Celebrating the Scottish Socialist Party, 2013
Conference TODAY - Saturday 20th April, 10am, Augustine United Church, Edinburgh.
Join the revolution!
Showing posts with label Glasgow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glasgow. Show all posts
Saturday, 20 April 2013
Saturday, 21 July 2012
Hiroshima Day
Monday 6th August UPDATE -
The Council and Police are being really awkward on this international day of action across the world. Their small mindedness has forced us to move to St Enoch's Square Glasgow - we are there now - so come along and make your lantern and show solidarity with people across the world who want rid of weapons that could spell the extinction of all living things.
Join the Facebook Event for updates and reminders! - HERE
The Council and Police are being really awkward on this international day of action across the world. Their small mindedness has forced us to move to St Enoch's Square Glasgow - we are there now - so come along and make your lantern and show solidarity with people across the world who want rid of weapons that could spell the extinction of all living things.
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Tony Benn's speech at the UCS Work-in 40th Anniversary
 |
| Photo by Janine Kellett |
Shop Stewards who were part of the UCS Work-In in the shipyards of Glasgow and Clydebank organised a concert to mark the 40th anniversary of the famous industrial dispute, in the Mitchell Theatre, Glasgow. The Gala Concert on Sat 1 October in the Mitchell Theatre featured Tony Benn as Guest of Honour. He was the Labour Minister who created the UCS consortium in 1968 and a prominent supporter of the Work-In when in opposition. This is the speech he delivered that night.
Saturday, 1 October 2011
Thousands demonstrate against cuts in Glasgow despite the downpour!
Thousands of anti-cuts and anti-ConDem Government protesters took to the streets of Glasgow today, despite the massive flooding that hit the city.
Friday, 23 September 2011
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Unity Video from 5 years ago...
...this video had been blocked by the Black Eyed Peas record company for quite a while... but they have seen sense and unblocked it. Check it out!
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Glasgow UKUNCUT demo
Video of yesterdays UKUNCUT rally in Glasgow. Excellent views from SSP member, Jack Ferguson at around 11 minutes - plus arrest of young activist by police.
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Hugo Blanco - events in Scotland this week
A Word About Hugo Blanco
Hugo Blanco is a historic leader of the Peruvian peasant movement who
has been politically active since the 1950s. In the 1960s he played a
central part in the ‘Land or Death’ peasant uprising in the southern
highlands of Peru. He was captured, and sentenced to 25 years. He
wrote the book “Land or Death: the peasant struggle in Peru” during
one of his many periods in prison. In 1976 he was released and
deported to Sweden. On returning to Peru in 1978, he was elected to
parliament. He was a member of the Peruvian Senate until 1992, when he
was forced to seek political asylum in Mexico following Alberto
Fujimori’s “self-coup”.
Hugo Blanco has been at the forefront of a huge struggle in the
Peruvian Amazon where the government has sold off the rain forests to
the oil corporations and the indigenous people are resisting the
devastation this brings. He is working on the newspaper “Lucha
Indigena” (Indigenous Struggle). The struggle in Latin America today
is an international beacon of hope for all socialists including Eco
socialists.
The people’s summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010 showed an
alternative to the total failure of the world’s governments –
especially those of the US and the European Union – to meet the
challenge of climate change. In a world where profit is the motor
force rather than human need, it has been an inspiration that social
movements in Latin America have won important victories. Indigenous
peoples have been key to the strength and success of those movements.
Hugo argues that indigenous peoples across the planet are in the
forefront of fighting climate change and conserving the local
environment. This is true of those struggling to preserve the lungs of
the world in the Amazon, to defend the rainforests in Borneo or
against the uranium mine in the Grand Canyon.
This weekend gives you a unique opportunity to hear directly from Hugo
- do not miss the chance!
Public Meeting
HUGO BLANCO
Historic Leader of the Peruvian Peasant Movement
Partick Burgh Halls
Glasgow
Friday 15TH October
7.30PM
Organised by the Scottish Socialist Party.
Edinburgh University Socialist Society Presents:
Latin America
The Eco Socialist Alternative
With
Hugo Blanco
...&
Speakers and Workshops from:
Scottish Socialist Party
Edinburgh Chiapas Solidarity Group
Green Left (England & Wales)
Venezuelan Solidarity Campaign
Cuban Solidarity Campaign
Scottish Socialist Youth
Saturday 16th October 2010
10:30 – 13:00
The Dining Room Teviot House
Bristo Square
Hugo Blanco is a historic leader of the Peruvian peasant movement who
has been politically active since the 1950s. In the 1960s he played a
central part in the ‘Land or Death’ peasant uprising in the southern
highlands of Peru. He was captured, and sentenced to 25 years. He
wrote the book “Land or Death: the peasant struggle in Peru” during
one of his many periods in prison. In 1976 he was released and
deported to Sweden. On returning to Peru in 1978, he was elected to
parliament. He was a member of the Peruvian Senate until 1992, when he
was forced to seek political asylum in Mexico following Alberto
Fujimori’s “self-coup”.
Hugo Blanco has been at the forefront of a huge struggle in the
Peruvian Amazon where the government has sold off the rain forests to
the oil corporations and the indigenous people are resisting the
devastation this brings. He is working on the newspaper “Lucha
Indigena” (Indigenous Struggle). The struggle in Latin America today
is an international beacon of hope for all socialists including Eco
socialists.
The people’s summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010 showed an
alternative to the total failure of the world’s governments –
especially those of the US and the European Union – to meet the
challenge of climate change. In a world where profit is the motor
force rather than human need, it has been an inspiration that social
movements in Latin America have won important victories. Indigenous
peoples have been key to the strength and success of those movements.
