You can read a copy online HERE
The national version of the Scottish socialist Voice, available fortnightly, can be downloaded HERE
Showing posts with label Scottish Socialist Voice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scottish Socialist Voice. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 April 2014
Campsie Socialist Voice
Campsie Socialist Voice's are being delivered across the Campsie area from Moodiesburn, Twechar, Kirkintilloch, Bishopbriggs, Milton of Campsie, Lennoxtown through to Bearsden/ Milngavie and Torrance.
You can read a copy online HERE
You can read a copy online HERE
Tuesday, 3 December 2013
SCOTTISH SOCIALIST VOICE FORUM ON THE SCOTTISH GOVERNMENTS INDEPENDENCE WHITE PAPER
Book for this exclusive event HERE
WHEN:
December 7, 2013 at 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
WHERE:
The Jury's Inn Hotel,
Jeffrey Street,
Edinburgh,
Midlothian
Speakers - CHAIR: John Finnie, MSP.
Jim Sillars, Isobel Lindsay, Paul Holleran, John McAllion, Maggie Chapman, Prof. Mike Danson and Colin Fox
Download the latest Scottish Socialist Voices FREE here
SsV on Facebook HERE
Friday, 14 June 2013
Satirical Invitation!
Frank Boyle is a cartoonist who has drawn some hard hitting satirical comment for the Scottish Socialist Voice. He has invited you to come along to Kirkintilloch to an exhibition of his work...
Sunday, 18 July 2010
SSP MUGDOCK BBQ + Campsie Voice/National Voice
BBQ - organised by SSP Campsie - details HERE
Latest Campsie Voice here
Latest SSP National Voice HERE
If you would like a print version of these delivered to your house, please email eastdunbartonshiressp@hotmail.co.uk
review of WEE RED BOOK SHOP -HERE
If you have any books you would like to donate to the shop, please contact us on eastdunbartonshiressp@hotmail.co.uk
Latest Campsie Voice here
Latest SSP National Voice HERE
If you would like a print version of these delivered to your house, please email eastdunbartonshiressp@hotmail.co.uk
review of WEE RED BOOK SHOP -HERE
If you have any books you would like to donate to the shop, please contact us on eastdunbartonshiressp@hotmail.co.uk
Friday, 9 July 2010
Shoppers in Kirkintilloch flock to sign SSP Alternative to Cuts petition
SSP Campsie branch were in Kirkintilloch today, talking to shoppers about the alternatives we have to the butchers budget set out by the Twin Tories.
Even though we were rained off after around an hour, people flocked to the table to talk about their fears of how the heartless Tories and their lackey's, the Liberal Democrats budget will effect them. All of the people we spoke to thought our Alternative budget was a much more sensible way to deal with the capitalist, greedy bankers crisis.
The message is clear - the public will not stand for the debt being foisted upon the poor and the ordinary working people of this country - we didn't cause this! The rich must pay for their debt!
If you didn't get the chance to sign up to our Alternative Budget - we will be in Kirkie High Street on Wednesday 14th July from 12noon onwards -so come along!
Read our alternative in our special edition of the Scottish Socialist Voice. Click on image below. (also - scroll down for local edition of Voice)
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Saturday, 26 June 2010
Friday, 21 May 2010
Saturday, 24 April 2010
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
PCS BUDGET DAY STRIKE
Below - PCS Voice and details about tomorrows PCS strike. Also, a link to the new Scottish Socialist Voice - now available FREE online!
PCS plans....
Edinburgh
Gather at the Mound from 10.30 am - head for the PCS banner
Alternative Budget declaration - don't cut civil and public services, and a noisy protest (whistles and other noisy items will be provided!)
Public leafleting
Speaker - PCS national president Janice Godrich
Glasgow
Gather in the Iron Horse, 115 West Nile Street from 10.15
March to Labour Party HQ and hand in a letter to Ian Gray
Public leafleting
Speaker - Scotland Committee Chair Derek Thomson
ARTICLE BY SSP WORKPLACE ORGANISER, Richie Venton, ABOUT STRIKE HERE
CLICK ON THE LEAFLET TO READ A BIGGER VERSION:
CLICK ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE VOICE TO GET INSIDE!
PCS plans....
Edinburgh
Gather at the Mound from 10.30 am - head for the PCS banner
Alternative Budget declaration - don't cut civil and public services, and a noisy protest (whistles and other noisy items will be provided!)
Public leafleting
Speaker - PCS national president Janice Godrich
Glasgow
Gather in the Iron Horse, 115 West Nile Street from 10.15
March to Labour Party HQ and hand in a letter to Ian Gray
Public leafleting
Speaker - Scotland Committee Chair Derek Thomson
ARTICLE BY SSP WORKPLACE ORGANISER, Richie Venton, ABOUT STRIKE HERE
CLICK ON THE LEAFLET TO READ A BIGGER VERSION:
CLICK ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE VOICE TO GET INSIDE!
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Loch Katrine; a triumph of community values over private greed
The 150th anniversary of the greatest public health achievement of its day
by Alan McCombes
It was the mid-19th century equivalent of the moon landing, and all Scotland was in state of excitement. In Glasgow, the city bells rang out in celebration of the new dawn that was about to break. In Edinburgh and Stirling, cannons roared their approval from the castle battlements.
But the main stage was a lonely, eight mile stretch of water in the wild, mountainous Trossachs. There, on the shores of Loch Katrine, Queen Victoria was about to open the new aqueduct that would supply the great and growing city of Glasgow with fresh, clean water for centuries to come.
The day was suitably dreich, swirling grey mists merging with soft Highland rain. As Queen Victoria turned on a small tap, 400 members of the Glasgow Volunteer Rifle Corps fired off a royal salute. The volley shattered every window of the lochside cottage where she had been due to spend the night.
But no matter. October 14, 1859 was a special day that would change Glasgow and Scotland forever. As the sluice gates opened, the pure water began its 34-mile journey south.
