Issue 131
Sep – Oct 2022
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After BoJo’s long but often AWOL goodbye since resigning on 7 July 2022, you still need to pinch yourself to recognise that current favourite, Liz Truss, is going to be an even more right-wing PM than Johnson was. The Tory leadership contest that led to her election highlights a number of drastic deficiencies in our […]
In Scottish Left Review (Jul/Aug 2022), George Kerevan bemoaned what he sees as increased working-class support for the SNP in the 2022 Scottish council elections stating: ‘With the avowed anti-capitalist parties remaining miniscule and irrelevant, what alternative did the working-class have?’ Kerevan criticised the election campaign and the ‘negligible’ votes of the Scottish Trade Unionist […]
Tracey Dalling sets out what some creative thinking could achieve for raising revenue for public services Faced with demands for decent public sector pay, the Scottish Government tends to point to London and claim that budgets are fixed. There are many things union members simply won’t be buying this winter and the London blame-game is […]
Mike Danson examines the constraints and options as we face a coming winter of discontent Few are against workers and citizens generally being protected against the cost-of-living crisis caused by Brexit, massive energy price increases and levels of inflation not witnessed for many decades. In a normal economy with a government armed with the fiscal, […]
Sara Cowan says women suffer disproportionately from Covid, climate change and the cost-of-living crisis The Covid-19 crisis is not over for communities across Scotland but it is being closely followed, or eclipsed, by the impact of cost-of-living crisis. Individuals, households and communities are facing uncertain and deeply challenging times as costs keep rising, while there […]
Dave Watson examines a recent investigation and reprises ideas for how to improve the situation This summer, The Ferret, in conjunction with The Herald, ran a series of articles under the heading ‘Are Councils Working?’ The series identified problems across local authority areas and then highlighted some views on local government reform. The long-term impact […]
Francis Stuart details the case for public, not-for-profit care following the publication of the STUC’s ground-breaking report Scotland’s large private social care providers are associated with lower wages, more complaints about care quality, and higher levels of rent extraction than public and third sector care providers. That’s the conclusion of STUC’s new report ‘Profiting from […]
Stephen Low argues the National Care Service will be a case of centralised managerialism gone mad The Scottish Government has published its National Care Service Bill. The title evokes the National Health Service – this title though is deliberately deceptive, evoking as it does the affection felt towards the NHS. The reality of the Bill […]
Vince Mills dissects the disaster that is the Starmer leadership of Labour The Starmer ‘phenomenon’ is not one that history will linger over. Keir Starmer is not Tony Blair. He is not even Neil Kinnock. He is, by contrast, absolutely the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Think back to the […]
Daniel Randall details what Truss and the Tories have in store for unions and workers’ rights Then prospective PM, Liz Truss, announced a raft of new anti-strike laws she plans to introduce if elected. This includes: i) action within 30 days of taking office to introduce the ‘minimum service requirement’ outlawing all-out transport strikes that […]
Katy Clark explains why she has laid a badly needed Bill before the Scottish Parliament This month, I plan to introduce my first Member’s Bill to the Scottish Parliament, with the aim of reforming Freedom of Information (FOI) law and making it fit for the present day. It’s an issue that transcends party lines, and […]
Goran Zangana looks behind the media blackout to explain what is going on and what needs to happen Abass was married for just five days and was spending a honeymoon with his bride near Zakhoo in Southern Kurdistan (Bashoor) when Turkish artillery killed him on 20 July 2022. A child was among the 9 other […]
Maurice Hickey explains the initiative to provide concrete solidarity in this time of war The European Association of Employed Community Pharmacists in Europe (EPhEU) is the European-wide federation of unions representing community pharmacists. The UK affiliate to EPhEU is the Pharmacists’ Defence Association with PDA chair, Mark Koziol, being EPhEU Secretary General from 2021-2024. The […]
Christine Buchholz looks at the crisis enveloping all political parties as the winds of change blow through Though Germany has been seen as a stable liberal democracy for many decades, the climate crisis, pandemic, Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the increase in the cost-of-living are causing political conditions there to slide into the […]
Barbara Steiner gives an overview of the strength of left parties in Europe, revealing not everything is bad Let’s begin by recognising that the new popular ecological and socialist union is biggest opposition party in the French parliament, Sinn Féin became the strongest party in Northern Ireland, and Syriza is preparing to re-enter the Greek […]
John Dennis explains the STUC’s call for action in Scotland against the needless deaths of migrant workers building the World Cup stadia in Qatar Scotland are out of the World Cup. Nonetheless the STUC, acting on the Congress motion – see below – has resolved to call a major protest involving leafleting, red card show […]
Benji Brown reports on the recent Aberdeen Climate Camp and where the campaign goes from here After a summer filled with heatwaves, wildfires, and drought, Europe is waking up to the terrifying realities of climate breakdown. Extreme conditions endured by many poorer communities for decades are now increasingly impacting the lives of citizens in rich […]
Ben Lawrence, director, Ithaka (2022) Reviewed by Jackie Bergson At its simplest, Ithaka tells the story of a father, John Shipton, who travelled halfway around the world to fight for his son, Julian Assange’s freedom. The documentary opens with footage of the inciting event which triggered his journey. This was the moment on 11 April […]
L. Douds, J. Harris and P. Whitewood (eds.) The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation 1917-41, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020 Brendan McGeever Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2019 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan Russia’s liberatory 1917 revolution became, within two decades, more dictatorial than the system it had overthrown. For the right, this […]
Ben Tarnoff Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, Verso, 2022, pp272, £8.99 Reviewed by John Wood A new and highly informative book by leading tech writer and activist, Ben Tarnoff, responds to a dilemma that the world is waking up to and which we must confront together: that the internet has […]
Neil Davidson, James Foley, and Ben Wray Scotland After Britain: The Two Souls of Scottish Independence, Verso, 2022, £12.99 pb Reviewed by Gordon Morgan The authors have attempted a massive task. First, to set out a theoretical framework of nationalism’s role in the post-crash 2008 world and tie this to earlier theories like Marx and Lenin. The […]
Jeff Sparrow Crimes against Nature – Capitalism and Global Heating, Scribe, 2021, pp240, £16.99 Reviewed by Charlotte Ahmed Jeff Sparrow is an Australian writer, broadcaster and journalist. This, his latest book, is a collection of polemical essays detailing examples of how capitalism has imposed ecological disaster on the worlds’ population in the name of growth. […]
Matthew Crighton reviewed the Jimmy Reid Foundation’s edited collection called A New Scotland: Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society in the Jul/Aug 2022 issue. The review was a legitimate if narrowly-based one but it did not take into account several issues germane to the project of producing such an edited work. Prime amongst these […]
By the time this column goes to press, the UK will have a new Prime Minister. Whoever that person may be, they will have been elected under a system which makes China look like a democracy. As we all know, the only people with a say in choosing the next leader of the Government will […]