Hugo argues that indigenous peoples across the planet are in the
forefront of fighting climate change and conserving the local
environment. This is true of those struggling to preserve the lungs of
the world in the Amazon, to defend the rainforests in Borneo or
against the uranium mine in the Grand Canyon.
This weekend gives you a unique opportunity to hear directly from Hugo
- do not miss the chance!
Public Meeting
HUGO BLANCO
Historic Leader of the Peruvian Peasant Movement
Partick Burgh Halls
Glasgow
Friday 15TH October
7.30PM
Organised by the Scottish Socialist Party.
Edinburgh University Socialist Society Presents:
Latin America
The Eco Socialist Alternative
With
Hugo Blanco
...&
Speakers and Workshops from:
Scottish Socialist Party
Edinburgh Chiapas Solidarity Group
Green Left (England & Wales)
Venezuelan Solidarity Campaign
Cuban Solidarity Campaign
Scottish Socialist Youth
Saturday 16th October 2010
10:30 – 13:00
The Dining Room Teviot House
Bristo Square
Saturday, 31 July 2010
Guest Blogger - Kristofer Keane on The Case for a Scottish Left-Green Movement
Kristofer Keane has been a Scottish Green Party activist since 2007, has previously been a Green candidate and was briefly chair of the party’s policy committee. He currently lives in Motherwell and is studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Follow him on Twitter HERE and on his blog HERE
In fewer than three months since the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, I have been amongst many who have been shocked by the ferocity, depth and eagerness of the ConDem cuts. We have all had our difficulties in swallowing the rightward swing of the Labour Party and British politics as a whole, but that mildly compares to the ideological onslaught with which we are now faced. Scrapping investment in schools, cutting funds to the NHS, raising VAT, our least progressive tax, the job cuts across the board, the determination to retain Trident – all these things are abhorred by us on the left.
Ideology is very much at the heart of the new Government’s agenda. On a nearly daily basis some minister or some tabloid will come out to remind us how “terrible” our debts are, how “necessary” the cuts are, how “protective” the new government are. Yet this belies basic facts: our debt as a percentage of out GDP is one of the lowest in the developed world – lower than Germany’s, lower than France’s, lower than the USA’s or Japan’s; we are cutting essential provision in education, healthcare and further whilst retaining our nuclear arsenal; and, the Government has taken very little action to protect those of us whose livelihoods depend on, and are dedicated to, benefiting society as a whole, rather than shareholders and CEOs or upon the genuine need for welfare.
However, it cannot be disputed that the new Government has a mandate of the majority of its people, can it? Well, perhaps if we were to exclude those who supported the Liberal Democrats in the belief they were supporting what was touted at the time as the “progressive coalition” (admittedly, I fell into this category myself due to the lack of a Green candidate in the Motherwell and Wishaw constituency). On a rather larger scale, we must also consider the fifteen million or so eligible voters who chose to not participate at all rather than support any candidates, a disproportionate number of whom were working class voters. Overall, fewer than one in four potential voters backed the Conservative Party, whose policies to which we are now being subjected.
Matters of mandate aside, the Conservative Party still received the plurality of votes – but why? Ipsos MORI’s large post-election poll “How Britain Voted In 2010” reveals many of the key demographic factors at play (http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2613&view=print). Immediately notable is that the largest group of swing voters were amongst social classes C2, D and E. The upper and middle classes saw comparatively little swings of 2-3% Labour to Conservative. However, the working class vote swung by 7-7.5% in favour of the Conservatives with the result that C2 voters (skilled manual workers) were only marginally more Labour-supporting that AB voters (managers and professionals). Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of female voters by class, there is an exaggeration of the swing against Labour amongst the skilled workers bloc, while the swing is actually reversed in favour of Labour amongst the most affluent voters.
Overall, there are two apparent trends – the fall in the Labour Party vote, and the rise in the Conservatives’. However, those of you who have glanced at the tables will have noticed that these two trends are not acting equally – the Labour vote is collapsing to other parties as much as the Conservatives. What can we extrapolate from this? I believe this is evidence of the major cause for the swing – disillusioned working class voters leaving Labour and unsure where to go.
This is hardly a groundbreaking or original assessment, but it does raise the point I seek to emphasise here – traditional Labour voters no longer know which ship will protect their interests when the Labour Party have sailed so willingly to the right. That so many working people may be encouraged to vote against their economic interests seems incredible, but may be attributed to a combination of the desire to replace the existing Labour government with a lack of any other working class alternative. Certainly, it is a common feature of American politics where generations raised under McCarthyism, the free market and the religious right have created millions of poor Republican voters happy to support tax cuts for the rich, many in the sustained deception that some of that wealth will one day be theirs.
So, the working people who swung to the Conservatives were largely acting to oppose Labour. In that case, how else did their vote move? Well, it certainly spread far and wide – over one third of voters supported parties other than Labour or the Conservatives, the greatest proportion of third-party voters since Labour first contested elections on a national scale. Green and left votes generally fell, with the notable exception of Brighton Pavilion, where a concentrated Green effort led to the election of Caroline Lucas, the first Green MP. On the other hand, a disconcertingly large bloc of voters supported the far right, with UKIP and the BNP both making substantial gains in vote share.