At the start of the the 1850s, Loch Katrine was already famous across the English-speaking world as the setting for Walter Scott's epic poem, Lady of the Lake, and his novel, Rob Roy, celebrating the exploits of Scotland's most famous Highland outlaw.
This beautiful and desolate landscape, steeped in history and romance, was a different world from the fever-ridden slums of the growing city to the south west, where life expectancy was just 27 years.
One contemporary historian Andrew Wallace described the gruesome scenes in the city during a cholera epidemic in 1832: “Husbands returning from the funerals of their wives were seized with the disease and hurried off to the common grave. A great covered caravan was employed in the city for the removal of dead bodies from the streets”.
The epidemic led to a long-term campaign of petitions and public meetings calling for the city’s water supply to be brought under municipal ownership.
At that time, two private companies controlled the water supply; using steam engines, they pumped it out from the River Clyde into two reservoirs, near where the Royal Infirmary now stands. The filthy water, contaminated with sewage and chemicals, was then distributed to 27 public wells around the city, where families would queue up with their buckets day and night.
Eventually, in October 1845, a committee of the council voted unanimously “that it would be better if the supply of water and gas was taken out of the private joint stock companies and brought under public control.” The proposal was voted down, by 16 to seven, at a full council meeting.
Then in 1848 and 1849, cholera returned. This time, the epidemic spread from the slums into the more prosperous parts of the city. Thousands perished. The town council now came out strongly for municipal ownership, and presented a bill before Westminster.
They also appointed a chief engineer, John Frederick Bateman, to locate the best source for a fresh water supply. The 40-year old Halifax-born engineer had already masterminded the construction of a public waterworks supplying the city of Manchester. The Longdendale scheme had involved driving a 3000-yard aqueduct from into the city.
But what he now proposed was startling in its audacity, and towering in its vision. His plan was to create a 34-mile aqueduct capable of transporting 50 million gallons of fresh water daily through some of the wildest mountain terrain in Europe, and into every home in Glasgow.
When the town council adopted the plan, there was political uproar. The private water companies went on the warpath. Landowners in the Trossachs denounced the proposed “robbery” of their water and land. Wealthy Glasgow property owners objected to paying higher property taxes to fund the project; it would bankrupt the city, they declared.
The Admiralty joined in the affray, claiming that the scheme would reduce the flow of water into the River Teith, a tributary of the River Forth, which in turn could endanger the navigability of the Firth, and maybe even drain the entire river dry.
Frederick Penny, an eminent professor of chemistry at the Andersonian Institute in Glasgow, warned that it would be “extremely hazardous” to supply Glasgow with water from Loch Katrine. The action of pure water on lead piping would poison the population, he told a House of Commons committee considering the bill.
After hearing evidence from this parade of objectors, the parliamentary committee threw out the plan. But Glasgow's Lord Provost Robert Stewart was a determined and committed man.
The journalist and politician, John S Clark, would later describe him as “the Trojan of the struggle [who] got his teeth into the principle of public ownership and and held onto it with the tenacity of a vice. He schemed for the measure, piloted his colleagues and battered down opposition with tireless energy.”
Within the council, the debate grew even more fractious. One opponent, Baillie Gemmill, suggested that “the inevitable consequences of Loch Katrine water would be that poison would be carried into the systems of the inhabitants using it, producing slowly and insidiously injury to the constitution in various forms, leading to the most excruciating pains and terminating in death.”
In response, the Lord Provost's right hand man, Bailie Gourlay, warned, “If by your votes this day the council should propose to abandon this undertaking, you will do more injury to the health, to the sanitary improvement and to the commercial prosperity of the city of Glasgow than either you or your descendants will ever be able to repair.”
Although most of the press backed the opposition, the Glasgow Herald threw its weight behind the council: “Everyone knows that the rich can get pure water...they can dig wells to their own houses, or sweeten impure liquid by filters, or they can leave the city altogether, as a place of residence, should water fail. The poor man can do none of these things...the poor people have to carry or pump it laboriously for their domestic purposes from a reservoir – a work at which they can be seen toiling from morning till night.” (Glasgow Herald, February 24 1854)
Pragmatically, the council now offered generous compensation packages to neutralise the opposition. The two failed private water companies would receive £800,000 over the next 30 years in annuities, interest payments and debt write-offs. In today's money, it would be worth around £60 million.
The two major landowners along the route of the aqueduct – the Duke of Montrose and the Earl of Ancaster - were to receive over £100,000 between them . And to placate the city's own disgruntled property owners, the council promised to reduce the proposed levy on the rates by two thirds, from 2/6d to one shilling a year.
With the most powerful opponents of the project effectively bought off, all talk of impending calamity ceased. On July 12 1855, the prosaically named Glasgow Corporation Water Works Act received royal assent, and within a year, the great construction project got underway.
It was a monumental undertaking. The west side of Loch Katrine, where the aqueduct would begin, was well-nigh inaccessible, with no roads and just a few isolated few dwellings. Even the clans had gone, put to the sword after the defeated Jacobite Rising of 1745.
But for three and half years, this heartland of the Clan MacGregor was to resounded once again with the old Gaelic tongue, though in an unfamiliar dialect. Of the 3000-strong army of navvies drafted into these glens, many were Irish-speaking refugees from the famine that had recently blighted their land.
To accommodate the influx, new villages of timber and mud sprung up along the shores of Loch Katrine, Loch Arklet, Loch Ard and Loch Lomond. The biggest of these, at the head of Loch Chon, spread over 53 acres, and had grocers' shops, reading rooms, a schoolhouse, and a church. The constant blasting of gunpowder in the surrounding hills led the inhabitants to nickname their new town Sebastopol, áfter the famous battle of the Crimean War.
Meanwhile, in the factories and workshops of the Lowlands, mechanics, iron moulders and blacksmiths churned out the pipes, tubes, troughs, beams and girders that would support the elaborate structure.
