Issue 115
Jan – Feb 2020
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Regroup and resist – but how? Well, the polls were stunningly accurate so we well and truly had our ‘Friday the thirteenth’. Welcome, readers, subscribers and supporters then to an unhappy New Year. We’ll all need 2020 vision to get through this year and the next ones because it’s all too glib to say all […]
Richard Leonard says when the people speak, political parties must listen The election result was grave for Labour. Though we tried to break through the din of Brexit and the issue of a second independence referendum, we failed. And while we tried to be positive and set out what we were for and what a […]
Kenny MacAskill offers suggestions on how to build a united anti-Tory, democratic alliance The elections over and the debacle has come to pass. The country now faces a Tory Government that the Scottish people loathe and fear. Parties need time to grieve and to have their celebrations and it’s inevitable that there’ll be reflections and […]
Grahame Smith says resolving constitutional matters can unlock progress on social and economic issues After such a momentous election result, almost everybody will have an opinion on why it turned out as it did. Was it simply a Brexit election? Was there a Corbyn factor? Was Labour too radical and its spending promises too unconvincing? […]
Michael Keating says choppy waters lie ahead for both defending and defeating the Union Once again, Scotland and England have diverged sharply in their electoral choices. Campaigns in both countries focused on Brexit but in Scotland equal prominence was given to the prospect of a second referendum on independence. In 2014, Scots voted by 55% […]
Mike Cowley reviews ‘Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief’ (Pluto, September 2019) In conducting their research with such forensic rigour, Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller have done Labour, the movement and the anti-fascist struggle a considerable service. Their research asks our media, a minority of […]
We asked a further range of left activists and commentators to provide their assessments of what happened and what we should do now: Chris Stephens MP, Neil Findlay MSP, George Kerevan, Bryan Quinn, Siobhan McCready, Gavin Lundy, Jim Sillars, Stella Rooney, Róisín McLaren, Maggie Chetty, Vince Mills, Morgan Horn, and Myshele Haywood. Chris Stephens, SNP […]
Mary Church argues COP26 in Glasgow in 2020 must be a rallying point for people and planet The outcomes of the longest ever meeting in the history of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – the COP25 negotiations in Madrid – have failed to reflect the urgency of the crisis or any grasp of […]
Oscar Mendoza explains the roots of the revolt and the emergence of new progressive forces A social explosion started on Friday 18 October 2019 in Chile, triggered by mass fares avoidance by mainly students in the Santiago subway, rejecting an increase of 30 Pesos (a few pence) in the peak time one-way ticket. It baffled […]
The word, pacifism, was coined in Scotland in the early twentieth century. Tim Gee asks if is it time to broaden its scope. In 2011, after a racial slur was used on a women’s rights march, writer Flavia Dzodan wrote a blog called, ‘My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’. The framing […]
Albert Brenchat Aguilar recounts the unseen and forgotten workers that make conference happen and their fightback I dish nibbles and pour wine at events in University College London (UCL). I serve water at the start. I put chairs and tables in place and move them across venues. I pick up coffee cups from the floor. […]
Reflecting on his experience of applying to university, Patrick Phillips gives a critical appraisal Last summer I applied to ‘attend’ university. ‘What are you attending to, or, for?’ was a question that made me wonder. When we say we are ‘going to university,’ how have we imagined, or rather perceived, what our final destination will […]
General election 2019 analysis We would welcome any responses to the analysis contained in this issue – what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s missing etcetera – as we intend to continue our coverage of the implications. Please send any comments, articles or suggestions to the editor, Gregor Gall (gregorgall@outlook.com), for the March/April issue by Friday 21 […]
Campbell Martin gives an update on his expose on the PPP scandal in North Ayrshire When ‘new’ Labour swept to power in 1997, the party embraced the Tories’ Private Finance Initiative (PFI) method of funding public sector capital projects. However, having ridiculed the funding method while in opposition, ‘new’ Labour, once in government, rebranded PFI […]
The Big Meeting (2019), director: Daniel Draper, editor: Christie Allanson Reviewed by Jackie Bergson The Big Meeting is a documentary by film company, Shut Out The Light, which follows from the success of its Nature Of The Beast (2017) about now former Labour MP, Dennis Skinner. Its latest feature-length chronicle of the 134th Durham Miners’ […]
Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow (eds.) Scotland the Brave? Twenty Years of Change and the Future of the Nation, 2019, Luath Press £14.99 Reviewed by Gordon Morgan This is a hugely ambitious book to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Scottish Parliament. It consists of forty chapters each written by a diverse set of people […]
Classic recounted: Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey, Mainstream Publishing, new edition, 1996 Commented on by Rory Green Maggie Chapman reviewed James McEnaney’s A Scottish Journey in Scottish Left Review (Sept/Oct 2019). My eye was drawn to her review as it brought to mind a book of the same name, one briefly referenced but rightly praised by […]
Slavoj Žižek Sex and the Failed Absolute, Bloomsbury, 2019, £20.00 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan Žižek’s first English-language book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, appeared in 1989 and was an immediate sensation, comparable to watching Pulp Fiction when it came to cinemas in 1994, or seeing one of Alexander McQueen’s runway shows a decade later. There […]
Gardner Thompson, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel, Saqi Books, £20.00, 9780863563614 Reviewed by Sandy Hobbs Sixty years and more ago, when involved in socialist politics, I had many Jewish comrades. When I and other socialists organised the first Glasgow meeting of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination, there was a friendly […]
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile Books, 2019, £10.99 Reviewed by Colin Fox Whilst reading this international bestseller by Harvard academic, Shoshana Zuboff, I also happened to watch the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, about the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Both the paperback and the film exposed a practice that claims human experience […]
As the bells rang in the New Year and 2019 drew to a close, many on the left were still in a state of shock that a philandering sociopath who had lied to the country, lied to MPs, lied to the Queen, attempted to shut down Parliament and dodged multiple medias interviews had still managed […]