Issue 130
Jul – Aug 2022
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Asking an awkward question and needing an honest answer: What’s left of the left? The May 2022 local elections were an important staging post for politics, especially those of a radical nature, in Scotland. On the one hand, they took the temperature of the voting populace on important matters, both local and national. On the […]
George Kerevan surveys the scene, suggesting the SNP’s dominance results from a lack of choices. How often have you heard someone say: ‘The Scottish left has never been so weak or divided’? But how true is this in actuality? Indeed, what does the question mean? And, who counts as left-wing these days? We might look […]
Joe Cullinane explains why Labour lost but is proud of its achievements in North Ayrshire. For five and half a years, we were Scotland’s municipal socialists, putting together one of the most ambitious political programmes in Britain with a large expansion in council housing, delivering council-owned renewable energy and democratising our economy through Community Wealth […]
Gordon Munro looks back on missed opportunities to advance local democracy and delivery. The left in Scotland has been a useful prophylactic for the SNP. While the SNP continues its independence fetish, UNISON called out the ‘silent slaughter’ in local government. The Fraser of Allander Institute put the job losses at 30,000. The Convention of […]
Having taken the fightback to London, Roz Foyer says we’ve also building it in our workplaces and communities. We’re now experiencing a cost-of-living emergency and one that will only get worse. It is an emergency particularly for those on low pay and on benefits and is about how we provide ourselves with affordable (warm) housing, […]
Kate Ramsden casts her eye over the health of the union movement as it gears up for an almighty battle. I attended the TUC ‘We demand better’ march and rally on 18 June in London. It was uplifting. 100,000 people on the streets to protest the cost-of-living crisis that is impacting so badly upon working […]
Here we reprint the speech of Rab Noakes from the Musicians’ Union moving Motion 64 at the 2022 STUC congress in Aberdeen. The sexual harassment of women is a scourge in many workplaces. It’s severe bullying, with a sharp contaminated edge. It’s perpetrated by men. It’s witnessed by men. It’s excused and covered up by […]
Scots folk singer and union activist, Iona Fyfe, wins the STUC Equality Award. One of Scotland’s leading folk singers has been recognised in her campaign for equality within the music industry by scooping a top trade union prize. Iona Fyfe of the Musicians’ Union received the Equality Award at the 2022 STUC Annual Congress in […]
Ruby Gibson explains the evidence-based case for the shorter working week in the Scottish civil service. Working time can and should be reduced. This is what PCS union members who work in organisations across the devolved Scottish civil and public sector have been saying for years, largely due to implementation of labour-saving technologies that workers […]
Alex Rowley shows how the Scottish Parliament can together tackle climate change and fuel poverty. I have introduced a consultation for a Private Member’s Bill that would change building standards and require all new build housing in Scotland to be built to Passivhaus standard or a Scottish equivalent. The aim being to significantly reduce the […]
Stuart Fairweather recounts the new initiatives to connect different types of poverty into one campaign. Recent Scottish Left Review editorials have asked an important, if uncomfortable, question: why has the public response to the cost-of-living crisis demonstrations been so limited? We are not involving enough people, so to increase involvement we need to be timely […]
Peter Lomas surveys the contours of an increasingly dangerous and unstable Europe. Someone once said that nuclear weapons make the world safe for conventional war. This was certainly what Vladimir Putin thought when he declared, on launching the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that ‘whoever tries to interfere with us, and even more so to create […]
Then University of Glasgow student, Dougie Harrison, recall’s Reid’s election fifty-one years ago. In summer 1971, with every active communist in Glasgow, I was aware that something was fomenting in the shipyards on the upper Clyde. I was also very aware that we had a university Rectorial election that October. We needed a candidate. The […]
Raphael De Santos looks at the implications of high inflation, rising interest rates and a contracting economy for Scotland after independence. Nine months ago, I wrote in Scottish Left Review (September/October 2021) prior to the full impact of Covid-19 being known, outlining the challenges facing a Scottish economy under independence. Since then, we have seen […]
We reprint the speech Tabassum Niamat gave to open the first Festival of Resistance. Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you are all enjoying the day so far. Today, we remind ourselves about what took place in Pollokshields a year ago. I look at this crowd and see those familiar faces that stood together shoulder to […]
Fatima Uygun and Tabassum Niamat reflect on how a community stood up to be counted. Kenmure Street in Pollokshields on Glasgow’s Southside is a quiet street, almost a leafy suburb. But events there last year echoed around Britain and the world. What happened on Thursday 13 May 2021 attracted the world’s media and became an […]
Graham Smith takes comfort from the continuing long-term decline of the monarchy in Britain. Observers from overseas might be forgiven for thinking the British are unanimous in their love of the monarchy and all things royal. Coverage of recent Platinum Jubilee celebrations focused almost entirely on the voices of those who are enthusiastic about the […]
John Barker exposes those that are effectively judge and jurors in their own malfeasance. Earlier this year there were reports of a Financial Reporting Council (FRC) tribunal in which a partner of KPMG and layers of managers below him shifted blame for a forgery onto each other in the case of Carillion’s bankruptcy. Despite being […]
Poems from Mathew Knights and Dr David McKinstry. Based in Arbroath, Matthew Knights is a writer and creative writing tutor (www.matthewknights.co.uk) and Artistic Director at the Knights Theatre Company (www.knightstheatre.co.uk) Jennie Lee Straight-faced woman With a magnificent heart The type to bear arms In other ages and places In this Where she found herself instead […]
Jonas Poher Rasmussen, director, Flee (2021) Reviewed by Jackie Bergson True stories which are told in first person throughout a feature length film are unusual. Flee is just such an unusual film. Formed as a virtual documentary, this story is brought to life through mixed media animation, archive footage and original sound recordings. The interrogator […]
Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, The World For Sale: Money, Power And The Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources, Random House, 2021, £9.99, pp416, 9781847942678 Reviewed by Will Podmore. Blas and Farchy are journalists at Bloomberg News. Previously, they covered commodities for the Financial Times. They have produced a fascinating account, based on more than […]
Mike Phipps, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, OR Books, 2022, 9781682193693, £13, pp230 Reviewed by Dexter Govan. When the storm cleared after the 2019 general election, there was wreckage in its wake. Much of it now is the flotsam accounts of prominent individuals from the labour left, published as monographs, and often accusing former crewmates […]
Arnold Weinstein. The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing, Princeton University Press, £14, 9780691177304, pp352 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan. The Lives of Literature, a valediction by a retiring academic who taught at an Ivy League university for over fifty years,has a lot not going for it. Prone to platitudinizing, paternalistic at times and peppered with […]
Patrick O’Hare Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons, Pluto Press, 2022, 9780745341408, pp240, £19.99 Reviewed by John Wood. Whether from an environmental or geopolitical perspectives, waste management is on the political agenda in 2022. O’Hare – a young and influential activist academic – takes the reader on an impressive journey […]
Gregor Gall (ed.) A New Scotland: Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society, Pluto, £14.99, 9780745345062, pp352 Reviewed by Matthew Crighton. I both applaud and am deeply disappointed by this book. As a collection of pieces on the main issues regarding inequalities in Scotland, it has clear analysis and prescriptions from a constellation of excellent […]
When issued with a fixed penalty by the Metropolitan Police for breaking Covid rules, Boris Johnson said he was not going to resign and that it was important to move on and do the job the British people wanted him to do – which was tackling the cost-of-living crisis, which he started in the first […]