The aqueduct consisted of 80 tunnels blasted under the mountains and 25 bridges of iron and masonry. It carried the water into a new reservoir at Mugdock on the northern outskirts of the city, from where it would then flow into every home in the city, via an 800-mile labyrinth of underground pipes.
For the open-mouthed Victorians, the new Loch Katrine waterworks was the eighth wonder of the world. Engineers and scientists around the world hailed the structure as the greatest engineering feat since the Roman Empire.
More importantly for the citizens of Glasgow, the Loch Katrine scheme was also one of the great public health achievements of the industrial age. When a new cholera outbreak swept Britain in 1866, Glasgow escaped almost unscathed, with only 53 deaths compared with over 4000 in the 1848-49 epidemic.
Eventually it was discovered that the lead poisoning warnings, though exaggerated, had contained a kernel of truth. Because of its purity, Loch Katrine water was vulnerable to contamination by lead from pipes and cisterns. Only in the late 1970s did the authorities finally rectify the problem by adding lime to the reservoirs.
Yet, even that legitimate health concern had been blown out of all proportion. In today's context, it would be like refusing to feed starving children in Africa on the grounds that cholestorol can be harmful.
Indeed, research in 1990s discovered that other environmental influences, such as deprivation and diet, had wreaked far more serious damage to the health of Glaswegians over the generations.
The other objections to the Loch Katrine water scheme were to prove groundless. The Forth continued to flow, confounding the predictions of the Admiralty. To this day, the town of Stirling deep inland is still navigable by vessels of up to 100 tons.
Glasgow, far from descending into bankruptcy, rose to become one of the greatest industrial cities the world had ever seen, its prosperity underpinned by the fresh, mountain water cascading into the city.
And not only was the new water clean – it was also cheap. Manufacturers' water charges were cut by half, while household bills were slashed by two thirds.
Inspired by the success of the new public water supply, Glasgow town council launched one new public project after another. In 1867, the city took control of the gas supply, cutting bills by half, and providing street and tenement lighting.
Anticipating the future NHS, the council built a municipal fever hospital in 1869, and went on to built municipal baths, wash-houses, laundry services, markets, slaughterhouses , libraries, art galleries, parks and a tram system.
The success of Loch Katrine project was a triumph of community values over those of the free market, and would leave a deep imprint on the psyche and political culture of wider Scottish society for generations to come.
Today, Lord Provost Robert Stewart's name is commemorated by a soaring architectural landmark in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park. Built after his death in 1872, the Stewart Memorial Fountain - topped by a bronze statue of Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake – is about to be restored to its old glory, after lying derelict and vandalised for 15 years.
After Loch Katrine, the chief engineer, John Frederick Bateman, went on to build water supply systems for cities around the world, including Newcastle, Belfast, Dublin, Perth, Buenos Aires, Naples, Constantinople and Colombo.
But the Loch Katrine aqueduct remains his greatest monument, a structure which will supply the city of Glasgow with Highland water for the next 150 years and beyond.
As he told a banquet given in his honour in Glasgow in 1860: “I leave to you a work which I believe will, with very slight attention, remain perfect for ages, which for the greater part of it is as indestructible as the hills through which it has been carried.”
this article is published with kind permission of the author. it originally appeared in december 2009 in The Scottish Socialist Voice
by Alan McCombes
It was the mid-19th century equivalent of the moon landing, and all Scotland was in state of excitement. In Glasgow, the city bells rang out in celebration of the new dawn that was about to break. In Edinburgh and Stirling, cannons roared their approval from the castle battlements.
But the main stage was a lonely, eight mile stretch of water in the wild, mountainous Trossachs. There, on the shores of Loch Katrine, Queen Victoria was about to open the new aqueduct that would supply the great and growing city of Glasgow with fresh, clean water for centuries to come.
The day was suitably dreich, swirling grey mists merging with soft Highland rain. As Queen Victoria turned on a small tap, 400 members of the Glasgow Volunteer Rifle Corps fired off a royal salute. The volley shattered every window of the lochside cottage where she had been due to spend the night.But no matter. October 14, 1859 was a special day that would change Glasgow and Scotland forever. As the sluice gates opened, the pure water began its 34-mile journey south.
At the start of the the 1850s, Loch Katrine was already famous across the English-speaking world as the setting for Walter Scott's epic poem, Lady of the Lake, and his novel, Rob Roy, celebrating the exploits of Scotland's most famous Highland outlaw.
This beautiful and desolate landscape, steeped in history and romance, was a different world from the fever-ridden slums of the growing city to the south west, where life expectancy was just 27 years.
One contemporary historian Andrew Wallace described the gruesome scenes in the city during a cholera epidemic in 1832: “Husbands returning from the funerals of their wives were seized with the disease and hurried off to the common grave. A great covered caravan was employed in the city for the removal of dead bodies from the streets”.
The epidemic led to a long-term campaign of petitions and public meetings calling for the city’s water supply to be brought under municipal ownership.
At that time, two private companies controlled the water supply; using steam engines, they pumped it out from the River Clyde into two reservoirs, near where the Royal Infirmary now stands. The filthy water, contaminated with sewage and chemicals, was then distributed to 27 public wells around the city, where families would queue up with their buckets day and night.Eventually, in October 1845, a committee of the council voted unanimously “that it would be better if the supply of water and gas was taken out of the private joint stock companies and brought under public control.” The proposal was voted down, by 16 to seven, at a full council meeting.
Then in 1848 and 1849, cholera returned. This time, the epidemic spread from the slums into the more prosperous parts of the city. Thousands perished. The town council now came out strongly for municipal ownership, and presented a bill before Westminster.
They also appointed a chief engineer, John Frederick Bateman, to locate the best source for a fresh water supply. The 40-year old Halifax-born engineer had already masterminded the construction of a public waterworks supplying the city of Manchester. The Longdendale scheme had involved driving a 3000-yard aqueduct from into the city.
