repeated tests of loyalty. On most issues, the young Donald would have been with Gaitskell as a matter of conviction, although he approved also of Harold Wilson’s more ecumenical style of party management. Wilson succeeded as leader when Gaitskell died unexpectedly in January 1963. Canavan said the issue of compensation did not fall within their "narrow remit" of the panel - but urged the Scottish Government to offer some form of compensation. However, we know that sadly some dying people do go beyond the limits of even the very best care and suffer intolerably as they die.

Dennis Canavan Scholarship

Just as he must have thought a return to Westminster was never going to come, he landed what looked like a pact with political suicide. Dewar was selected to fight a parliamentary by-election in the Glasgow Garscadden constituency in 1978. I also want to thank the National Union of Mineworkers and the Retired Police Officers Association for their contributions to the review. And of course, my thanks go to the miners, police officers and other members of the mining communities who provided such powerful and personal accounts of their experiences of the strike.