That so many people can be fooled into supporting the thinly veiled fascism of the BNP is something that should be disturbing to all of us. The best news post-election is that their excessive election spending combined with increasing personality splits within the party leave the BNP on the precipice of internal collapse. We can give thanks to our comrades in Unite Against Fascism and Searchlight and all those who helped campaign against the BNP in Barking and up and down the country, preventing them from gaining an MP and leading to the defeat of most of their defending councillors.
One campaign I was involved in last year against the fascists was the by-election in Glasgow North East. I was, naturally, supporting the Green candidate in that election but given we were not going to take the seat, my greater concern was that we should defeat the BNP candidate, given our history of poor results against them in the east end of Glasgow. Unfortunately as that campaign drew on, it became clear that the media was hyping up the BNP presence, and as it was they came within scraping distance of saving their deposit and taking third place. The closest left candidate to beating the BNP was Solidarity’s Tommy Sheridan, 219 votes behind.
However, Sheridan was not the sole left candidate against the united presence of the far right. A united left vote, as had been pushed from many fronts before the election, of Solidarity, Scottish Socialist Party and Socialist Labour Party would have drawn up just twenty votes short of the BNP excluding additional votes that could have been gained from co-operation and the pooling of resources. A left-green unity candidate would not only have saved their deposit based upon crude totalling, but would have beaten the Conservatives into fourth and the BNP into fifth place.
Glasgow North East at the general election again saw three left candidates – all losing deposits, all beaten by the BNP. Across the city, Green and left votes fell as their voters moved to Labour, looking to fight the Conservative squeeze from down south. All Green and left candidates lost their deposits, the best results being Dr Martin Bartos in Glasgow North (3.2%) and Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow South West (2.9%). We must ask ourselves – if there had been better co-operation amongst our parties, could we have improved that? Given we all fight elections with relatively little resources and relatively few activists, a division of labour across the city – a non-aggression pact of some sort – could have assisted in the division of Labour voters.
The Greens, for example, contested four seats. This meant the cost of four freepost leaflets, the work hours for canvassing and further leafleting of target areas, and four lost deposits. Supposing the same amount of Green effort and resources had been focussed onto two seats – say Glasgow North and Glasgow North West – it stands to reason that support would have risen in those seats. The support would be further increased by the withdrawal of the TUSC and Communist candidates, to fight other seats, on the basis of a united front that our supporters should vote for each other in the constituencies we each stand in. It is simply a missed opportunity that we should be fighting each other when we already have to contend with the major parties, none of whom share our common goals. Together, our votes really could make an impact against the major parties – for instance, the combined left-green vote in 2004 would have won an MEP, taking Labour’s third seat.
Again, none of these concepts are new. Left unity has been often debated and attempted in the last decade and when successful can lead to real breakthroughs such as the six Socialist MSPs in 2003 or the rapid initial gains made by Respect in Birmingham and Tower Hamlets. However, to date no attempt has been made towards a left-green unity group, outside of some local arrangements – notably in Birmingham Sparkbrook back in May.
So, with all this background in mind, what is the case for a left-green movement?
Well, what are any of us here for? Yes, as campaigners we take many approaches for many causes, but as political party activists we are all seeking one thing – to maximise the representation of our beliefs in the democratic bodies that run the state. Yes, we acknowledge that not all socialists are greens and not all greens are socialists (and that greens and socialists separately have many of their own platforms), but both movements have been converging over time and share much common ideology – more than we either share with Labour, Nationalists, Liberal Democrats or Conservatives.
At present, neither greens nor socialists can claim great advances in achieving representation – the organised left was wiped out save for a couple of councillors in 2007, and the Greens all but joined them. I think I can safely say we all agree that the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives are not going to support the policies that we know are required to implement a just, equal, sustainable society. We have also seen that Labour and SNP governments have failed, and lack the impetus, to bring the change we support.
The left has had the relative luxury of time to split, merge and morph through various permutations during the last thirteen years of Labour rule, but now we all face an absolute crisis – the wanton destruction of the public sector at the hands of the coalition Government. We need a united front of all those who believe this destruction is wrong. There can be a time later when we reflect upon our future direction, but now what is needed is a focus on simply reversing the direction that we are being pulled in. What we need is the maximum real opposition we can muster – for we are the only opposition to the private-sector agendas of the coalition, of New Labour, or of the SNP. We need more Green and left MSPs in Holyrood, we need Green and left voices on every council, we need to be representing people on every level from Europe right down to our local communities.
There is plenty of evidence about what change for the better our radical voices, even in small numbers, can make. From Robin Harper and Tommy Sheridan alone in Holyrood in 1999 to councils with Green and Socialist elected members to Caroline Lucas, newly elected to Westminster, immediately highlighting Trafigura, supporting Gaza, opposing academies – where we have a presence we ask questions no other party will ask, raise issues no other party will approach, demand action no other party will take.
Our policy is not dissimilar. We might express different priorities and differ in the detail but despite our differing means, we all seek the same ends – that just, equal, sustainable society. Socialists strongly support measures to protect the environment and oppose nuclear weapons. Greens want a fair living wage, sustainable jobs and a strong public sector. Together, there is so much we all share and want to defend.
The differences we do have also make us stronger together. We have our traditional bases of support in different voter groups – the left carries much of the support of trade unionists, workers and students while Greens have their core support in academics, professionals and the third sector. Our combined supporters would come from all walks of life, our combined memberships would cancel out the fringe platforms of each side, our combined votes would win seats that would otherwise go to another same-old-party politician.