But what he now proposed was startling in its audacity, and towering in its vision. His plan was to create a 34-mile aqueduct capable of transporting 50 million gallons of fresh water daily through some of the wildest mountain terrain in Europe, and into every home in Glasgow.
When the town council adopted the plan, there was political uproar. The private water companies went on the warpath. Landowners in the Trossachs denounced the proposed “robbery” of their water and land. Wealthy Glasgow property owners objected to paying higher property taxes to fund the project; it would bankrupt the city, they declared.
The Admiralty joined in the affray, claiming that the scheme would reduce the flow of water into the River Teith, a tributary of the River Forth, which in turn could endanger the navigability of the Firth, and maybe even drain the entire river dry.
Frederick Penny, an eminent professor of chemistry at the Andersonian Institute in Glasgow, warned that it would be “extremely hazardous” to supply Glasgow with water from Loch Katrine. The action of pure water on lead piping would poison the population, he told a House of Commons committee considering the bill.
After hearing evidence from this parade of objectors, the parliamentary committee threw out the plan. But Glasgow's Lord Provost Robert Stewart was a determined and committed man.
The journalist and politician, John S Clark, would later describe him as “the Trojan of the struggle [who] got his teeth into the principle of public ownership and and held onto it with the tenacity of a vice. He schemed for the measure, piloted his colleagues and battered down opposition with tireless energy.”
Within the council, the debate grew even more fractious. One opponent, Baillie Gemmill, suggested that “the inevitable consequences of Loch Katrine water would be that poison would be carried into the systems of the inhabitants using it, producing slowly and insidiously injury to the constitution in various forms, leading to the most excruciating pains and terminating in death.”
In response, the Lord Provost's right hand man, Bailie Gourlay, warned, “If by your votes this day the council should propose to abandon this undertaking, you will do more injury to the health, to the sanitary improvement and to the commercial prosperity of the city of Glasgow than either you or your descendants will ever be able to repair.”
Although most of the press backed the opposition, the Glasgow Herald threw its weight behind the council: “Everyone knows that the rich can get pure water...they can dig wells to their own houses, or sweeten impure liquid by filters, or they can leave the city altogether, as a place of residence, should water fail. The poor man can do none of these things...the poor people have to carry or pump it laboriously for their domestic purposes from a reservoir – a work at which they can be seen toiling from morning till night.” (Glasgow Herald, February 24 1854)
Pragmatically, the council now offered generous compensation packages to neutralise the opposition. The two failed private water companies would receive £800,000 over the next 30 years in annuities, interest payments and debt write-offs. In today's money, it would be worth around £60 million.
The two major landowners along the route of the aqueduct – the Duke of Montrose and the Earl of Ancaster - were to receive over £100,000 between them . And to placate the city's own disgruntled property owners, the council promised to reduce the proposed levy on the rates by two thirds, from 2/6d to one shilling a year.
With the most powerful opponents of the project effectively bought off, all talk of impending calamity ceased. On July 12 1855, the prosaically named Glasgow Corporation Water Works Act received royal assent, and within a year, the great construction project got underway.
It was a monumental undertaking. The west side of Loch Katrine, where the aqueduct would begin, was well-nigh inaccessible, with no roads and just a few isolated few dwellings. Even the clans had gone, put to the sword after the defeated Jacobite Rising of 1745.
But for three and half years, this heartland of the Clan MacGregor was to resounded once again with the old Gaelic tongue, though in an unfamiliar dialect. Of the 3000-strong army of navvies drafted into these glens, many were Irish-speaking refugees from the famine that had recently blighted their land.
To accommodate the influx, new villages of timber and mud sprung up along the shores of Loch Katrine, Loch Arklet, Loch Ard and Loch Lomond. The biggest of these, at the head of Loch Chon, spread over 53 acres, and had grocers' shops, reading rooms, a schoolhouse, and a church. The constant blasting of gunpowder in the surrounding hills led the inhabitants to nickname their new town Sebastopol, áfter the famous battle of the Crimean War.
Meanwhile, in the factories and workshops of the Lowlands, mechanics, iron moulders and blacksmiths churned out the pipes, tubes, troughs, beams and girders that would support the elaborate structure.
The aqueduct consisted of 80 tunnels blasted under the mountains and 25 bridges of iron and masonry. It carried the water into a new reservoir at Mugdock on the northern outskirts of the city, from where it would then flow into every home in the city, via an 800-mile labyrinth of underground pipes.
For the open-mouthed Victorians, the new Loch Katrine waterworks was the eighth wonder of the world. Engineers and scientists around the world hailed the structure as the greatest engineering feat since the Roman Empire.
More importantly for the citizens of Glasgow, the Loch Katrine scheme was also one of the great public health achievements of the industrial age. When a new cholera outbreak swept Britain in 1866, Glasgow escaped almost unscathed, with only 53 deaths compared with over 4000 in the 1848-49 epidemic.
Eventually it was discovered that the lead poisoning warnings, though exaggerated, had contained a kernel of truth. Because of its purity, Loch Katrine water was vulnerable to contamination by lead from pipes and cisterns. Only in the late 1970s did the authorities finally rectify the problem by adding lime to the reservoirs.
Yet, even that legitimate health concern had been blown out of all proportion. In today's context, it would be like refusing to feed starving children in Africa on the grounds that cholestorol can be harmful.
Indeed, research in 1990s discovered that other environmental influences, such as deprivation and diet, had wreaked far more serious damage to the health of Glaswegians over the generations.
The other objections to the Loch Katrine water scheme were to prove groundless. The Forth continued to flow, confounding the predictions of the Admiralty. To this day, the town of Stirling deep inland is still navigable by vessels of up to 100 tons.
Glasgow, far from descending into bankruptcy, rose to become one of the greatest industrial cities the world had ever seen, its prosperity underpinned by the fresh, mountain water cascading into the city.
And not only was the new water clean – it was also cheap. Manufacturers' water charges were cut by half, while household bills were slashed by two thirds.
