Issue 123
May – Jun 2021
Download PDF
Though Charles Dickens did not say ‘It was not the best of times. It was not quite the worst of times’ as he began his novel, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), this is what it feels like for the left after 6 May 2021 elections for the sixth Scottish Parliament. After months of electioneering […]
Looking behind the election facts and figures, James Mitchell reveals the continuing, underlying dynamics of politics in Scotland. There is always something in any election to justify the claim that it was unique and the 2021 Holyrood election has many claims. It was fought against the backdrop of a pandemic. Turnout was the highest on […]
Gerry Hassan sees the 2021 election in a longer lens to assess the current state of Scottish democracy and point up some ways forward. Scottish politics are defined by many factors – fourteen years of SNP dominance, seven years of Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister, and the arrogance of Westminster. But underlying these factors at […]
Carol Mochan says there’s a mountain of political leg work needed but that it can be done. Scotland’s status as a devolved nation worthy of its place on the world stage is in no doubt after yet another well contested election. But the most recent campaign did little to evidence the life changing debates going […]
Maggie Chapman looks back on not just a quantitative but also qualitative shift for the Scottish Greens. The Holyrood 2021 election reflected a number of trends that we have seen in previous elections, but gives significant hope for workers’ rights, a just transition, a second referendum and the left in Scottish politics. The first trend […]
Chris Stephens says the populace is behind the SNP’s prospectus for a socially just independent Scotland. Seven days after Scotland went to the polls to elect the most diverse parliament in its history and on the morning that new and re-elected MSPs were being sworn in, Home Office removals officers were carrying out a dawn […]
Given that the work-in started fifty years ago in June 1971, we are pleased to showcase the work of Derek McKechnie on the back cover (above). Derek McKechnie explains why he created the UCS work-in image on the back cover. ‘My parents grew up during the 1970s in Glasgow to working class families and both […]
Surveying the political landscape, Linda Somerville asks: what will it mean for workers and the working-class? Hailed by the media as the most important election yet for the Scottish Parliament, the 6 May plebiscite will, indeed, go down in history. Holding a national election while mainland Scotland was still living under significant restrictions was certainly […]
Kenny MacAskill looks back at Alba’s debut campaign and forward to its future. Sometimes in politics, as in life, the concept can be correct but circumstances and timing are wrong. And so, it was to prove for Alba in the Holyrood election. That an SNP vote on the list would be wasted and let in […]
Dave Watson is the secretary of the Socialist Health Association Scotland. There are plenty of new faces in the Scottish Parliament, but will they make any difference to the nation’s health? Even a pandemic that has killed more than 10,000 people in Scotland and has driven 25,000 to the mental health helpline did not put […]
Iain Ferguson shows why the case for a publicly-owned and controlled care service is unanswerable. On 19 April 2021, BBC Scotland published the Covid-19 deaths by care home in Scotland, based on Crown Office figures. They made grim and tragic reading. Of the 10,000+ Covid-related deaths, around a third – at least 3,400 – occurred […]
Regina Serpa argues the SNP promise of ‘a safe, warm, affordable home’ for all is possible with a pro-independence majority. Skimming the headlines for post-election autopsies, I find only a handful of political analyses that criticise the 2021 Scottish elections as ‘boring’ or ‘zombie’-like, which might be surprising given the lack of campaigning due to […]
Jane Carolan lays out an alternative approach to that offered by the SNP Scottish Government. In the election, employments rights were on the Scottish political agenda. Several party manifestos maintained the policy of Scotland as a country of ‘Fair Work’ and made promises on how that Fair Work agenda could be maintained or even reinforced. […]
David Spaven assesses the likelihood of the future of decent, environmentally transport getting better. Transport is rarely a key factor in national elections in the UK. One has to go back to 1964 – when the Beeching programme of rail cuts was only just getting underway – to find a campaign in which transport was […]