There are other real threats to us too. For too long now, the far right has been viewed as the primary opposition to the major parties’ consensus. We have already seen the BNP gain MEPs and councillors. While we can hope they are near to collapse, without a real alternative for those voters disenfranchised by the rightward lurch of the major parties they will continue to vote for whoever they see out in the community saying something different. We need to be the ones out there, campaigning and fighting for people instead of amongst ourselves – we need to prove we are a far greater alternative concerned with the welfare and livelihoods of the working class than racists and fascists.
In terms of practicalities, it may be too late to form a united front for next year’s elections. Greens have already started selecting candidates, and I would presume that the SSP, Solidarity and other left parties are doing the same. However, the future holds many options. In 2012 council elections, we should seek to maximise the benefits of the STV system by encouraging transfers between left-green parties. In areas where we haven’t stood full slates before, we should try to offer every voter a left-green candidate. In areas where one party is stronger than another, such as the Greens in Edinburgh or the Socialists in much of Glasgow, we could perhaps advance on to withdrawing candidates in favour of those more likely to get elected to bolster our real-opposition force. We should also as a priority have agreements in place to select unity candidates for first-past-the-post by-elections to prevent another Glasgow North East debacle where the BNP can defeat our four-way-split vote.
Left-Green movements have formed all across Europe in the last two decades as our comrades in other countries realise they share more aims than they dispute and choose to work together. As an example to close on, here are the founding principles of the GreenLeft in the Netherlands, which I’m sure we would all support.
 |
| Kristopher Keane |
Ideology is very much at the heart of the new Government’s agenda. On a nearly daily basis some minister or some tabloid will come out to remind us how “terrible” our debts are, how “necessary” the cuts are, how “protective” the new government are. Yet this belies basic facts: our debt as a percentage of out GDP is one of the lowest in the developed world – lower than Germany’s, lower than France’s, lower than the USA’s or Japan’s; we are cutting essential provision in education, healthcare and further whilst retaining our nuclear arsenal; and, the Government has taken very little action to protect those of us whose livelihoods depend on, and are dedicated to, benefiting society as a whole, rather than shareholders and CEOs or upon the genuine need for welfare.
However, it cannot be disputed that the new Government has a mandate of the majority of its people, can it? Well, perhaps if we were to exclude those who supported the Liberal Democrats in the belief they were supporting what was touted at the time as the “progressive coalition” (admittedly, I fell into this category myself due to the lack of a Green candidate in the Motherwell and Wishaw constituency). On a rather larger scale, we must also consider the fifteen million or so eligible voters who chose to not participate at all rather than support any candidates, a disproportionate number of whom were working class voters. Overall, fewer than one in four potential voters backed the Conservative Party, whose policies to which we are now being subjected.
Matters of mandate aside, the Conservative Party still received the plurality of votes – but why? Ipsos MORI’s large post-election poll “How Britain Voted In 2010” reveals many of the key demographic factors at play (http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2613&view=print). Immediately notable is that the largest group of swing voters were amongst social classes C2, D and E. The upper and middle classes saw comparatively little swings of 2-3% Labour to Conservative. However, the working class vote swung by 7-7.5% in favour of the Conservatives with the result that C2 voters (skilled manual workers) were only marginally more Labour-supporting that AB voters (managers and professionals). Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of female voters by class, there is an exaggeration of the swing against Labour amongst the skilled workers bloc, while the swing is actually reversed in favour of Labour amongst the most affluent voters.
Overall, there are two apparent trends – the fall in the Labour Party vote, and the rise in the Conservatives’. However, those of you who have glanced at the tables will have noticed that these two trends are not acting equally – the Labour vote is collapsing to other parties as much as the Conservatives. What can we extrapolate from this? I believe this is evidence of the major cause for the swing – disillusioned working class voters leaving Labour and unsure where to go.
This is hardly a groundbreaking or original assessment, but it does raise the point I seek to emphasise here – traditional Labour voters no longer know which ship will protect their interests when the Labour Party have sailed so willingly to the right. That so many working people may be encouraged to vote against their economic interests seems incredible, but may be attributed to a combination of the desire to replace the existing Labour government with a lack of any other working class alternative. Certainly, it is a common feature of American politics where generations raised under McCarthyism, the free market and the religious right have created millions of poor Republican voters happy to support tax cuts for the rich, many in the sustained deception that some of that wealth will one day be theirs.
So, the working people who swung to the Conservatives were largely acting to oppose Labour. In that case, how else did their vote move? Well, it certainly spread far and wide – over one third of voters supported parties other than Labour or the Conservatives, the greatest proportion of third-party voters since Labour first contested elections on a national scale. Green and left votes generally fell, with the notable exception of Brighton Pavilion, where a concentrated Green effort led to the election of Caroline Lucas, the first Green MP. On the other hand, a disconcertingly large bloc of voters supported the far right, with UKIP and the BNP both making substantial gains in vote share.
That so many people can be fooled into supporting the thinly veiled fascism of the BNP is something that should be disturbing to all of us. The best news post-election is that their excessive election spending combined with increasing personality splits within the party leave the BNP on the precipice of internal collapse. We can give thanks to our comrades in Unite Against Fascism and Searchlight and all those who helped campaign against the BNP in Barking and up and down the country, preventing them from gaining an MP and leading to the defeat of most of their defending councillors.
One campaign I was involved in last year against the fascists was the by-election in Glasgow North East. I was, naturally, supporting the Green candidate in that election but given we were not going to take the seat, my greater concern was that we should defeat the BNP candidate, given our history of poor results against them in the east end of Glasgow. Unfortunately as that campaign drew on, it became clear that the media was hyping up the BNP presence, and as it was they came within scraping distance of saving their deposit and taking third place. The closest left candidate to beating the BNP was Solidarity’s Tommy Sheridan, 219 votes behind.