Inspired by the success of the new public water supply, Glasgow town council launched one new public project after another. In 1867, the city took control of the gas supply, cutting bills by half, and providing street and tenement lighting.
Anticipating the future NHS, the council built a municipal fever hospital in 1869, and went on to built municipal baths, wash-houses, laundry services, markets, slaughterhouses , libraries, art galleries, parks and a tram system.
The success of Loch Katrine project was a triumph of community values over those of the free market, and would leave a deep imprint on the psyche and political culture of wider Scottish society for generations to come.
Today, Lord Provost Robert Stewart's name is commemorated by a soaring architectural landmark in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park. Built after his death in 1872, the Stewart Memorial Fountain - topped by a bronze statue of Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake – is about to be restored to its old glory, after lying derelict and vandalised for 15 years.
After Loch Katrine, the chief engineer, John Frederick Bateman, went on to build water supply systems for cities around the world, including Newcastle, Belfast, Dublin, Perth, Buenos Aires, Naples, Constantinople and Colombo.
But the Loch Katrine aqueduct remains his greatest monument, a structure which will supply the city of Glasgow with Highland water for the next 150 years and beyond.
As he told a banquet given in his honour in Glasgow in 1860: “I leave to you a work which I believe will, with very slight attention, remain perfect for ages, which for the greater part of it is as indestructible as the hills through which it has been carried.”
this article is published with kind permission of the author. it originally appeared in december 2009 in The Scottish Socialist Voice
Sunday, 15 November 2009
SSP PUBLIC MEETING- UNITE against racism and fascism
Monday 16th Nov
7pm - note earlier time - 7pm
The Piper on the Square (upstairs), George Sq, Glasgow
UNITE against racism and fascism
UNITE against poverty and inequality
UNITE for an inclusive, independent socialist Scotland
Speakers:-
A Polish anti-fascist
Liam Turbett - Scottish Socialist Youth
Carolina Perez - whose Chilean socialist family were persecuted by Pinochet
Keith Baldassara - veteran anti-fascist & SSP
7pm - note earlier time - 7pm
The Piper on the Square (upstairs), George Sq, Glasgow
UNITE against racism and fascism
UNITE against poverty and inequality
UNITE for an inclusive, independent socialist Scotland
Speakers:-
A Polish anti-fascist
Liam Turbett - Scottish Socialist Youth
Carolina Perez - whose Chilean socialist family were persecuted by Pinochet
Keith Baldassara - veteran anti-fascist & SSP
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Glasgow Council admit "Gaffe" over School Closures
- and the Gaffe, as well costing safe, friendly, community schools - is going to cost existing schools £2million of their valuable funding... see HERE
Friday, 18 September 2009
Decent work... pay... conditions...life! NOT profit!
Andy Bowden speaks about youth unemployment - and his own experience of it. It's not the crisis thats to blame... it is the greedy bosses...
Richie Venton speaks about how the bosses are piling their debt blackhole onto the workers and how they are saving their millions by casting workers into the misery of long working hours, low pay and ultimately, unemployment.
Richie elaborates in these articles HERE and HERE
Richie Venton speaks about how the bosses are piling their debt blackhole onto the workers and how they are saving their millions by casting workers into the misery of long working hours, low pay and ultimately, unemployment.
Richie elaborates in these articles HERE and HERE
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Missed last Saturday's Cuba discussion?
Have a watch at the introductory presentations...
In the first video, Brian Pollitt, drawing on experience inside Cuba and involvement in academic study of the Americas over the past 50 years, speaks about the challenges and successes of the Cuban Revolution. Brian is an SSP member and Secretary of Scottish Medical Aid for Cuba.
Dorothy Sharkey of Scottish Cuba Solidarity on the US. blockade, the Miami 5 and Solidarity Brigades. More information HERE
Kevin Carroll, from the Scottish Socialist Party and Scottish Cuba Solidarity, explains how he became interested in, and describes some of his visits to, Cuba.
Brian on Cuba HERE
Brian on "Che, the People's Revolutionary" HERE
Article on Che HERE Brian Pollitt comments on it:
It is acutely frustrating to read Che's concluding thoughts which are quoted so approvingly:
"...the plan as an economic decision by the masses, conscious of the peoples' interests.... The masses must decide which share of production will be assigned respectively to accumulation and consumption. Economic technique must operate within the limits of this information and the consciousness of the masses must ensure its implementation."
As an implicit critique of the "top down" Soviet model of planning this sounds all very well. But the Soviets, the Chinese and the Cubans all claimed to have a "top-down-top" planning system whereby the planners framed a draft plan which was taken down to "the masses" via the Party and in discussion with the Trade Unions, and then, accompanied by their critique, went back up again to be reformulated by the central planners. Whether and how this happened in practice is quite another matter but the difficulty with Che's formulations is that absolutely nothing concrete is said about how "the masses" make their wishes known; through what organised and representative fora do they make their decisions on accumulation versus consumption in the plan; and how does the masses "consciousness" ensure the implementation of their democratically expressed will? It all sounds fine but doesn't withstand close inspection as to its organisational meaning, does it?
In the first video, Brian Pollitt, drawing on experience inside Cuba and involvement in academic study of the Americas over the past 50 years, speaks about the challenges and successes of the Cuban Revolution. Brian is an SSP member and Secretary of Scottish Medical Aid for Cuba.
Dorothy Sharkey of Scottish Cuba Solidarity on the US. blockade, the Miami 5 and Solidarity Brigades. More information HERE
Kevin Carroll, from the Scottish Socialist Party and Scottish Cuba Solidarity, explains how he became interested in, and describes some of his visits to, Cuba.
