2012

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What independence means
A busy week in politics
Only one party fighting for ordinary men, women and children

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the3towns.com January 21 2012.

What independence means

With the Scottish Independence Referendum being thrust into the UK media spotlight over the past week or so, the question of what an independent Scotland would look like has been posed by many people, including some London-based news outlets who appeared totally confused over what constitutional change would actually mean.

The bottom line is that, for Scotland, independence would mean the restoration of normality. Prior to 1707 Scotland operated as an independent nation. Back then, though, the Scots Parliament was far from a democratic body, comprised as it was of unelected aristocracy. History tells us that ordinary Scots had no say in the running of their country, even to the extent of whether or not Scotland should join in union with England.

From the Scots side, the decision to unite the parliaments of Scotland and England was taken solely by those unelected and unrepresentative Lords and Earls. Contemporary documents record ordinary Scots rioted in the streets in opposition to the union. It is also a matter of record that members of the Scots Parliament received payment from the English in order to sell Scotland into a British Union. Robert Burns famously referred to them as “such a parcel o’ rogues in a nation”.

Today, unionists on both sides of the border tell us Scotland and the Scots have benefitted from membership of the British Union, and that we should not destroy 300 years of history. However, when we take a closer look at how Scots have benefitted from being British, it is not something of which we can be proud. For much of our membership of the British Union, Scots have played the part of foot-soldiers invading and conquering other lands in the name of the British Empire. Once in control of those foreign lands, Britain proceeded to exploit their natural assets, with Scots again playing significant roles as administrators and clerks.

More recently, Britain has looked to young Scots whenever wars needed to be fought: in almost every conflict of the 20th Century, the number of Scots killed in action far outstripped our percentage share of the British population. When we consider our role in the British military, the phrase ‘cannon-fodder’ comes most readily to mind.

That said, there remains a generation of Scots for whom fighting, shoulder-to-shoulder, with contemporaries from other parts of the British Isles and beyond, is rightly something of which they can be proud - defeating fascism in the second World War.

The 1707 Union of Parliaments was supposed to be a union of two equals, Scotland and England. However, the reality, from that day to this, has been very different. In just one sentence last week, a Sky News reporter managed to show both his historical ignorance and the actual English perception of the union between Scotland and England: he said, “In 1707 England annexed Scotland, which even the Romans had not been able to do.”

The British/English establishment has always looked on Scotland as an English possession, the Empire’s last colony. For the second half of the 20th Century even basic democracy was denied to Scots within the British Union. Scotland has not voted for a Conservative & Unionist Government since 1955, but for much of the time since then we have had Tory Governments imposed on us by the electorate of England. Throughout the 1980s, as England voted for Margaret Thatcher, Scotland soundly rejected her and the right-wing policies she advocated, but she was still able to destroy our manufacturing industries and the communities that relied on them. At the last UK Election, in 2010, the Tories were returned to office, with the help of the Liberal Democrats, and are again able to impose their right-wing ideology on Scotland, despite the fact there are now more giant pandas in Scotland than there are Tory MPs.

The 1999 restoration of a Scottish Parliament was supposed to address the democratic deficit that saw Scotland receive governments for which we had not voted, but we now have an SNP administration in Edinburgh – with an overall majority provided by the Scottish electorate – being told what to do by a Tory-Lib Dem Coalition that was hammered at the polls in Scotland.

So long as Scotland remains merely a devolved region of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the London-based government elected by the people of England will claim supremacy over a Scottish Government and over Scotland. Even increasing Holyrood’s powers to ‘devo-max’ will not change that position.

Independence is the normal state of affairs in virtually every nation around the world – ask yourself, how many countries celebrate ‘Devolution Day’? With independence, the full powers necessary to govern ourselves at home and represent ourselves around the globe will be returned to Scotland, for the first time since 1707: and today the ordinary people of Scotland elect the Scottish Parliament. Only independence fully removes the democratic deficit that sees political parties we reject at the ballot box still being able to form a government and impose their will on us. Only independence guarantees the Tories will never again be in a position to wreak havoc on Scotland.

The government of an independent Scotland would have the power to remove nuclear weapons of mass destruction from Scottish soil and waters. At present, and under ‘devo-max’, the decision to house such weapons in Scotland remains with the London government, irrespective of the wishes of the Scottish people.

The government of an independent Scotland would decide if young Scots in our defence force should be sent into conflict zones. At present, and under ‘devo-max’, such decisions are taken by the London-based government for which we did not vote.

Presently, and under ‘devo-max’, the Westminster government sets the level of pension received by senior citizens in Scotland – it’s currently one of the lowest in Europe. London is also responsible for setting rates of benefits that see pensioners die needlessly in Scottish winters. In addition, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer sets the level of taxation applied to Scotland, which allows some of the wealthiest people in the country to contribute a pittance compared with the less well-off. Presently, and under ‘devo-max’, some of the most draconian anti-trade union laws in the world are applied to Scottish workers, by virtue of UK-wide legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher and retained by the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and of course the current Tory-Lib Dem Coalition.

Independence for Scotland means the end of political union between our country and England – a union that, in reality, has been very uneven, with Scotland playing a subservient role. The ending of England’s political control of Scotland does not mean other links between the two countries would also terminate. The social union between Scots and English would continue and would flourish, as would business and commercial links.

Don’t believe the British Unionist scare stories, and you’ll hear plenty of them as we head towards our Independence Referendum in autumn 2014. There will be no border posts at Gretna, you will not be prevented from visiting your relations in England, and you will still be able to watch Coronation Street. If you don’t believe me, ask our cousins across the water in the independent Republic of Ireland.

Independence simply means Scotland re-taking the status of a normal nation.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 14 2012.

A busy week in politics

Last week saw two significant political developments. Firstly, the intervention by the Tory-Lib Dem UK Government into the issue of a referendum on Scottish independence showed the British establishment still look on Scotland as the Empire’s last colony. Secondly, the Labour Party completed its journey to becoming a clone of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

Almost completely unnoticed due to wall-to-wall media coverage of Alex Salmond running rings round David Cameron and his Westminster colleagues, Ed Miliband addressed a Labour event in London and confirmed the party originally set up to give a parliamentary voice to the working class was now committed to “building a better, more responsible capitalism.”

