A humbling tale of everyday folk

Better Together recently announced that it had received further donations, amounting to £1,121,000, from six donors. Blair MacDougall, campaign director, is reported in today's Sunday Herald as saying that “we know the money that we have managed to raise ourselves is dwarfed by the almost limitless funds available to the Nationalists”. He is said to have described himself as “humbled” by the actions of supporters who have managed to scrape together a donation in these “tough times”.

Tough times indeed. I was listening to Radio Scotland's Headlines this morning to stories of one person deemed fit to work despite the recent discovery of a cancerous tumour and another who had her benefit stopped because she'd mistakenly applied for only 27 jobs instead of the targetted 28 (and this seems to be that woman's own story). And we are of course all in it together. So, who are the generous heroes, willing to hand over cash even when faced with these kinds of mind-numbing stresses and pressures? Who are the selfless six, fired by a sense of injustice, who will stand up for the poor and downtrodden against the vile Nationalist onslaught? Just how horrific are the stories of personal hardship and sacrifice that so moved even an old cynic like Blair?

• Sir Chippendale "Chips" Lindley Keswick was born in 1940 into the Keswick tai-pan dynasty, which  had a long-standing association with the Jardine Matheson conglomerate. The Keswick family have been closely associated with the ownership or management of a number of Far East businesses. Sir Chippendale was educated at Eton College and the University of Aix-Marseilles and married Lady Sarah Ramsay, daughter of the 16th Earl of Dalhousie, in 1966. He is a non-executive director of DeBeers Société Anonyme and Investec Bank. Sir Chippendale is a member of the gentleman's clubs White's (whose 50 or so current members include Sir Run Run Shaw,  Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg and HRH The Prince of Wales) and The City University Club. He is a past supporter of "Business for Sterling", a donor to the Conservative party and sat on the board of corporate donors to the Conservatives.

• Christopher Wilkins is a former Welsh Guards officer. In 1995 he, together with Christopher James, a former SAS and MI6 operative, founded Mayfair-based, private intelligence company Hakluyt. Hakluyt was described as a “convenient rest-home for spies” . An investigation by the Times found that Haklyut was “staffed almost entirely by ex-intelligence [services] staff” . In 2000, the company protested “we are not just a tearaway bunch of ex-government officials” and claimed to abide “by a code of practice, which has an absolute ban on doing anything illegal, any dirty tricks”. In 2001, Hakluyt was hired by Shell and BP to spy on Greenpeace . It was described as “[regarding] itself as operating at the top end of oneof the capital’s most lucrative service industries. It has the most impressive list of big corporations, with particularly close links to the big oil firms.”

• Donald Irwin-Houston is a director and shareholder of the Lincoln-based Engineering Technologies Ltd. He is also the owner of the Ardnamurchan Estate, a member of Scottish Land and Estates, the body which represents the interests of landowners in Scotland. Scotland has “the most inequitable land ownership in the west”. Perhaps half of Scotland is owned by around 500 people. Scottish Land and Estates have around 2,500 members (a number equal to roughly 0.05% of Scotland's population). They are estimated to own as much as three quarters of land in Scotland. Scottish Land and Estates recently made a video submission to the Scottish Government's Land Reform Review Group. They were in favour of maintaining the status quo: “... land ownership is rarely mentioned in Scottish public life. There is no significant land reform movement. Nobody from Scottish Land and Estates says it on camera, but they will be hoping it stays that way.”

• The Hon. Andrew McDonnell Fraser is the son of Baron Fraser of Tullybelton. He graduated from St John's College, Oxford and worked in the City and elsewhere, before appointment as CEO of Baring Securities in the UK. In 2000, and following Baring's collapse, as absentee landlord of the 11,000 acre Corriegarth Estate near Fort Augustus, the Honourable Andrew sacked his shepherd, George Mathieson. Mr. Mathieson sued for compensation, a claim which the Honourable Andrew resisted. At the tribunal hearing, Mr. Mathieson was represented by his wife, Margot, a cookery student. The Mathiesons won. At present, The Honourable Andrew is “a director of an Asian hedge fund and a global investor”  .

• Christopher John "C.J." Sansom is a crime writer. He has written several internationally best-selling novels during the last decade. He has described the prospect of Scottish independence as "literally heartbreaking". His 2012 novel Dominion envisaged the SNP as collaborators with a British Nazi state. He has described the SNP as "deeply dangerous, with no politics in the conventional sense, believing only in the old dream that the unleashing of 'national spirit' and 'national pride' can solve a country's problems." He lives in Sussex.

• Alan Savage is founder and Chairman of Orion Group, the Inverness-based global recruitment company. He has threatened to relocate his business if Scotland becomes independent. (75% of the Group's business comes from the oil and gas industries). The Group's pre-tax profits recently increased by just under 50% to £11,660,000 on a turnover of £355,200,000.

Whatever side of the debate you are on, it would be churlish not to recognise that this heart-warming tale of altruism and struggle, by those whom fate has not favoured, ought finally to give the lie to the claim you sometimes still hear whispered, to the effect that Better Together is at base no more than a loose conglomeration of right-wing business interests, estate-owning aristocrats and romantic, occasionally shadowy, British nationalists, every last one of them fired by nothing more dignified than a grim determination to protect their position of power and comfort coupled with an increasingly desperate and disbelieving fury that anyone might dare to challenge it in the first place.