Steve Sprung, writer/director, The Plan That Came From The Bottom Up, 2018 Reviewed by Jackie Bergson The need for the human race to counteract, mitigate and reverse catastrophic impacts of climate change on an industrial scale is currently undeniable. In particular scientific, corporate and political quarters, it was no less so, forty years ago. This […]
Jim Aitken (ed.) Ghosts of the Early Morning Shift: An anthology of Radical Prose from Contemporary Scotland, Culture Matters, 2021, 9781912710409, £12, pp195 Reviewed by David McKinstry Ghosts of the Early Morning Shift is an anthology of radical writing which explores historical and contemporary Scotland, combining memoirs of grassroots activists and contemporary fiction. The book […]
Sally Rooney Beautiful World, Where Are You? Faber & Faber, 2021 Reviewed by John Wood Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? was hotly anticipated by critics and by her broad fanbase after the acclaim and mainstream commercial success – aided by the popular and captivating BBC3 adaptation of her second novel, Normal People – of […]
Colin Burnett A Working Class State of Mind, Pierpoint Press, £9.84, 9781914090158 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan The title of the first short story in this set of twelve, ‘A Working Class State of Mind’, gives its name to the collection as a whole. The story transforms Robert the Bruce into a depressed young man contemplating […]
Jim Sillars A Difference of Opinion: My political journey, Birlinn, 2021, 97817802706830, £14.99, pp303 Reviewed by Will Podmore Jim Sillars is a talented man. This intriguing book covers many different topics, on all of which he has something interesting to say. Sillars opposed the SNP’s Hate Crime Bill, calling it ‘one of the most pernicious […]
Jane Hardy Nothing to Lose But Our Chains: Work and Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Britain, Pluto, 2021, 9780745341040, pp272, £19.99 Reviewed by Eleanor Kirk If there’s a central theme in this book, it is optimism. Drawing on both secondary data analysis and interviews with activists from across the union movement and beyond, the book provides a […]
The book will be available this April – further details in the next issue of Scottish Left Review. Contents Foreword Rozanne Foyer Introduction Gregor Gall The structural development of poverty and inequality Carlo Morelli and Gerry Mooney Towards climate justice Mary Church, Niamh McNulty and Eurig Scandrett Neo-liberalism and Scotland George Kerevan Economic democracy and […]
Few have made the transition from COP to flop with such outstanding speed as Boris Johnson. He had, in the space of five short weeks between the conference and mid-December, gone from hobnobbing with world leaders to being a dead man walking. Everything is unravelling around him at such an alarming pace that the knives […]
COP26 ≠ much cop On the face of it, there may not seem to be a much of a theme to the articles that make up the front half of the content of this issue of Scottish Left Review. However, they all do gather around the crux of ‘power shifts’. Power shifts has several meanings […]
Roz Foyer, STUC general secretary, gave the eight Jimmy Reid Foundation lecture on Thursday 7 October 2021 in Glasgow. Here we print an edited version of her lecture. As a lifelong union activist and organiser, I’m deeply honoured to be invited to deliver the lecture this year because it has particular resonance following the recent […]