The Labour Party ceased to be a socialist organisation a very long time ago. It’s more than 30 years since the party, under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, expelled socialist members for actually attempting to protect public services and defend communities from devastating cuts being imposed by the Tory Government of Margaret Thatcher. Around the same time, Labour also refused to back striking Miners as they fought pit closures and pitched battles with ranks of police officers sent by Thatcher to crush what was then the UK’s biggest trade union.

John Smith followed Kinnock as Labour leader and continued the party’s movement away from its working class, socialist roots. It was under Smith that Labour also ditched its long-held opposition to nuclear weapons.

Then, on Smith’s death, along came Tony Blair, and the Labour Party’s movement to the right of the political spectrum became a mad dash. Blair couldn’t wait to ditch any remaining socialist ‘baggage’, like Clause 4 of the party’s constitution – the core principle of the Labour movement that enshrined a worker’s right to receive in payment the full worth of their labour; the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; and the best obtainable system of administration and control of each industry and service.

What the Labour Party scrapped along with Clause 4 was its commitment to end the capitalist system that allows a tiny minority to accrue fabulous wealth by exploiting the majority. The political movement that once prided itself on being the People’s Party turned its back on ‘the people’, courted the capitalist bosses, and confirmed its transformation into the Tory Party MKII when Peter Mandelson stated ‘New’ Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”.

Between them Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pandered to the capitalist ‘Masters of the Universe’ in the City of London, infamously introducing the light-touch regulation of banks and financial institutions that ultimately led to reckless gambling, toxic deals and privately-owned banks being bailed-out using public money...our money.

Ed Miliband’s statement of last week simply confirmed Labour had dropped even the pretence of being a party of the Left. The Labour Party of old, the one that did actually care about the working class, is not stunned, nor is pining for the fjords: the Labour Party for which so many people in Scotland have voted in the past is no more, it has ceased to be, it is bereft of life, it rests in peace.

On the same day that Miliband confirmed Labour was now committed to the capitalist system that actively works to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer – UK Government Ministers were telling Scots we are so insignificant, in their eyes, that we can’t be allowed to run a referendum on the constitutional future of our own country.

Liberal Democrat MP Michael Moore, the Colonial Governor General of Scotland (oh, okay then, Secretary of State at the Scotland Office), was on his feet in the Imperial Parliament in London, telling the Jocks not to get ideas above their station. The Right Honourable Mr Moore said the democratically-elected Scottish Government did not have the right or the power to hold a referendum on whether or not Scotland should assume the status of a normal, independent nation.

While Moore was on his feet, doing the Tories’ dirty work for them, Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, sauntered in front of a BBC camera and simply said, “We’ll hold the referendum in autumn 2014.”

British Unionist parties – Tory, Liberal Democrat and Labour – say the Scotland Act 1998 places a legal bar on the Scottish Government holding a referendum on ‘the constitution’, which is an area of legislation retained by Westminster. It was British Unionist lawyers that wrote the Scotland Act, so they know there is a clause barring the SNP Government from holding such a referendum – just as there are clauses allowing the Westminster Parliament to overrule any decision taken by Holyrood, and even allowing the UK Parliament in London to abolish the Scottish Parliament, if it sees fit.

Meanwhile, Alex Salmond is confident there is nothing, in international law, to prevent the democratically-elected Scottish Government from consulting the people of Scotland on their preferred option for the constitutional future of their own country.

So, who is right? If only there was an independent and globally-acknowledged expert on such things. Actually, there is. Step forward Dr Matt Qvortrup of Cranfield University, author of ‘A Comparative Study of Referendums’.

Dr Qvortrup says, “The basic principle in international law is that the seceding country (in this case Scotland) decides whether it wants to become independent.

“To use but two examples, Montenegro did not have to ask Serbia to secede in 2006, nor did Estonia seek the Soviet Union’s permission to become independent in 1990.

“The fundamental rule is that countries become independent when they are recognised by the international community. According to the so-called Estrada Doctrine, if Scotland votes for independence (and if the government is in control of the territory) then the international community will in all likelihood recognise the new state. Just like the cases of the former Soviet states in the 1990s.

“Of course, it is possible that only a narrow majority votes for independence. But this need not be fatal. When Malta voted for independence in 1965, only a little more than 50 percent voted to sever the ties with Britain, yet Westminster still accepted the outcome.”

Only by re-taking the full sovereign powers of independence can we begin to put first the interests of the Scottish people.

Autumn 2014 – when we will finally be given the opportunity to get off our knees and become a normal, independent nation...no matter what the Imperial British Parliament in London thinks.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 7 2012.

Only one party fighting for ordinary men, women and children

In his New Year’s message Prime Minister David Cameron said, “I get that”: he was referring to people struggling because of the ongoing economic crisis.

In truth, though, Cameron does not ‘get it’. The multi-millionaire Prime Minister does not have a clue about how people are suffering. Officially, Cameron receives a salary of £142,500 - £2,740 per week – but that does not include other allowances and perks, such as living free at Downing Street and having a ‘second home’ in his constituency funded by taxpayers. Free transport in luxury cars – again funded by you and me – and round the clock security means Mr Cameron very rarely comes into contact with anyone who is suffering because of policies his government has imposed to address a financial deficit caused by public money being used to bail-out failed private banks.

From his extremely cosseted position, David Cameron cannot even begin to imagine how someone might live on just £65.00 per week, the current rate of Jobseekers Allowance for a single person.

Of course, those of us who live in North Ayrshire don’t need to go all the way to London and the British Prime Minister for an example of a politician completely out of touch with those they are supposed to serve.

In the last financial year (2010/11), Cunninghame North’s SNP MSP Kenneth Gibson claimed £34,563 in expenses on top of his publicly-funded salary of £57,521. The constituency Mr Gibson claims to represent includes areas with some of Scotland’s highest levels of unemployment, poverty and deprivation, yet the SNP MSP charged the public £297.10 to pay his car parking bill, and £312.66 to buy his ‘evening meals’. Incredibly, Kenneth Gibson also charged the public £1.00 every time he made the journey between his home in Kilbirnie and his constituency office in Dalry: he also charged for the return journey.

North Ayrshire Council oversees the area with the country’s highest unemployment, and a recent report by the charity Save the Children found local communities now have Scotland’s second-highest level of severe poverty, but just last week the SNP Scottish Government announced North Ayrshire Council’s budget for the next financial year would be cut by almost £1million.