However, Sheridan was not the sole left candidate against the united presence of the far right. A united left vote, as had been pushed from many fronts before the election, of Solidarity, Scottish Socialist Party and Socialist Labour Party would have drawn up just twenty votes short of the BNP excluding additional votes that could have been gained from co-operation and the pooling of resources. A left-green unity candidate would not only have saved their deposit based upon crude totalling, but would have beaten the Conservatives into fourth and the BNP into fifth place.
Glasgow North East at the general election again saw three left candidates – all losing deposits, all beaten by the BNP. Across the city, Green and left votes fell as their voters moved to Labour, looking to fight the Conservative squeeze from down south. All Green and left candidates lost their deposits, the best results being Dr Martin Bartos in Glasgow North (3.2%) and Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow South West (2.9%). We must ask ourselves – if there had been better co-operation amongst our parties, could we have improved that? Given we all fight elections with relatively little resources and relatively few activists, a division of labour across the city – a non-aggression pact of some sort – could have assisted in the division of Labour voters.
The Greens, for example, contested four seats. This meant the cost of four freepost leaflets, the work hours for canvassing and further leafleting of target areas, and four lost deposits. Supposing the same amount of Green effort and resources had been focussed onto two seats – say Glasgow North and Glasgow North West – it stands to reason that support would have risen in those seats. The support would be further increased by the withdrawal of the TUSC and Communist candidates, to fight other seats, on the basis of a united front that our supporters should vote for each other in the constituencies we each stand in. It is simply a missed opportunity that we should be fighting each other when we already have to contend with the major parties, none of whom share our common goals. Together, our votes really could make an impact against the major parties – for instance, the combined left-green vote in 2004 would have won an MEP, taking Labour’s third seat.
Again, none of these concepts are new. Left unity has been often debated and attempted in the last decade and when successful can lead to real breakthroughs such as the six Socialist MSPs in 2003 or the rapid initial gains made by Respect in Birmingham and Tower Hamlets. However, to date no attempt has been made towards a left-green unity group, outside of some local arrangements – notably in Birmingham Sparkbrook back in May.
So, with all this background in mind, what is the case for a left-green movement?
Well, what are any of us here for? Yes, as campaigners we take many approaches for many causes, but as political party activists we are all seeking one thing – to maximise the representation of our beliefs in the democratic bodies that run the state. Yes, we acknowledge that not all socialists are greens and not all greens are socialists (and that greens and socialists separately have many of their own platforms), but both movements have been converging over time and share much common ideology – more than we either share with Labour, Nationalists, Liberal Democrats or Conservatives.
At present, neither greens nor socialists can claim great advances in achieving representation – the organised left was wiped out save for a couple of councillors in 2007, and the Greens all but joined them. I think I can safely say we all agree that the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives are not going to support the policies that we know are required to implement a just, equal, sustainable society. We have also seen that Labour and SNP governments have failed, and lack the impetus, to bring the change we support.
The left has had the relative luxury of time to split, merge and morph through various permutations during the last thirteen years of Labour rule, but now we all face an absolute crisis – the wanton destruction of the public sector at the hands of the coalition Government. We need a united front of all those who believe this destruction is wrong. There can be a time later when we reflect upon our future direction, but now what is needed is a focus on simply reversing the direction that we are being pulled in. What we need is the maximum real opposition we can muster – for we are the only opposition to the private-sector agendas of the coalition, of New Labour, or of the SNP. We need more Green and left MSPs in Holyrood, we need Green and left voices on every council, we need to be representing people on every level from Europe right down to our local communities.
There is plenty of evidence about what change for the better our radical voices, even in small numbers, can make. From Robin Harper and Tommy Sheridan alone in Holyrood in 1999 to councils with Green and Socialist elected members to Caroline Lucas, newly elected to Westminster, immediately highlighting Trafigura, supporting Gaza, opposing academies – where we have a presence we ask questions no other party will ask, raise issues no other party will approach, demand action no other party will take.
Our policy is not dissimilar. We might express different priorities and differ in the detail but despite our differing means, we all seek the same ends – that just, equal, sustainable society. Socialists strongly support measures to protect the environment and oppose nuclear weapons. Greens want a fair living wage, sustainable jobs and a strong public sector. Together, there is so much we all share and want to defend.
The differences we do have also make us stronger together. We have our traditional bases of support in different voter groups – the left carries much of the support of trade unionists, workers and students while Greens have their core support in academics, professionals and the third sector. Our combined supporters would come from all walks of life, our combined memberships would cancel out the fringe platforms of each side, our combined votes would win seats that would otherwise go to another same-old-party politician.
There are other real threats to us too. For too long now, the far right has been viewed as the primary opposition to the major parties’ consensus. We have already seen the BNP gain MEPs and councillors. While we can hope they are near to collapse, without a real alternative for those voters disenfranchised by the rightward lurch of the major parties they will continue to vote for whoever they see out in the community saying something different. We need to be the ones out there, campaigning and fighting for people instead of amongst ourselves – we need to prove we are a far greater alternative concerned with the welfare and livelihoods of the working class than racists and fascists.
In terms of practicalities, it may be too late to form a united front for next year’s elections. Greens have already started selecting candidates, and I would presume that the SSP, Solidarity and other left parties are doing the same. However, the future holds many options. In 2012 council elections, we should seek to maximise the benefits of the STV system by encouraging transfers between left-green parties. In areas where we haven’t stood full slates before, we should try to offer every voter a left-green candidate. In areas where one party is stronger than another, such as the Greens in Edinburgh or the Socialists in much of Glasgow, we could perhaps advance on to withdrawing candidates in favour of those more likely to get elected to bolster our real-opposition force. We should also as a priority have agreements in place to select unity candidates for first-past-the-post by-elections to prevent another Glasgow North East debacle where the BNP can defeat our four-way-split vote.