Brian on Cuba HERE
Brian on "Che, the People's Revolutionary" HERE
Article on Che HERE Brian Pollitt comments on it:
It is acutely frustrating to read Che's concluding thoughts which are quoted so approvingly:
"...the plan as an economic decision by the masses, conscious of the peoples' interests.... The masses must decide which share of production will be assigned respectively to accumulation and consumption. Economic technique must operate within the limits of this information and the consciousness of the masses must ensure its implementation."
As an implicit critique of the "top down" Soviet model of planning this sounds all very well. But the Soviets, the Chinese and the Cubans all claimed to have a "top-down-top" planning system whereby the planners framed a draft plan which was taken down to "the masses" via the Party and in discussion with the Trade Unions, and then, accompanied by their critique, went back up again to be reformulated by the central planners. Whether and how this happened in practice is quite another matter but the difficulty with Che's formulations is that absolutely nothing concrete is said about how "the masses" make their wishes known; through what organised and representative fora do they make their decisions on accumulation versus consumption in the plan; and how does the masses "consciousness" ensure the implementation of their democratically expressed will? It all sounds fine but doesn't withstand close inspection as to its organisational meaning, does it?
Friday, 11 September 2009
Cut Hours... not Jobs or Pay
by Richie Venton
One of the most perverse contradictions in a system riddled with cruel absurdities is that of the working week.
Whilst unemployment leaps upwards, with a scourge of redundancies and closures, the length of the working week for vast hordes of workers increases.
Whilst employers lay off workers, cutting their hours and pay, others demand overtime of their workers – and obscene proportions of this is unpaid overtime.
Long Hours Culture
The UK suffers a notorious ‘Long Hours Culture’. And after a few years of decline (in the years 1998-2006), the hours worked is rising rapidly again.
Figures from December 2008 show that full-time workers in the UK put in an average of 42.1 hours a week - although that is acknowledged to be an under-estimate, not including undeclared hours on second jobs.
Beneath this average lies appalling levels of drudgery for a big minority: one in eight works over 48 hours a week!
And for male workers, the figure is 19.7 per cent exceeding the 48 hour week.
Put another way, in Scotland alone, 260,000 workers are on over 48 hours; 3.3 million across the UK. The latter figure is an increase of 180,000 compared with 2007.
A breath-taking 460,000 workers clock up over 60 hours work a week (54,000 of these in Scotland) - leaving little else time for family or social life after travel to work time and sleep is accounted for!
Long hours at work lead to increased illness, including stress.
It also lowers productivity levels, and reduces Health and Safety for the workforce, as tired people are a risk to others as well as themselves in many jobs.
21st Century Drudgery
So why do workers in Scotland and the UK put in such back-breaking, mind-boggling hours at work in the 21st century?
One of the most obvious causes is low hourly rates of pay. This country is one of the lowest-waged economies in the advanced world. Workers are frequently compelled to clock up the hours to get a half-decent income for themselves and their families – through hours that lead to neglect of family life and increased family break-ups.
But there is also a more naked form of exploitation that explains the Long Hours Culture: unpaid overtime. An absolute majority of the workers on long hours get no extra pay for their overtime. Last year, 5.24 million workers in the UK (425,000 in Scotland) worked unpaid overtime, to a total value of £27billion.
That is the highest toll of unpaid labour since records began in 1992.
It is the equivalent of working for absolutely nothing from 1st January to 27th February last year.
It means these workers gave their bosses an average of £5,139 worth of work without getting a single penny in pay.
Unpaid Labour
As socialists as far back as Karl Marx in the 1840s have explained, profit is the unpaid labour of the working class.
Two of the several means by which the capitalist class boost their profits are by intensifying the amount of production a worker provides during the hours of work, and by lengthening the working week.
Certainly in recent decades bosses have extracted more work out of fewer workers as a means of piling up their profits. But the growing trend of unpaid overtime is one of the most glaring forms of profiteering. And it is likely to rise, as the recession bites deeper; fear of being made unemployed gives the employers a powerful weapon to pressure people into unpaid hours of extra work.
All this, whilst the number of people with no hours of work – the unemployed – rockets to levels not seen in years.
And meantime many employers – including in sectors as varied as the car industry, steel, the finance sector – are putting workers on reduced hours with equivalent cuts in pay; prolonged shut-downs with savage pay cuts; ‘sabbaticals’ as an alternative to outright redundancies – all to preserve profit margins at cost to workers’ pay packets.
Open Secret Company Accounts
Instead of feeding the philosophy that there is nothing can be done about all this – and specifically about job losses – it is high time the leaderships of the trade union movement spearheaded an aggressive campaign to ‘cut hours – not jobs’, to ‘cut hours – not pay’.
Every time some employer demands layoffs, redundancies or outright closures, the first demands of the trade union movement and its allies should be for public inspection of all the secret company accounts, to expose where all the profits have gone – and in many cases where all the public grants and subsidies have gone. And this should not just look at the current year’s accounts, where bosses may be able to demonstrate loss-making during the recession – but also the accounts for previous years of piling up profits.
Such an exercise would provide plenty of ammunition to challenge the employers’ ‘justification’ for job losses or closures.
Cut Hours – not Jobs or Pay
But regardless of whether companies and public sector employers are announcing job losses, they should be challenged by a generalised campaign for a shorter working week – without a penny being lost in pay.
As an immediate initial step, the battle-cry for a 35 hour maximum working week across the board, but crucially without loss of earnings, would rally workers and their families around an eminently rational measure in this crazed, profit-motivated system.
Such a shorter working week would vastly reduce stress levels and other illnesses, help improve health and safety at work, and actually boost productivity from less tired, more motivated workers.
It would greatly improve the family and social lives of working people – a real measure to enhance the much talked about ‘work/life balance’.
And crucially, it would create at least a couple of million jobs across the UK!
Challenging the Profit System
The demands to ‘cut hours – not jobs’ and ‘cut hours – not pay’ would of course challenge the central motive of capitalist employers: profit.
They impose long hours; unpaid overtime; pay cuts through prolonged shut-downs and reduced hours; closures and redundancies…. all to secure the maximum profit levels at the expense of workers’ lives being made a misery.