Such a reduction in available funds will result in more cuts to services that are desperately needed by so many local people: there could also be further job losses from within the Council. With reduced funding also having been imposed in recent years, many services have already been cut or part-privatised, while 400 Council workers have lost their jobs.

Meanwhile, the Leader of North Ayrshire Council, Cllr David O’Neill, has in the past claimed public money to cover journeys from his home to the local authority’s headquarters, a trip of just over one mile: Cllr O’Neill receives a publicly-funded salary in excess of £30,000 and a further payment of up to £10,000 for representing the Council on the board of NHS Ayrshire & Arran.

Another Labour councillor, Alan Munro (Saltcoats & Stevenston), charged the hard-pressed public of North Ayrshire for five journeys to meetings held at the Council’s Irvine headquarters. Cllr Munro pocketed the public money but did not actually attend the meetings.

People like David Cameron will never implement policies that create a fairer society: Tories have always unashamedly represented the interests of a wealthy elite, and always will. The Labour Party was created to give a parliamentary voice to the working class, but that worthy idea was abandoned long ago. The transformation of the Labour Party into a pro-capitalist, Tory Party Mark II was completed under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Today, many Labour MPs are from the same privileged backgrounds as their Tory counterparts, with some having been contemporaries at the same Oxbridge universities.

In Scotland, during the 1970s, political opponents branded the SNP ‘Tartan Tories’. At the time, the jibe was pretty accurate. Many SNP activists back then did hold centre-right political beliefs, and it was no coincidence that initially the most fertile ground for the party was Tory-held constituencies.

The SNP changed, though, and until relatively recently genuinely held a centre-left position on the political spectrum, certainly well to the left of the Labour Party. Unfortunately, under the leadership (for want of a better, more accurate word) of John Swinney, the SNP began a movement back to the right. Swinney, who represents a former Tory seat in Perthshire, argued the party moved to the centre-ground – but if you start on the left and move to the centre, you’re moving to the right. Contemporary or ‘New SNP’ is now as much a centre-right, pro-capitalist party as Labour, the Liberal Democrats and, amongst certain prominent members, even the Tories.

Only in a centre-right political party could a member lodge a parliamentary Motion praising the State of Israel, which has bombed residential areas of the Gaza Strip and continues to illegally occupy Palestinian land. Only in a centre-right political party could a member lodge a parliamentary Motion praising action taken by the military of Sri Lanka in brutally crushing the Tamil Tigers, an organisation that fought for an independent Tamil State. The two parliamentary Motions were lodged by Kenneth Gibson, MSP for the local seat of Cunninghame North.

There is only one credible political party of the left in Scotland, the Scottish Socialist Party. Between 2003 and 2007, when the SSP had six MSPs, the party introduced legislation in the Scottish Parliament to abolish Poindings and Warrant Sales, the practice where the belongings of the poor were sold-off to pay debts, usually owed to Labour-controlled Councils. The SSP also originated Bills to provide free nutritious meals for pupils in primary schools, and free prescriptions for every Scottish citizen.

In the last couple of months, here in North Ayrshire, activists from the Scottish Socialist Party have been campaigning on the streets of local towns, demanding ‘No Cuts – Tax the Rich’. Only the SSP is prepared to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary men, women and children to oppose the savage cuts being imposed by the Tory-Lib Dem Government in London, the SNP Government in Edinburgh and the Labour administration of North Ayrshire Council.

In May, at the North Ayrshire Council Election, we will have the chance to elect Socialist councillors who will represent local people, and will oppose cuts being imposed on all of us to pay the debts of millionaire and billionaire bankers and financial speculators in the City of London.

The SSP has proved itself to be the only party working in the interests of the ordinary people of North Ayrshire and Scotland.

(c) the3towns.com

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2011

2011~2012
Christmas
The reality of Cameron’s stand at the EU summit
The strike
The fight we have to win
We are NOT all in this together
The democratic British State
‘The markets’ and the November 30 strikes
Only told what they want us to know
Delivering independence
Are you getting what you expected from the Scottish Government?
No longer the party of real independence
What ‘the cuts’ actually mean in North Ayrshire
Why we need to ‘do politics’ in the Three Towns
New SNP
Political mysteries
We’re bailing out millionaires, and cutting the care of vulnerable children
Why I’ve joined the SSP
Whose side is the SNP on? Now we know.
We’re failing our children
Riots
Breaching the bounds of tolerance
The strange consequence of an SNP Government
Funding local government
Why Scottish football isn’t producing an Andy Murray
News of the World
How the global collapse of capitalism has impacted on the Three Towns
Time to ditch the ‘Scottish cringe’
Why we should support the June 30 strikers
There is always money for war
Private companies in the public sector
The disgrace of ‘care at home’ in North Ayrshire
Scotland and the monarchy
The Labour Party
Scottish Parliament Election – the outcome
The Scottish Parliament Election
Colourful politics
Secrets
As others see us
Our role in electing the next government
Future of our public halls and libraries
No future for nuclear
The root of Scotland’s sectarian problem
How to tell there’s an election coming
Who says council meetings are boring?
The Big Society and Labour councillors
Choices and decisions
The Council’s budget
If we want things to change...
Future of community halls
Unemployment and poverty in North Ayrshire
George Galloway and Respect

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the3towns.com December 31 2011.

2011~2012

As we approach a new year, it’s customary to reflect on the previous twelve months and look forward to what might lie ahead.

From a political perspective, 2011 will be remembered as the year when the SNP secured a majority in the Scottish Parliament, confounding an electoral system put in place to prevent any party from achieving such power, particularly one that seeks independence for Scotland.

There are very good reasons why the SNP achieved its historic victory: the previous SNP administration, governing without a majority in parliament, had proved itself competent and sure-footed, with able Ministers, such as Nicola Sturgeon and Kenny MacAskill, coming to the fore and backing up First Minister Alex Salmond. Opposition parties, particularly Labour, were in disarray, unable to offer anything remotely attractive to the people of Scotland, and certainly incapable of landing a punch on Salmond at First Minister’s Questions.

It was against this background that Scotland went to the polls last May, and it therefore was no surprise that an SNP government was returned to power. What was surprising, though, was the magnitude of the victory.

