David Maddox: Tales of sheep and the Middle Eastern divide on offer at Perth

As this blog has noted before, the Perth Concert Hall is now the favoured destination for annual conferences in Scotland. The latest ongoing this week is the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC).

Apart from Harriet Harman's gaffe, covered in today's Scotsman, there were a couple of other curiosities at the conference yesterday.

One of the funnier things was the way somebody turned on a noise sounding like a herd of sheep every time the cncert hall's sliding doors opened, to the slight consternation of Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy.

It was not clear whether the sheep addition was a joke, an accident or a piece of social commentary on a group of people who seemed to agree on everything.

Although, maybe not everything. It was noticeable that the a room given over to various stalls from interest groups had diplomatically put the Scottish Friends of Palestine at one end of the room and Scottish Trade Union Friends of Israel at the opposite end as far away as possible. Amnesty was stuck somewhere in the middle.

It did lead to an interesting conflict for delegates in terms of entering the pro-Israeli raffle for a bottle of Israeli wine or to follow the Palestinian supporters' view that anything Israeli should be boycotted. To say that the two people on the Palestinian stall were glowering across the room would not do justice to the mental daggers they were sending across.

In contrast Donald MacDougall, who has lived in and around Perth for more than 60 years and was looking after the pro-Israel stall when I arrived took a far more conciliatory view. He went across to introduce himself to the other stalls and appropriate on a day when the Iranian President's remarks in the UN about Israel were condemned as racist, wore a Let's Give Racism the Red Card sticker. It has to be said that he was not aware of what was going on in the UN.

He explained to me that his support for Israel was based on his Christian faith and the hope that the two sides could be reconciled rather than blind loyalty to whatever the Israeli government has done. He did not agree though that it is an apartheid society or that by excluding Israelis would solve the problem. He recounted several uplifting tales of how people over there can co-operate from his many visits to the area.