By cutting the working week, but protecting the level of income of workers, a greater share of national wealth would be distributed in wages, a lesser percentage in profit.
This fight to share out the work, without loss of earnings, needs to run in tandem with the campaign for a living minimum wage, a safety net of at least £8 to £9 an hour, based on the formula of two-thirds median male earnings.
Many who work day and night at risk to their own health are on dirt cheap wages – a system encouraged rather than eliminated by the pathetic level of Labour’s current minimum wages.
There are alternatives to long hours of work alongside no work for millions, a rational alternative to the slaughter of jobs in pursuit of profit margins.
The potential power of the unions and the communities they are rooted in needs to be combined with the sharp weapon of fighting demands that would share out the work rather than share out the misery.
…………..
One of the most perverse contradictions in a system riddled with cruel absurdities is that of the working week.
Whilst unemployment leaps upwards, with a scourge of redundancies and closures, the length of the working week for vast hordes of workers increases.
Whilst employers lay off workers, cutting their hours and pay, others demand overtime of their workers – and obscene proportions of this is unpaid overtime.
Long Hours Culture
The UK suffers a notorious ‘Long Hours Culture’. And after a few years of decline (in the years 1998-2006), the hours worked is rising rapidly again.
Figures from December 2008 show that full-time workers in the UK put in an average of 42.1 hours a week - although that is acknowledged to be an under-estimate, not including undeclared hours on second jobs.
Beneath this average lies appalling levels of drudgery for a big minority: one in eight works over 48 hours a week!
And for male workers, the figure is 19.7 per cent exceeding the 48 hour week.
Put another way, in Scotland alone, 260,000 workers are on over 48 hours; 3.3 million across the UK. The latter figure is an increase of 180,000 compared with 2007.
A breath-taking 460,000 workers clock up over 60 hours work a week (54,000 of these in Scotland) - leaving little else time for family or social life after travel to work time and sleep is accounted for!
Long hours at work lead to increased illness, including stress.
It also lowers productivity levels, and reduces Health and Safety for the workforce, as tired people are a risk to others as well as themselves in many jobs.
21st Century Drudgery
So why do workers in Scotland and the UK put in such back-breaking, mind-boggling hours at work in the 21st century?
One of the most obvious causes is low hourly rates of pay. This country is one of the lowest-waged economies in the advanced world. Workers are frequently compelled to clock up the hours to get a half-decent income for themselves and their families – through hours that lead to neglect of family life and increased family break-ups.
But there is also a more naked form of exploitation that explains the Long Hours Culture: unpaid overtime. An absolute majority of the workers on long hours get no extra pay for their overtime. Last year, 5.24 million workers in the UK (425,000 in Scotland) worked unpaid overtime, to a total value of £27billion.
That is the highest toll of unpaid labour since records began in 1992.
It is the equivalent of working for absolutely nothing from 1st January to 27th February last year.
It means these workers gave their bosses an average of £5,139 worth of work without getting a single penny in pay.
Unpaid Labour
As socialists as far back as Karl Marx in the 1840s have explained, profit is the unpaid labour of the working class.
Two of the several means by which the capitalist class boost their profits are by intensifying the amount of production a worker provides during the hours of work, and by lengthening the working week.
Certainly in recent decades bosses have extracted more work out of fewer workers as a means of piling up their profits. But the growing trend of unpaid overtime is one of the most glaring forms of profiteering. And it is likely to rise, as the recession bites deeper; fear of being made unemployed gives the employers a powerful weapon to pressure people into unpaid hours of extra work.
All this, whilst the number of people with no hours of work – the unemployed – rockets to levels not seen in years.
And meantime many employers – including in sectors as varied as the car industry, steel, the finance sector – are putting workers on reduced hours with equivalent cuts in pay; prolonged shut-downs with savage pay cuts; ‘sabbaticals’ as an alternative to outright redundancies – all to preserve profit margins at cost to workers’ pay packets.
Open Secret Company Accounts
Instead of feeding the philosophy that there is nothing can be done about all this – and specifically about job losses – it is high time the leaderships of the trade union movement spearheaded an aggressive campaign to ‘cut hours – not jobs’, to ‘cut hours – not pay’.
Every time some employer demands layoffs, redundancies or outright closures, the first demands of the trade union movement and its allies should be for public inspection of all the secret company accounts, to expose where all the profits have gone – and in many cases where all the public grants and subsidies have gone. And this should not just look at the current year’s accounts, where bosses may be able to demonstrate loss-making during the recession – but also the accounts for previous years of piling up profits.
Such an exercise would provide plenty of ammunition to challenge the employers’ ‘justification’ for job losses or closures.
Cut Hours – not Jobs or Pay
But regardless of whether companies and public sector employers are announcing job losses, they should be challenged by a generalised campaign for a shorter working week – without a penny being lost in pay.
As an immediate initial step, the battle-cry for a 35 hour maximum working week across the board, but crucially without loss of earnings, would rally workers and their families around an eminently rational measure in this crazed, profit-motivated system.
Such a shorter working week would vastly reduce stress levels and other illnesses, help improve health and safety at work, and actually boost productivity from less tired, more motivated workers.
It would greatly improve the family and social lives of working people – a real measure to enhance the much talked about ‘work/life balance’.
And crucially, it would create at least a couple of million jobs across the UK!
Challenging the Profit System
The demands to ‘cut hours – not jobs’ and ‘cut hours – not pay’ would of course challenge the central motive of capitalist employers: profit.
They impose long hours; unpaid overtime; pay cuts through prolonged shut-downs and reduced hours; closures and redundancies…. all to secure the maximum profit levels at the expense of workers’ lives being made a misery.
By cutting the working week, but protecting the level of income of workers, a greater share of national wealth would be distributed in wages, a lesser percentage in profit.