Having said that, there was one group of people who knew the SNP was on course for victory, and a big victory at that – the SNP knew.

A week before Polling Day an SNP source, close to the leadership of the party, told me they were going to win. The activist went as far as saying the results of the party’s internal polling (its canvass returns) were so good, they were reluctant to believe them. If the election proved anything, it is that the SNP’s canvassing produced accurate data.

Throughout the night of May 5 previously rock-solid Labour seats fell to the SNP, to such an extent that, before the sun rose on May 6, an overall majority looked distinctly on the cards. By early afternoon, Salmond arrived in Edinburgh by helicopter, proclaimed the overwhelming support of the Scottish people, and set-out his intention to govern in the interests of all Scots.

For those of us who support the restoration to Scotland of full sovereign powers – otherwise known as independence – the future that sunny day in May looked very bright.

Sadly, though, events have since raised doubts over the SNP’s willingness to ‘Stand Up For Scotland’, and the party’s lack of urgency in delivering independence.

The UK Government in London – comprised of two parties soundly rejected by the people of Scotland – have unleashed savage cuts to public spending, all to pay for a British budget deficit caused by public money being used to bail-out failed private banks. The Westminster cut to Scotland’s budget this year is in the region of £1.3billion.

Faced with such a massive cut, imposed by parties Scotland rejected, the SNP Government that promised to ‘Stand Up For Scotland’ meekly bent the knee, tugged the forelock and accepted London’s financial hammer-blow.

Then there is the issue of independence. Undoubtedly the SNP still supports independence for Scotland, but it now appears more of an aspiration than the core belief of the party. As promised in its election manifesto, the SNP will bring forward a referendum on the subject, scheduled for 2014 or 2015. However, the ‘gradualist’ leadership of the party now talks of a multi-option referendum, with the prospect of adding some powers to the current devolution settlement, a position that falls far short of independence.

Maintaining Scotland’s position as a devolved region within the British Union, even with ‘fiscal autonomy’ or ‘devolution max’, would see the continuation of foreign and macro-economic policies set by the UK Government in London. Young Scots would still be sent to kill or be killed in Britain’s imperialist wars for oil, and a Scottish Government would still be unable to support indigenous employment sectors, such as shipbuilding on the Clyde, so long as such facilities existed in other parts of the so-called United Kingdom – European Union regulations prevent a member state from favouring one site over another, and the member state would remain the UK. It was these regulations that saw Scottish steel and aircraft manufacturing closed, while competitors in other countries received government subsidies: no help was provided to Ravenscraig because other steel manufacturing facilities existed in England and Wales, while Jetstream at Prestwick was allowed to close because of the existence of a similar plant in Belfast.

Only independence restores to Scotland the full sovereign powers of a normal nation; only independence would allow a Scottish Government access to our nation’s abundant natural resources; only independence delivers the power and authority to govern Scotland in the interests of all Scots. Yet the SNP Government seems happy to tiptoe agonisingly-slowly towards normal statehood, rather than taking long, bold strides to achieve the status Scotland needs to build a better future for our people.

In reality, even with independence an SNP Government would be implementing savage cuts to public spending. The SNP is as much a pro-capitalist party as the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats: with full sovereign powers an SNP Government would not materially differ from the approach currently being adopted by David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne – the SNP would also put the interest of ‘the markets’ before those of the people.

To deliver a radically different Scotland, we need to re-take our independence and put in place socialist policies that put first the interests of the people. The year ahead, 2012, can be the beginning of that process.

I joined the Scottish Socialist Party in 2011, partly because I want to play my part in creating a better, fairer Scotland. For reasons far removed from politics, the party had suffered its worst period since its creation in 1998. Having risen in a few short years to become the most successful socialist political party in Western Europe, the SSP found itself floored and fighting to get up off the canvass.

Thanks to the commitment of so many dedicated, hard-working members, the party is once again on its feet and fighting for the ordinary men, women and children of Scotland. Evidence of the SSP’s resurgent strength has been provided locally, with over 1,000 people in North Ayrshire signing the party’s petition demanding ‘No Cuts – Tax the Rich’.

In 2012 the SSP will stand candidates for the North Ayrshire Council Election. With socialist councillors representing local communities, we can begin to play our part in building that better, fairer Scotland.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com December 24 2011.

Christmas

It is ironic that many Christmas cards we send and receive carry images of festive scenes from the Dickensian era.

Candlelight flickering through frosted windows; a father in heavy coat and top hat, trudging through thick snow, carrying presents for his family; a horse-drawn carriage passing along snow-covered cobbles, flakes of falling snow shimmering in the yellow light cast from gas lamps. ‘Traditional’ Christmas scenes that give us a warm glow and make us feel good as we look forward to spending time with our family and friends.

The irony is that the Dickensian era, fondly depicted on Christmas cards, was actually marked by extreme poverty, a situation to which contemporary Britain is returning.

The works of Charles Dickens were set mainly during the reign of Queen Victoria, a time when a small, elite group built fabulous wealth through the exploitation of the majority. The Dickensian scenes on our festive cards depict the Christmas enjoyed by the wealthy: but for the majority of the population back then, Christmas was just another day of bitterly cold temperatures, insufficient food, grinding poverty and a future without hope.

Today, in North Ayrshire, a growing number of our fellow citizens are without work. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government in London is implementing a series of measures that will reduce the amount of benefit received by the poorest members of our communities; many claimants are forced to work for £10.00 per week on top of their benefit, a scheme the government describes as ‘work experience’, but which is actually a means of supplying large companies with a workforce that is paid a real-terms rate far below the minimum wage.

North Ayrshire has the highest unemployment in Scotland, and some of the worst deprivation in the country: a recent report by the respected charity Save the Children revealed the local area now has the second-highest level of children living in severe poverty.

In Scotland, the European Union’s biggest producer of oil, every third family is now living in ‘fuel poverty’, where they have to spend more than 10 per cent of their disposable income to heat their homes. The level of ‘extreme fuel poverty’ – spending more than 20 per cent of income on heating – is rising steeply. Lucy McTernan, chief executive of Citizens Advice Bureau Scotland, was recently quoted saying, “There can no longer be any doubt that fuel poverty in Scotland is approaching crisis levels.”

