Background, Early Life and Career
MacAskill was born in Edinburgh and was educated at Linlithgow Academy before studying law at the University of Edinburgh. After completing his training at a firm in Glasgow, he set up Erskine MacAskill. He is married with two sons.
He came to prominence inside the SNP through his activities in the left wing 79 Group and became a party office bearer. In the 1980s he led the "Can't Pay, Won't Pay" campaign in opposition to the Poll Tax. It was widely known that he often disagreed politically with Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP through the 1990s, and he was at one stage viewed as belonging to the SNP Fundamentalist camp, being perceived to be allied to figures such as Jim Sillars and Alex Neil within the party.
Read more about this topic: Kenny MacAskill
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Early rising is no pleasure; early drinking’s just the measure.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)