Left-Green movements have formed all across Europe in the last two decades as our comrades in other countries realise they share more aims than they dispute and choose to work together. As an example to close on, here are the founding principles of the GreenLeft in the Netherlands, which I’m sure we would all support.
- To ensure the democratic state of justice, which ensures individual freedom and equal political rights.
- To ensure an ecological balance, in the knowledge that natural resources are limited.
- A just distribution of power, knowledge, property, labour and income, within the Netherlands, but also on a world scale.
- A resistance to exploitation and opposition to the suppression of groups and peoples.
ANYONE WISHING TO GUEST BLOG, PLEASE EMAIL eastdunbartonshiressp@hotmail.co.uk
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
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Saturday, 26 June 2010
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Invitation to meet Farooq Tariq
Glasgow Public Meeting
Friday 4th June 7.30pm
Pollokshields Primary School, Glasgow
Hear Farooq Tariq, General Secretary of Labour Party Pakistan (LPP)
Monday, 24 May 2010
Scottish Socialist Party Red Shirts protest against Tory Butchery and LibDem Treachery
By Richie Venton
On the day that the new Tory-LibDem coalition government announced its first £6billion tranche of public sector cuts, the Scottish Socialist Party Red Shirt protesters took to the streets of Glasgow in a public warning of the resistance Scotland will mount to these cuts.
Early Monday morning, as workers travelled to work, a team of SSY members mounted a giant banner on a city centre multi-storey car park, gaining supportive horn-blowing for the message “Scotland didn’t vote Tory – resist the cuts”.
At noon, the SSP Red Shirts marched into the offices of Glasgow LibDem MSP Robert Brown to conduct a polite, peaceful dialogue with him, putting him on the spot about the treacherous role of the LibDems in propping up the vicious Tory government.
He was feeble in his claims that it was better to go into government and restrain the Tories in their worst excesses. He visibly squirmed over the LibDem’s sell-out on Trident renewal.
We challenged him to justify why the LibDems claim to favour progressive taxation but are instrumental in a Coalition that plans to cut taxes on Corporations and the rich, whilst assaulting the incomes of the sick, elderly and those on benefits.
He tried to argue that the SSP’s policies to tackle the public sector deficit would force millionaires to leave the country!
We challenged him to either publicly endorse the decision of Clegg et al to be at best the mudguards of a dirty Tory government of cuts, or at worst the willing accomplices in their carnage – or to publicly criticise the impact this will have on the people of Glasgow who elected him.
We suggested honesty in politics is an all too rare commodity, so he should be honest, choose which option he agrees with, and go public on it – instead of the vote-seeking under false pretences conducted by the LibDems in the recent election.
The SSP Red Shirts were dignified but determined in exposing the LibDems’ part in plans to slaughter communities and workers, explaining to both Robert Brown and the media that this was just the opening shot in the resistance we will be a vital part of in the months and years to come.
As we put it in our Press Release announcing the Red Shirts protest:
“In faraway Thailand an unelected dictator, educated at Eton school for the very rich and privileged, is facing determined opposition from the urban and rural poor, organised as the Red Shirts movement.
Meanwhile, an Eton-educated Tory Prime Minister who was rejected by 85% of Scottish voters is out to rule and ruin Scotland without a mandate.
Cameron plans to commit carnage against public sector jobs, workers’ pay and pensions, and the vital local public services they provide.
He is only able to launch this Tory butchery because of LibDem treachery.
The LibDems posed as an anti-cuts party during the general election and conned a minority in Scotland into voting for them; now they have formed the Twin Tory government that will cut taxes on the rich and big Corporations, whilst slashing up to 100,000 Scottish jobs.
The Scottish Socialist Party is determined to unite workers and communities to resist, defy and defeat these cuts.
As an opening shot in our resistance, we will mount a demonstration of Red Shirts at a government building. Our message is clear – the Twin Tories have no right to rule and ruin Scotland – we will help to defeat their cuts plans – and we will redouble our campaign for an independent socialist Scotland.”
More HERE and HERE
On the day that the new Tory-LibDem coalition government announced its first £6billion tranche of public sector cuts, the Scottish Socialist Party Red Shirt protesters took to the streets of Glasgow in a public warning of the resistance Scotland will mount to these cuts.
Early Monday morning, as workers travelled to work, a team of SSY members mounted a giant banner on a city centre multi-storey car park, gaining supportive horn-blowing for the message “Scotland didn’t vote Tory – resist the cuts”.
At noon, the SSP Red Shirts marched into the offices of Glasgow LibDem MSP Robert Brown to conduct a polite, peaceful dialogue with him, putting him on the spot about the treacherous role of the LibDems in propping up the vicious Tory government.
He was feeble in his claims that it was better to go into government and restrain the Tories in their worst excesses. He visibly squirmed over the LibDem’s sell-out on Trident renewal.
We challenged him to justify why the LibDems claim to favour progressive taxation but are instrumental in a Coalition that plans to cut taxes on Corporations and the rich, whilst assaulting the incomes of the sick, elderly and those on benefits.
He tried to argue that the SSP’s policies to tackle the public sector deficit would force millionaires to leave the country!