After generations of social advancement, where governments strived to achieve full employment; where safeguards were put in place to prevent people falling into poverty; where standards of housing were improved; where barriers were removed from educational and workplace attainment, the Tory Government of Margaret Thatcher was elected and set about deconstructing the ‘social contract’.

Under Thatcher, all that mattered was making money: people were expendable, workers were to be exploited once again, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Her ideology was fully embraced by her successor, John Major, and by New Labour Governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Now we have the Tories back in power – with the help of the Liberal Democrats – and things are going from bad to worse. The gap between the wealthy elite and the rest of us is returning to levels not seen since Charles Dickens was writing books and Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Victorian London.

Tory Government ministers don’t care about the plight of the poor. Of course, they won’t admit that in television interviews or in newspaper articles, but it’s true. Many of the Tory-Lib Dem Cabinet are millionaires: they are the Dickensian father in heavy coat and top hat, trudging through thick snow, carrying presents for their family. They will enjoy the warm, happy Christmas depicted on festive cards. Like the Dickensian wealthy elite, the super-rich of today can’t begin to imagine how the poor will spend Christmas, and won’t devote much time, if any, to considering how parents feel when they know they’ve failed their children, simply because they lost their job, through no fault of their own, and can’t afford what is now perceived as a ‘normal’ Christmas.

The Tory-Lib Dem Government led by David Cameron is returning us to the dark days of fabulous wealth for a tiny minority, contrasted against an unremitting life of deep poverty for more and more of our fellow citizens. We, the people, must not allow that to happen.

Another traditional Christmas favourite shows us a shining example of a better way, a better society, and again there is an element of irony to it. The 1946 Frank Capra movie It’s A Wonderful Life – made in the USA, the most capitalist of societies – tells the story of one man’s feeling of failure, because he believes he let down his family and the people of his home town. In true Hollywood style, when the man, George Bailey, says he wishes he’d never been born and attempts to end his life by jumping into a raging river on Christmas Eve, his guardian angel, Clarence, saves him and goes on to show how so many people’s lives would have been poorer if George had never lived.

If you get a chance over the Christmas period, watch the film. Irrespective of how many times you may have watched it before, it will still be inspirational. It’s A Wonderful Life is not just a story about one man’s troubles and how he overcomes them, it is a metaphor for a better society, a socialist society.

Each of us touch so many lives in our journey from the cradle to the grave. We can help or hinder our fellow citizens, we can decide to be selfish and look after ourselves, to the detriment of others, or we can work together to build a better life for us all.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com December 17 2011.

The reality of Cameron's stand at the EU summit

Apparently, Prime Minister David Cameron is a hero. He stood up for Britain and told those Johnnie Foreigners where to stick their new European Union treaty.

Well, that is what Cameron, the Tories and right-wing English newspapers would have us believe. We are also told Cameron’s actions have the support of the British public, but how many of the people asked their view actually knew what was proposed at last week’s European Union summit or to what, exactly, Cameron objected?

When the British media reports what the British public thinks, it is fair to assume it’s actually the English media reporting what the English public thinks – and, sadly, one element that must be factored into any such outcome is nothing more than prejudice. English newspapers have long-promoted an anti-European sentiment – particularly in relation to France and Germany – and that feeling is often also articulated by large sections of the English population. In Scotland, while we are not immune to exhibiting prejudices, we don’t generally have the same feelings of animosity towards our mainland European neighbours, partly because of historic links that far pre-date our Union with England – the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France (1295-1560) being the most well known.

Unfortunately, any Englishman portrayed as having tweaked the noses of the French and Germans will be praised by a xenophobic English press and the easily-led parts of the English public. The fact many Scots now also join in is a reflection of the increasing ‘Englishing’ of Scottish newspapers, and the overall indoctrination of Scots within the British Union.

So, did Cameron stand up for Britain, and to what did he so strongly object?

Firstly, last week’s EU summit did not propose a new treaty – Cameron claimed the proposals would have amounted to ‘a treaty within a treaty’. What was proposed, and was adopted by the other 26 member states, was a legal framework enabling the EU to enforce ‘fiscal discipline’ in every country within the Euro-zone – those countries that use the Euro as their currency - with the European Commission and the European Court of Justice given the power to control national budgets.

In addition, labour market reforms were constitutionally enshrined that will overturn workers’ rights, extend working hours, and slash levels of pay and pensions. The proposals also introduce automatic sanctions, including stripping EU voting-rights from states that fail to comply, and even potentially expelling them from the Euro-zone.

None of the above are measures to which the right-wing, Conservative-led UK Government objects. On the contrary, David Cameron and the administration he leads fully support cutting public expenditure and forcing down workers’ wages, conditions and pensions. Nor would there be many Tories who have a problem with forcing right-wing, capitalist ‘fiscal discipline’ on countries like, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Ireland.

So, why did Cameron refuse to sign-up to the proposals?

The answer lies in another recommendation contained in the document presented to last week’s EU summit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. This proposal included plans for Euro-denominated financial transactions to be confined to countries within the Euro-zone. This was the ‘deal breaker’ for David Cameron and the British Government - but why? Surely it makes sense for Euro-denominated financial transactions to be handled by countries that have the Euro as their currency?

If you are a British capitalist, such as David Cameron, the answer to that question is ‘no’, not when 70 per cent of Euro derivative trading is currently carried out by the Stock Exchange in the City of London.

The sovereignty defended by David Cameron was not that of the British people, but of the capitalist traders and brokers in London financial institutions. Cameron was happy to see ordinary men, women and children suffer with the imposition of further Europe-wide cuts to jobs, wages, pensions and living standards, but he drew the line at any move that would reduce the scope for ever-greater profits to be made by the already super-rich elite of the London Stock Exchange.

Cameron made clear his actions are motivated by the interests of the spivs and speculators of ‘the markets’, the very people that caused the collapse of their own capitalist system. The British Prime Minister would have signed-up to the Merkel-Sarkozy proposals if they had just stopped at plans to punish ordinary people and take economic control away from democratically-elected governments, but cutting the salaries and bonuses of the City of London was going too far.