Mike Danson eyes the prospect of cross-party cooperation for a boldly ‘building back better’. As I wrote in Scottish Left Review (Jan/Feb 2021), there is a remarkable degree of consensus across Scotland, its Scottish Government Commissions, STUC, Commonweal, Business for Scotland, the Wellbeing Alliance, think tanks and visionaries as to how we should be planning […]
Let the old and knackered who are within five years of their state retirement age retire early. Their jobs should be ‘swopped’ with an unemployed person under the age of 25. Such a scheme is likely to be cost neutral as the extra cost of paying early state pension is offset by the reduction in […]
Mick Rice considers a new way to skin this Tory tiger on work and employment. With Tory Brexiteers dreaming of turning Britain into a laissez faire paradise, the labour movement needs new strategies to defend worker rights. Already, uber Brexiteers are signaling that they wish to abolish the EU working time directive (notwithstanding that the […]
Jonathan Deans casts an eye down south to survey a climate of political unaccountability. For many months, Scottish politics was engrossed with the inquiry into the Scottish Government’s handling of sexual harassment and misconduct allegations against Salmond. The connected Hamilton inquiry also investigated whether Sturgeon had breached the Scottish Ministerial Code by knowingly misleading Parliament […]
Chris Sutherland assesses a major advance for having a balanced definition of anti-Semitism. So many column inches have been written on the 2016 ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ (IHRA) definition on anti-Semitism with 7 of its 11 accompanying examples proscribing criticism of the state of Israel. Across the media, including the liberal media (BBC, Guardian), it’s […]
The 80s David McKinstry The Keegan perm gave way to the mullet And CD replaced LP, Whilst Essex boys whistled ‘Maggie’s the girl for me’. Unemployment was rising Whilst the Belgrano was sinking, We were told to consume Without conscience or thinking. The nation watched Royal wedding at St. Pauls’, Whilst we prayed in our […]
Steve McQueen, director, Small Axe: Mangrove (2020) Reviewed by Jackie Bergson. Artistry and realism synergise perfectly within screenwriter and director, Steve McQueen’s, body of work, much of which includes historical drama films which have been inspired by real people and events. This is also true of his recently released Small Axe anthology of five films; […]
Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689-1939, Routledge, 2020, pp670, £29.99 (pb), 9780367432362. Reviewed by Sean Sheehan. In Britain, collusion between Classics and class is portrayed in terms of a privileged few brandishing their acquaintance with Greek and Latin as an emblem of […]
Trevor Royle, Facing the Bear: Scotland and the Cold War, Birlinn, 2019, £25, pp368, 9781780275260 Reviewed by Hamish Kirk. I grew up in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s not far from the Rosyth naval base. Awareness of the danger of nuclear war between the superpowers led me to CND and some token activism. I […]
Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, 4th Estate, 2020, £30, pp769, 9780007319053 Reviewed by Graeme Arnott. Readers will be more than familiar with the whole panoply of political ‘-isms’ that range from those of collective struggle to those named after specific individuals. The same is rarely true for artists, or […]
Gavin Esler, How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations, Head of Zeus, 2021, £9.99, 9781800241053 Reviewed by Andrew Noble. Born in a Clydebank council house, Esler is the descendant of Protestant refugees from Germany during the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. Further, in 1912 six of his Ulster relatives living in […]
The Red Paper Reviewed by Vince Mills. In the latest issue of the Red Paper, it is argued that the Scottish Parliament has fallen far short of the kind of parliament we need in these days of footloose, vampire capitalism. The current, dire state of the Scottish economy and the need for a radical strategy […]
As spring arrives and we slowly emerge from the winter lockdown, we appear to have entered some bizarre parallel universe where Dominic Cummings preaches about honesty, integrity and ethics; where Alex Salmond pledges to ‘put women front and centre’ of his party’s policies; and where Gordon Brown warns ‘Project Fear won’t work’. I suppose it’s […]