We challenged him to either publicly endorse the decision of Clegg et al to be at best the mudguards of a dirty Tory government of cuts, or at worst the willing accomplices in their carnage – or to publicly criticise the impact this will have on the people of Glasgow who elected him.
We suggested honesty in politics is an all too rare commodity, so he should be honest, choose which option he agrees with, and go public on it – instead of the vote-seeking under false pretences conducted by the LibDems in the recent election.
The SSP Red Shirts were dignified but determined in exposing the LibDems’ part in plans to slaughter communities and workers, explaining to both Robert Brown and the media that this was just the opening shot in the resistance we will be a vital part of in the months and years to come.
As we put it in our Press Release announcing the Red Shirts protest:
“In faraway Thailand an unelected dictator, educated at Eton school for the very rich and privileged, is facing determined opposition from the urban and rural poor, organised as the Red Shirts movement.
Meanwhile, an Eton-educated Tory Prime Minister who was rejected by 85% of Scottish voters is out to rule and ruin Scotland without a mandate.
Cameron plans to commit carnage against public sector jobs, workers’ pay and pensions, and the vital local public services they provide.
He is only able to launch this Tory butchery because of LibDem treachery.
The LibDems posed as an anti-cuts party during the general election and conned a minority in Scotland into voting for them; now they have formed the Twin Tory government that will cut taxes on the rich and big Corporations, whilst slashing up to 100,000 Scottish jobs.
The Scottish Socialist Party is determined to unite workers and communities to resist, defy and defeat these cuts.
As an opening shot in our resistance, we will mount a demonstration of Red Shirts at a government building. Our message is clear – the Twin Tories have no right to rule and ruin Scotland – we will help to defeat their cuts plans – and we will redouble our campaign for an independent socialist Scotland.”
More HERE and HERE
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
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
Monday, 21 September 2009
Goodbye, safe, friendly community based schools...
Today, the Wyndford Primary School was bulldozed to the ground.
Quite symbolic really as the Government look for further cuts...
We have paid for this crisis with OUR tax money to plug the hole left by greedy bankers. We are paying through job losses; wage freezes and low pay.
Our children are also being made to pay.
Quite symbolic really as the Government look for further cuts...
We have paid for this crisis with OUR tax money to plug the hole left by greedy bankers. We are paying through job losses; wage freezes and low pay.
Our children are also being made to pay.
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
DIAGEO: time for action
By Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
The Diageo bosses have booted their workforces at Kilmarnock and Glasgow right in the teeth. These profit-hungry capitalists have spat in the face of mass public opinion – expressed through 20,000 marching in Kilmarnock, and 500,000 email protests to Diageo shareholders – by confirming closure of the 200-year-old plants. And they didn’t even pretend to consult; they announced this on day 71 of a 90-day consultation period.
The Scottish Socialist Party has from day one warned that multi-nationals like Diageo have only one care in the world: profit! They don’t give a toss about chucking 900 workers and their families on the scrapheap, virtually closing down the town of Kilmarnock in the process. And we have equally warned that any belief that such greedy profiteers can be persuaded by arguments into saving the plants was dangerously delusional – that the only language they will listen to is decisive action that wallops their wallets.
With this callous, arrogant announcement that they are forging ahead regardless, the time is rotten ripe for the unions to lead workers in a campaign of industrial action, to hit Diageo’s profit margins.
This could be accompanied by a truly international appeal for a mass consumer boycott, which would potentially have a devastating impact on a company that relies overwhelmingly on overseas markets, and its overseas image.
Already the campaign of protest emails and online petitions has garnered widespread support in the likes of the USA, one of Diageo’s prime markets, and the Teamsters’ Union has offered to support action by UNITE the union.
A tremendous publicity campaign has been conducted over the summer, on the streets, at football matches, and at golf and other sporting events sponsored by the world’s biggest drinks company. But unless the national union leaderships give confidence to workers to hit back with action that damages the production of profits for Paul Walsh and his cronies in the boardroom, there will soon be nothing left to fight back with.
Diageo’s chief executive Paul Walsh has just had another obscene boost to his wealth, at precisely the time he struts the world stage handing out redundancy notices to families who face a future of not knowing where the next meal will come from.
His ‘wage’ actually went down last year compared to 2008 – when he took home £5.1m. That previous income should help cushion him from having to exist on £3.5m in the year up to 30 June 2009 ... the very day before the closure announcements!
That means a ‘salary’ of £67,300 a week! And if that is not vomit-inducing enough, his pension pot more than compensated for the “fall” in salary: it rose by £3.4m to £11.7m during the past year. So if this arrogant prat decides to retire, he stands to draw a pension of £637,000.
Walsh assured the SNP government-led Task Force – in an interview on BBC Scotland – that, “I will be very open-minded when I look at the content” of their alternative business plan. But in real life he didn’t wait even the derisory six days that elapsed between receiving the governments’ proposals and publicly shattering the fate of these workers who have given a lifetime to creating his obnoxious levels of wealth.
Within a couple of hours of declaring his “open mind”, Walsh was in the midst of a conference call to his cohorts in the USA, where he boasted: “A lot of the restructuring we’ve announced over time will help gross margin. They may invoke some letters to our shareholders, as we close plants in Scotland. But it’s the right thing to do for the future, and we have firmly grasped that nettle in order that we do not see gross margin slippage.”.
This arrogant contempt buries all the hopes of the SNP government, Ayrshire and Glasgow councils, and some in the leadership of the unions that – as Alex Salmond put it – “we are looking for something that reconciles Diageo’s financial objectives with Scotland’s social objectives.”