English newspapers backed Cameron’s actions because it allowed them to run stories pandering to their ‘Little Englander’ agendas, and because most are owned by corporations who benefit from the pro-capitalist policies of the Conservative-led Government. Meanwhile, ordinary members of the English (and Scottish) public are distracted from their own predicament – soaring unemployment, wage cuts, longer working hours, slashed public services – by stories that wrongly claim their interests were protected by a British Prime Minister standing up to foreign politicians.

One other issue highlighted by the draconian measures being imposed on ordinary men, women and children in countries across Europe, is how far the EU has moved from its original purpose.

The European Union was supposed to be a body that would implement legislation to raise the living standards of peoples across its member states. However, the organisation soon fell under the control of pro-capitalist politicians, and instead of helping ordinary people it became a vehicle that allowed rich corporations access to ‘national markets’ and drove-down workers’ wages and conditions. The contemporary European Union is nothing more than an offshoot of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, all of which operate in the interests of global capitalism and against ordinary people.

Scotland can learn lessons from the outcome of last week’s EU summit. Firstly, we should not believe the propaganda printed by right-wing English newspapers sold in Scotland – Daily Mail, Daily Express, Telegraph, Star, Sun. Secondly, all of the so-called mainstream political parties – Tory, Lib Dem, Labour, SNP – support the capitalist system and will always put the interests of the wealthy before those of ordinary men, women and children. Thirdly, the European Union operates entirely to ensure super-rich corporations are able to exploit the peoples of Europe across national boundaries.

For Scots, the answer lies in taking control of our own country and implementing policies that put the interests of the Scottish people before those of the capitalist system. That will only happen in an independent, socialist republic operating outside of the EU.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com December 10 2011.

The Strike

Last week I was proud to march shoulder-to-shoulder with striking public sector workers.

Millionaire Tory-Boy David Cameron described the strike as ‘a damp squib’, but that was nothing more than capitalist propaganda. The day-of-action brought 25,000 people onto the streets of Glasgow in a magnificent demonstration of the power of the working class.

Across Scotland 300,000 workers took industrial action, many for the first time in their careers. The Glasgow demonstration was repeated in cities across the UK, with the total figure for those who took part in the one-day strike put at 3million.

Over the years I’ve been on quite a few demonstrations and marches, but last week’s was different. There were people protesting last week who would normally run a mile from such public action. Many of the strikers were from professions known for their lack of militancy, but everyone who took strike action, and those who demonstrated their anger in Glasgow, felt they had no option when faced with a Tory-Lib Dem Government determined to cut their wages, force them to work years longer and slash their pensions.

Those workers now look to their trade unions and the UK Government to come together and negotiate a deal that will prevent further strikes, but the reality is the Tories’ position is unlikely to change. I say the Tories’ position, but of course they are backed to the hilt by their Liberal Democrat lapdogs. The Tories would not be in government, and would not be attacking ordinary working class people, if the Lib Dems were not propping them up. Clegg and his party will pay a heavy price for their treachery.

The UK Government’s Autumn Statement, announced the day before last week’s strike, introduced a series of economic measures that will lead to the poor getting even poorer and the rich even richer. This is what the Tories always do, including Tories who masquerade as New Labour (and that includes whatever the Labour Party is calling itself today, post Blair and Brown). Tories protect their own – the wealthy tax-dodgers, the spivs and speculators of the financial markets – and hit the poor. Under Thatcher and Major the gap between the poor and the rich in the UK began to grow. It became a chasm under Blair and Brown, and now Cameron, Clegg and Osborne are determined to refloat the corrupt capitalist system by fleecing the poor and pushing more and more ordinary working people into poverty.

Make no mistake, things would be exactly the same if Labour had been returned to power in May 2010. The last Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, made clear that if his party had won the election, it would have implemented spending cuts ‘bigger and deeper’ than even those introduced under Thatcher. If there was a Labour Prime Minister in Downing Street right now, we would still be seeing attacks on the working class and policies geared towards forcing the public sector to pay for the collapse of capitalism in the UK. Ed Miliband, the current leader of the Labour Party, declined to support the strike action taken last week.

However, that did not stop Labour MSPs in Scotland from posturing and claiming to be supportive of the action taken by public sector workers. Labour MSPs did not turn up for their work on the day of the strike, citing as justification their principled decision to not cross the picket line outside the parliament in Edinburgh. The same Labour MSPs had no such principles on the previous two occasions a picket was mounted outside Holyrood; each time they happily waltzed past the strikers.

The three contenders for the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party – more accurately described as the Scottish sub-section of the English Labour Party – all took part in last week’s march through Glasgow. They were there to be seen. They all desperately want the support of trade unions in the forthcoming leadership ballot, but you can bet that once it’s over, it will be back to business as usual and the cause of the striking public sector workers will be quickly dropped.

Then there was the action of the SNP, our Scottish Government. In what is certainly the biggest blunder of the Salmond administrations (from 2007 to the present), SNP MSPs sided with the Tories and Liberal Democrats by crossing the picket line at the parliament. Turning their backs on the ordinary people of Scotland, the SNP marched shoulder-to-shoulder through the picket line with the two parties of government in London, the two parties implementing savage cuts to public spending, the two parties forcing public sector workers to pay for the debts run-up by millionaire and billionaire bankers and financial speculators. By their actions, the SNP showed whose side they are on, and it’s not ours.

With just five-months until Council elections across Scotland, the SNP publicly sided with the Tories against the people who deliver our much-needed Council services. But we shouldn’t be surprised by the SNP’s action: after all, when the Tory-Lib Dem millionaires in London told the SNP to implement savage spending cuts in Scotland, Finance Secretary John Swinney tugged his forelock and said ‘Yes Sir’. The party that claimed it would ‘Stand Up For Scotland’ has, instead, become the Tories’ little helpers, accepting a cut of £1.3billion and passing it to Councils.

I was proud to march with public sector workers last week, and I’m proud of the part played by the Scottish Socialist Party in promoting and organising the biggest demonstration of working class solidarity since 1926.

Next May, I will also be proud to represent the SSP as the North Ayrshire Council candidate for the seat of Ardrossan & Arran. The Scottish Socialist Party stands fully in support of our public sector workers as they face brutal attacks from Tories and Liberal Democrats, and betrayal from Labour and the SNP.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com December 3 2011.

The fight we have to win

Last week, in his Autumn Statement, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne revealed the Tory-Lib Dem Government is intent on waging war against the working class of Britain.

