Work, struggle and solidarity have shaped Scotland’s story. It is up to us to create new history with working people in control, writes Roz Foyer.
From the 22nd to 26th April, Scotland’s trade union movement gathers once again in Dundee. We meet at a time when our members continue to face huge challenges with living costs here at home, and at a time when too many people across the world are facing much worse. The terrible impacts of war and conflict are not of people’s own making but are forged by corporate greed.
The gangster capitalism we see being played out on the world stage is also alive and well here in Scotland. At Grangemouth, at the whim of a billionaire tax exile, a century of refining was ended like the flick of a switch. A thousand workers were cast aside and a community’s future was erased, not because it had to happen, but because someone in a boardroom decided it would. At Mossmorran, a multinational fossil fuel giant threw hundreds of skilled workers on the scrapheap while handing out $12 billion in dividends. And in the North Sea, operators extract vast profits, undermine health and safety, and cut jobs in the supply chain, using the transition to renewables as an excuse for further profiteering, not a plan for reconstruction.
These are not isolated scandals, but the logical outcome of forty-five years of deregulation, privatisation and underinvestment, a political class in thrall to corporate interests, and an economic model built on dividends, not dignity. The impact of that model is not just economic. It is cultural and psychological. Bathgate, Linwood, Methil, Irvine, no more. Now we are told Grangemouth, Mossmorran, Aberdeen must go the same way.
These are communities where work was not just a wage, but an identity, with stories we still celebrate. You see this link between people and place in the global appeal of the Paisley pattern or Harris Tweed designs, born of Scottish hands and now worn across the world. You see it when the steelmen run out at Fir Park on a Saturday, and generations stand together in the terraces. You see it in Wick’s exhibition on the Herring Girls, the gutters and packers whose work fed nations. You see it in the gravestones of the Calton Weaver martyrs, who died so others might have a voice. Our history is written in work, struggle and solidarity. But too many of our stories now live in museums.
Who Holds The Pen?
Over the last century our economy has been turned upside down. We buy what we once made. We import what we once forged. Our industrial capacity has been hollowed out, sold off, shipped away. Two thirds of what you need to build a wind farm cannot be made in Scotland. We are told we are a renewable energy superpower yet we do not make the towers, the blades, the cables, the steel. Politicians left global markets to write the new story of our economy, and they forgot to write us in. If our shared history was written in shipyards, mills, pits and factories, then new history can be written in green energy, advanced manufacturing, care and culture. The question is simple: who holds the pen?
Right now, Scotland’s industrial script is being written by distant financial interests, like asset managers who have never set foot in our communities, and pension funds who see our infrastructure as nothing more than a revenue stream. Across Scotland, key assets are no longer rooted in the communities they serve. City Quay in Dundee is owned by a Canadian pension fund. Edinburgh Airport is owned by overseas investors. Car parks in Glasgow city centre are state-owned – by Japan. Our offshore wind is controlled by global asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Our gas networks, train carriages, transmitters and care homes are owned by overseas pension funds and private equity. These interests do not build Scotland. They leverage it. They acquire assets, extract value, load them with debt and move on. The results are higher prices, lower wages, stagnant productivity, and communities left behind.
The Scottish trade union movement has a proud history of fighting to take back control from these interests. In 1972, after the UCS dispute, the STUC convened a Scottish Assembly to demand the devolution of power to tackle Tory deindustrialisation. For more than twenty years our movement campaigned for devolution until, in 1999, 292 years after it was abolished, Scotland had its Parliament again. In that moment of pride and possibility, working people believed we would never again allow our communities to be decimated in the way they had been under Thatcher. That feeling of hope has evaporated.
Make Them Feel Our Presence
The Scottish Parliament has delivered gains: a better-paid public sector than elsewhere in the UK; the Scottish Child Payment; rail brought back into public ownership; progressive tax changes; rent caps. These things make a difference, but they did not fall from the sky. They were fought for, by rail unions, anti-poverty campaigners, Living Rent, public sector workers and the STUC. Where the organised working class led, politicians followed. But our victories paper over the cracks of a Parliament that is too unwilling to challenge corporate interests.
And it is that failure of mainstream politicians to challenge corporate interests that means the ground is shifting under our feet. With Reform polling at 20%, we can no longer comfort ourselves that Scotland is different or that our Parliament is slightly better than Westminster.
Westminster austerity has done enormous damage, but so too has Holyrood’s cowardice in refusing to challenge it. We do not want Scotland’s politicians to administer cuts while annunciating the droopy mantra, “it wizny me”. We want our politicians to govern. To chart Scotland’s own path trodden by our people, not by big business, bond markets or banks. Scotland is a wealthy country. We have vast renewable resources. We have a skilled and committed workforce. We have world-class universities and ingenuity. But wealth here is hoarded not shared. Two families own more than a quarter of our population combined. That is not the way things have to be. It is a political choice made by governments of various stripes to protect the fortunes of the few while telling the many there’s no money.
Our Congress theme is ‘Workers United Demanding Better’. That absolutely includes demanding better from our politicians in a year when they are seeking our votes in the Scottish Parliament elections. Twenty-seven years on from the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament, it falls once again to the trade union movement to demand that it works for us. That means taking back control.
Those words ‘Take Back Control’ have been completely twisted, corrupted, and emptied of their meaning by the Tories and the far right. But take back control we must. Not from migrants, or from those on benefits, or from ethnic minorities, but from the blind economic forces that have shaped our country for nearly half a century. Forces that have stripped our industries, hollowed out our towns, and told working-class people to accept decline as destiny.
For the Scottish Parliament to take back control means:
· Raising the taxes needed to close the £5 billion funding gap, not cutting 12,000 public sector jobs and calling it efficiency savings.
· Replacing the unfair council tax system, still based on property values from 35 years ago, with a system that asks more of those who have most.
· Ending the £3 billion annual profit drain from outsourced public services; money that should be invested in schools, hospitals and communities, not siphoned off to shareholders.
· Extending sectoral collective bargaining to care, to culture, and every publicly funded sector, so that every worker can benefit from union agreements.
· Using public money to create good jobs and domestic supply chains, not blank cheques for business with no conditions attached.
· Taking equity stakes in offshore wind, so that turbines built off our shores create jobs in our yards, our factories, our communities.
· Investing in ferries and rail here, not exporting contracts overseas while our own infrastructure crumbles.
· Bringing buses back into public hands, so profits are reinvested in routes and services, not extracted by shareholders.
· A Scottish Parliament with greater borrowing powers and control over employment law.
That is what taking back control means. Not flag-waving, scapegoating, or nostalgia for a past that is never coming back. Control over capital, control over investment, and control over the wealth we create.
Let’s demand better from our politicians, hold them accountable, and make them feel our presence. And let’s remember that a political party wants your vote once every five years so they can have power; a union wants your voice every day so you can have power. It is not just a service you pay for. A union is the organised expression of working-class control. It is people, together, deciding that our labour has value, that our voices matter, and that our futures are not for others to decide. So don’t just vote for change. Build it, organise in your workplace and your community, strengthen your branch, and stand with the worker beside you. Because when we come together and refuse to be divided, when we recognise that our struggles are connected, we take back control.
Roz Foyer is the General Secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress.