They are irreconcilable! Diageo has just announced another 4 per cent rise in their profits, to £2.6billion. But that is still not enough for these greedy parasites, so they want to cut back from three to two bottling and packaging plants in Scotland, chucking 900 families into despair, to save themselves £42m a year.
And if they get away with this butchery without a real shot being fired, how long will it be before they try to ship whisky across the high seas to be bottled in India or China by slave labour, closer to one of their huge markets?
Whilst the unions need to build members’ confidence for swift industrial action, and appeal for supportive consumer boycotts internationally, the government should drop it’s grovelling pleas for Diageo to accept public money and save maybe half of the 900 jobs; it’s not going to happen! Instead, they should seize the assets that have been built up by two centuries of workers’ skills and labour, supplemented by public subsidies to Diageo in the past, and turn them into public property, sustaining all jobs, embracing the know-how of workers in creating a genuine alternative plan for a publicly-owned drinks and food industry.
The time for action has arrived. Vast public support exists for the Diageo workforce in their plight. That could easily be channelled into a movement to halt the closures, with calls on the governments of Edinburgh and London to step in and bail out these workers, the way they were both so keen to do for the bankers who wrecked the economy in the first place.
The Diageo bosses have booted their workforces at Kilmarnock and Glasgow right in the teeth. These profit-hungry capitalists have spat in the face of mass public opinion – expressed through 20,000 marching in Kilmarnock, and 500,000 email protests to Diageo shareholders – by confirming closure of the 200-year-old plants. And they didn’t even pretend to consult; they announced this on day 71 of a 90-day consultation period.
The Scottish Socialist Party has from day one warned that multi-nationals like Diageo have only one care in the world: profit! They don’t give a toss about chucking 900 workers and their families on the scrapheap, virtually closing down the town of Kilmarnock in the process. And we have equally warned that any belief that such greedy profiteers can be persuaded by arguments into saving the plants was dangerously delusional – that the only language they will listen to is decisive action that wallops their wallets.
With this callous, arrogant announcement that they are forging ahead regardless, the time is rotten ripe for the unions to lead workers in a campaign of industrial action, to hit Diageo’s profit margins.
This could be accompanied by a truly international appeal for a mass consumer boycott, which would potentially have a devastating impact on a company that relies overwhelmingly on overseas markets, and its overseas image.
Already the campaign of protest emails and online petitions has garnered widespread support in the likes of the USA, one of Diageo’s prime markets, and the Teamsters’ Union has offered to support action by UNITE the union.
A tremendous publicity campaign has been conducted over the summer, on the streets, at football matches, and at golf and other sporting events sponsored by the world’s biggest drinks company. But unless the national union leaderships give confidence to workers to hit back with action that damages the production of profits for Paul Walsh and his cronies in the boardroom, there will soon be nothing left to fight back with.
Diageo’s chief executive Paul Walsh has just had another obscene boost to his wealth, at precisely the time he struts the world stage handing out redundancy notices to families who face a future of not knowing where the next meal will come from.
His ‘wage’ actually went down last year compared to 2008 – when he took home £5.1m. That previous income should help cushion him from having to exist on £3.5m in the year up to 30 June 2009 ... the very day before the closure announcements!
That means a ‘salary’ of £67,300 a week! And if that is not vomit-inducing enough, his pension pot more than compensated for the “fall” in salary: it rose by £3.4m to £11.7m during the past year. So if this arrogant prat decides to retire, he stands to draw a pension of £637,000.
Walsh assured the SNP government-led Task Force – in an interview on BBC Scotland – that, “I will be very open-minded when I look at the content” of their alternative business plan. But in real life he didn’t wait even the derisory six days that elapsed between receiving the governments’ proposals and publicly shattering the fate of these workers who have given a lifetime to creating his obnoxious levels of wealth.
Within a couple of hours of declaring his “open mind”, Walsh was in the midst of a conference call to his cohorts in the USA, where he boasted: “A lot of the restructuring we’ve announced over time will help gross margin. They may invoke some letters to our shareholders, as we close plants in Scotland. But it’s the right thing to do for the future, and we have firmly grasped that nettle in order that we do not see gross margin slippage.”.
This arrogant contempt buries all the hopes of the SNP government, Ayrshire and Glasgow councils, and some in the leadership of the unions that – as Alex Salmond put it – “we are looking for something that reconciles Diageo’s financial objectives with Scotland’s social objectives.”
They are irreconcilable! Diageo has just announced another 4 per cent rise in their profits, to £2.6billion. But that is still not enough for these greedy parasites, so they want to cut back from three to two bottling and packaging plants in Scotland, chucking 900 families into despair, to save themselves £42m a year.
And if they get away with this butchery without a real shot being fired, how long will it be before they try to ship whisky across the high seas to be bottled in India or China by slave labour, closer to one of their huge markets?
Whilst the unions need to build members’ confidence for swift industrial action, and appeal for supportive consumer boycotts internationally, the government should drop it’s grovelling pleas for Diageo to accept public money and save maybe half of the 900 jobs; it’s not going to happen! Instead, they should seize the assets that have been built up by two centuries of workers’ skills and labour, supplemented by public subsidies to Diageo in the past, and turn them into public property, sustaining all jobs, embracing the know-how of workers in creating a genuine alternative plan for a publicly-owned drinks and food industry.
The time for action has arrived. Vast public support exists for the Diageo workforce in their plight. That could easily be channelled into a movement to halt the closures, with calls on the governments of Edinburgh and London to step in and bail out these workers, the way they were both so keen to do for the bankers who wrecked the economy in the first place.
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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