Surely, it can now be only the wilfully delusional who believe the Tory mantra of ‘we are all in this together’. The range of economic measures introduced by Osborne showed he and the Coalition Government he represents are determined the poorest should pay the debts run-up by multi-millionaire bankers and financial speculators. While those same dealers in the financial markets continue to take home six or even seven-figure salaries and bonuses running into millions of pounds, the Tory-Lib Dem UK Government announced measures that will punish the poor, including the decision to scrap a proposed rise to the Child Tax Credit, a move that will result in an additional 100,000 children being pushed into poverty.

The pro-capitalist politicians in the Tory-Lib Dem Government are content to see children go hungry in order to make financial ‘savings’ that will go towards paying the UK’s national deficit, a sum of money borrowed by the Westminster administration and used to bail-out banks that had gambled on ‘the markets’ and lost. To be fair, it was the previous Labour Government that borrowed the money to bail-out the banks, but there is no doubt the present Tory-Lib Dem administration would have taken the exact same course of action. Capitalists caused the collapse of their own economic system, but the children of working class families are being punished and made to sacrifice what little they have in order that capitalism can be re-financed and the whole corrupt system can begin all over again.

Last Wednesday, St Andrew’s Day, over 25,000 people marched through Glasgow in protest against UK Government plans to force public sector workers to pay considerably more in pension contributions, work years more than they had expected, and yet receive a much lower pension once they retire. Similar marches took place in virtually every city across the UK.

Public sector workers have every right to be very angry about the way they are being targeted by the UK Coalition Government, and those of us who work in the so-called private sector should learn from history: if we don’t support our sisters and brothers in the public sector, who will speak up when the Tories come for us? Contrary to the Tory-Lib Dem propaganda, we are not all in this together, but all of us who sell our labour to make a living – the working class – are definitely all in this fight together.

The day before the one-day strike, George Osborne’s Autumn Statement also included the news that the Tory-Lib Dem programme of savage cuts to public spending and services had resulted in higher unemployment and a stagnating national economy. So, what do the UK Government propose as Plan B? Bigger and deeper cuts, that’s what.

Previously, the government of millionaires predicted their ‘austerity measures’ would result in 310,000 public sector workers losing their jobs. Callously, that figure tripped-off Tory and Lib Dem tongues without a thought for the consequences, such as families losing income and having to exist on poverty-level benefits. Now, though, that figure for public sector redundancies has been revised...to 710,000. Notwithstanding the personal misery this will create for the workers concerned and their immediate families, we should consider those vulnerable members of communities across the country who rely on public services. Put simply, it will be impossible to continue delivering these vital services with a workforce reduced by almost three-quarters of a million.

Just for good measure, Osborne also announced that pay rises in the public sector will be capped at 1 per cent for the two years after the current pay freeze expires. With inflation running at over 5 per cent, the pay freeze and a cap at 1 per cent – in other words, a maximum pay rise of 1 per cent – means public sector workers are faced with four years of real-terms pay cuts, which could represent as much as a 16 per cent reduction in salary for some.

One of the most-quoted lines by Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs in the run-up to last week’s one-day public sector strike was that increased pension contributions were necessary because we are all living longer and therefore current pension provision is no longer affordable. That is a bare-faced lie. In general terms we are living longer, but the Hutton Report, on which the UK Government bases its current reforms, shows public sector pension payments peaked at 1.9 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – national wealth – in 2010-11, and will gradually fall over the next fifty years.

In addition, a closer look at public sector pension funds shows workers are already contributing more than is currently paid in the form of pensions. Presently, almost £300million more is paid into local government pension schemes in Scotland than is paid out to public sector pensioners. The largest scheme, the Strathclyde Pension Fund, of which most North Ayrshire Council workers are members, currently shows a surplus of £117million.

Successive UK Governments – Labour, Tory and Lib Dem – have raided these pension funds to help pay for a range of government initiatives, including rescuing the failed capitalist system.

The reality is that around three-quarters of a million public sector workers now face losing their jobs; those who remain in employment will see their wages significantly cut, and they are being told they must pay more in pension contributions, despite their retirement schemes being in surplus and the overall cost to the public purse is falling.

Like all of the other ‘austerity measures’ being imposed by the Westminster Government, the attacks on public sector workers are not necessary, they are entirely ideological. Even without the collapse of global capitalism and the ensuing economic crisis, the Tories would be attacking public sector workers and slashing public services - it’s what Tories do. This time they have the backing of the Liberal Democrats, and that party is currently receiving exactly what it deserves for its treachery: it was reduced to just four MSPs at this year’s Scottish Parliament Election and can expect to be wiped-out at next May’s Council elections.

Meanwhile, those of us who sell our labour – the working class – must stand together and fight together as we face attack after attack from an uncaring government in London, a government comprised of two political parties that we in Scotland soundly rejected at the ballot box. The capitalists may be the millionaires, but we are the millions. If we stand and fight together, they can’t beat us – and this fight is not just for our future, it is for the future of our children and grandchildren.

(c) the3towns.com

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We are NOT all in this together

November 30 will see the biggest withdrawal of labour since the General Strike of 1926.

The reason three-million people across the UK will take strike action centres around the Tory-Lib Dem Government’s plans for public sector pensions, but that issue is just one in a raft of proposals that constitute nothing less than an attack on the working class.

The global capitalist system has collapsed – as corrupt enterprises always will – but instead of recognising that fact and moving to a different system, such as a socialist system based on fairness and equality, the capitalist millionaires in the British Government are implementing policies that force ordinary women and men to pay-off the debts of financial spivs and speculators. Not content with that, the UK Government then expects us to also refinance the capitalist system, allowing the whole corrupt venture to begin again.

Capitalism is based on exploitation. In order to generate fabulous wealth for a very small minority, it is necessary for the capitalists to exploit the rest of us. Other than the greed and selfishness of the capitalist class, there is no reason why society could not be structured in such a way as to benefit the majority.

Of course, most media outlets are owned and operated by capitalists, so the rest of us are force-fed the line that capitalism is the only viable economic system, and that our current living standards are as good as it gets. For over 100 years the working class have been told that if they voted for socialism, their lives would be hell (*See The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel). Have a look around: for most of us life is far from a Heavenly idyll.