This fight to share out the work, without loss of earnings, needs to run in tandem with the campaign for a living minimum wage, a safety net of at least £8 to £9 an hour, based on the formula of two-thirds median male earnings.
Many who work day and night at risk to their own health are on dirt cheap wages – a system encouraged rather than eliminated by the pathetic level of Labour’s current minimum wages.
There are alternatives to long hours of work alongside no work for millions, a rational alternative to the slaughter of jobs in pursuit of profit margins.
The potential power of the unions and the communities they are rooted in needs to be combined with the sharp weapon of fighting demands that would share out the work rather than share out the misery.
…………..
Thursday, 10 September 2009
INVITE THIS SATURDAY!!
Discussion on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
Speakers
Brian Pollitt, Scottish Cuba Medical Aid
Kath Campbell, Scottish Cuba Solidarity
Kevin Carroll, Scottish Socialist Party
Details here
Speakers
Brian Pollitt, Scottish Cuba Medical Aid
Kath Campbell, Scottish Cuba Solidarity
Kevin Carroll, Scottish Socialist Party
Details here
Saturday, 29 August 2009
Friday, 28 August 2009
LAST DAY TO SIGN THE SCHOOLS PETITION!
Please sign, regardless of where in the world you live. This could set a precedent for other countries/cities across the world with the problem of undemocratic "consultations" on schools.
Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to conduct a public investigation into the impact the proposed closures of schools and nurseries by local authorities has on education policies, class sizes, childrens health and safety, social inclusion, jobs, and whether the process of consulting with parents and wider communities on the provision of education complies with local authorities statutory duties and democratic principles.
SIGN HERE
Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to conduct a public investigation into the impact the proposed closures of schools and nurseries by local authorities has on education policies, class sizes, childrens health and safety, social inclusion, jobs, and whether the process of consulting with parents and wider communities on the provision of education complies with local authorities statutory duties and democratic principles.
SIGN HERE
Friday, 21 August 2009
GLASGOW SAVE OUR SCHOOLS CAMPAIGN PRESS RELEASE
- for immediate use (Thurs 20th Aug 2009)
SAVE OUR SCHOOLS CAMPAIGNERS CELEBRATE RESIGNATION OF EDUCATION CHIEF MARGARET DORAN
The Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign, which led the mass movement against school and nursery closures since January, is delighted at the resignation of Margaret Dorarn, chief education officer for the Labour council, given her central role in the closures.
Richie Venton, Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign organiser, today said:
“The resignation of Margaret Doran from her £120,000-a-year job is a victory for those of us who fought the vicious closures of primaries and nurseries that she was at the heart of.
“The parents, carers and communities of 2,000 children who have been uprooted and dumped in bigger classes, further from home, will have a very simple response to Ms Doran’s departure: ‘good riddance to bad rubbish!’.
“The statement announcing her decision talks of ‘financial challenges facing the council’. Are the thieves falling out?
“Margaret Doran was a critical player in drafting the butchery of our kids’ education and community facilities – but under orders from the Chief Axe-man himself, Labour Council leader Stephen Purcell.
“Far from hinting at any disagreement with the elected Labour politicians’ closures package, Ms Doran was a strident advocate and defender of them. But the ferocious opposition of parents, carers and communities, led by the Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign, undoubtedly caused private divisions amongst council leaders and officers on how best to cope with the public fury.
“So when Labour councillors sing hymns of praise for her ‘leaving a tremendous legacy’ for Glasgow kids’ education, it’s enough to make you vomit.
"Her ‘legacy’ includes chaos in the first week of school term, with kids packed into far bigger classes, many of them travelling dangerous and long routes, some teaching staff only hearing where they were to work a day before the new term started, and many parents facing loss of their jobs because they can’t juggle between childcare arrangements and working times.
“We celebrate the departure of one butcher of kids’ education – the unelected £120,000-a-year bureaucrat – but intend to work for the removal of the bigger butchers – the Labour councillors who rode roughshod over people’s needs and wishes.”
For more info contact Richie Venton on 07828 278 093 or email richieventon@hotmail.com
SAVE OUR SCHOOLS CAMPAIGNERS CELEBRATE RESIGNATION OF EDUCATION CHIEF MARGARET DORAN
The Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign, which led the mass movement against school and nursery closures since January, is delighted at the resignation of Margaret Dorarn, chief education officer for the Labour council, given her central role in the closures.
Richie Venton, Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign organiser, today said:
“The resignation of Margaret Doran from her £120,000-a-year job is a victory for those of us who fought the vicious closures of primaries and nurseries that she was at the heart of.
“The parents, carers and communities of 2,000 children who have been uprooted and dumped in bigger classes, further from home, will have a very simple response to Ms Doran’s departure: ‘good riddance to bad rubbish!’.
“The statement announcing her decision talks of ‘financial challenges facing the council’. Are the thieves falling out?
“Margaret Doran was a critical player in drafting the butchery of our kids’ education and community facilities – but under orders from the Chief Axe-man himself, Labour Council leader Stephen Purcell.
“Far from hinting at any disagreement with the elected Labour politicians’ closures package, Ms Doran was a strident advocate and defender of them. But the ferocious opposition of parents, carers and communities, led by the Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign, undoubtedly caused private divisions amongst council leaders and officers on how best to cope with the public fury.
“So when Labour councillors sing hymns of praise for her ‘leaving a tremendous legacy’ for Glasgow kids’ education, it’s enough to make you vomit.
"Her ‘legacy’ includes chaos in the first week of school term, with kids packed into far bigger classes, many of them travelling dangerous and long routes, some teaching staff only hearing where they were to work a day before the new term started, and many parents facing loss of their jobs because they can’t juggle between childcare arrangements and working times.
“We celebrate the departure of one butcher of kids’ education – the unelected £120,000-a-year bureaucrat – but intend to work for the removal of the bigger butchers – the Labour councillors who rode roughshod over people’s needs and wishes.”
For more info contact Richie Venton on 07828 278 093 or email richieventon@hotmail.com
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