A few weeks back it was revealed that directors in British FTSE-100 companies had seen their pay increase by almost 50 per cent over the last 12 months. No austerity measures or pay-restraint there. During the same period, the pay of ordinary workers has increased by an average of just 2.7 per cent. With inflation sitting at around 5 per cent, a wage increase below that level is a real-terms pay cut.

Then, last week, came the news that some senior company executives had seen their salaries rocket by a staggering 4,000 per cent since 1980. A man called John Varley, the former chief executive of Barclays Bank, was paid £4,365,636 – which works out as a rise of 4,899.4 per cent since 1980. In another example, the chief executive of Lloyds Bank, which is part-owned by the state, saw his pay increase by 3,141.6 per cent to £2,572,000 over the same period. His pay represents 75-times that of the average Lloyds employee: in 1980 it was 13.6-times the average. Remind me again, which industry was it that mainly contributed to the current economic crisis?

The above figures were contained in a report published by the High Pay Commission (HPC), which also revealed that in 1979 the top 10 per cent took home 28 per cent of national income, but by 2007 that had increased to 40 per cent. If such massive pay hikes continue, the HPC predicts that, by 2035, the top 0.1 per cent will be taking home a massive 14 per cent of the country’s national income, a disparity between rich and poor that hasn’t been seen since Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Victorian London.

Using official Scottish Government data, the picture of inequality in Scotland is so stark it’s hard to believe the figures relate to the same country. In the most affluent parts of Scotland, life expectancy is recorded at 87.7 years. If these areas existed as a separate entity, it would have the longest life expectancy in the world – with the next nearest being Iceland (79 years), Japan (78.4 years) Sweden (77.9 years), Australia and Canada (both 77.8 years).

However, ‘rich Scotland’ shares its borders with ‘poor Scotland’ – often as very close neighbours - and in our country’s least affluent areas life expectancy drops to just 64.4 years, lower than the Gaza Strip, Iran and North Korea. In modern, capitalist Scotland, an eighth of the male population can expect to die before they reach retirement age, and that’s before the Tory-Lib Dem Government increases it as part of the proposals that have prompted the November 30 strike.

Even closer to home the disparity between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is significant: in North Ayrshire the poorest members of the community can expect to die 14 years earlier than the richest, while almost 1-in-4 local households now officially exist in poverty.

Do us all a favour, remember the above figures the next time you hear a Tory MP or a Lib Dem MP, or a Labour MP or an SNP MP, or a banker or any other apologist for the capitalist system tell us that “we’re all in this together”. Austerity measures - or savage cuts, to give them a more accurate description - are being imposed on us to slash public spending and services in order that funds can be re-directed to provide liquidity to banks and to the capitalist markets. Far from all being in this together, it is the ordinary working class that is footing the bill of the failed capitalist system, and it is the wealthy elite who are reaping the benefit.

The capitalists, including all of the so-called mainstream political parties, are waging war against the ordinary women and men of this country. It is time we fought back, and the massive withdrawal of labour on November 30 is the opening shot.

Unless we are prepared to fight together for a decent job, a decent wage, a decent home and a decent pension, then the capitalist system will continue to prevail, the rich will get richer, and some people in North Ayrshire will continue to die in their mid-sixties for no other reason than they are poor.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com November 26 2011.

The democratic British State

In a democratic society, like ours, we can go about our lives without fearing a knock on the door and the arrival of the secret police, such as the KGB in the former Soviet Union.

The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security) was not only a police force that operated under the radar of public accountability, it also ran thousands of spies, ordinary people who were paid or coerced into providing information about their neighbours, work colleagues and even family members. Totalitarian dictatorships feel the need to know what everyone is up to, in order that the state can control every situation, thereby ensuring the interests of the ruling elite are never challenged.

Of course, such operations directed against ordinary citizens were not restricted to the Soviet Union. Similar actions were carried out by the DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) under the right-wing Pinochet administration in Chile. In fact, wherever an undemocratic regime assumes power, you will always find clandestine operations targeted against the people.

Thankfully, we have no such secret police in the UK. Thankfully, we are free to hold and express views contrary to those held by government. Thankfully, in Britain, the state does not spy on ordinary citizens.

Do you believe what was written in the last paragraph? If you do, you’ve almost certainly never been part of a left-wing political party, or one that supports an independent Scotland. If you have never encountered British State spying, you’ve probably never taken part in a protest against government-backed wars, or against nuclear weapons or nuclear power, or against the environmental catastrophe being caused by carbon emissions leading to climate change.

We know the British Government has a secret service, including MI5 and MI6 – the first is responsible for intelligence issues within the UK, while the second’s remit includes countering overseas actions deemed to be against Britain’s interests. It would be foolish to think countries could operate without gathering intelligence on those who might want to harm them or their citizens, but when those citizens are also being spied upon, is that acceptable in a supposed democracy?

Any political party or group that advocates change to the status quo will have been infiltrated by spies and informers. Even the SNP, which now forms the democratically-elected government of Scotland, will have card-carrying members whose real role is not advancing the cause of Scottish independence, but monitoring party activities and passing information to the British secret service.

During my time as an SNP MSP, a former colleague was convinced that a very senior member of the party was actually working on behalf of the British State, passing information to London and arguing for action that sidelined independence and maintained British control of Scottish resources, including North Sea oil reserves. When we see the direction the SNP has taken over recent years, my former colleague may have had a point.

It was also the case that during the 1984-1985 Miners strike, the British State had informers placed within the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers, a democratic and legitimate trade union. Then Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described ordinary Miners fighting to save their jobs as ‘the enemy within’. The British State, and all its apparatus, including the police, was used to fight an ‘enemy’ comprised of ordinary citizens.

More recently, it has been revealed that undercover police officers have penetrated many, if not all, left-wing political parties, organisations and campaign groups. This only came to light after a Metropolitan Police officer called Mark Kennedy was exposed as having worked undercover for seven-years, infiltrating left-wing environmental groups. All of the groups spied on by Kennedy are legitimate organisations whose only ‘crime’ is disagreeing with UK Government policies.

Kennedy has subsequently confirmed that the actions of undercover police officers have led to miscarriages of justice when false evidence was used in trials and police officers perjured themselves to maintain their cover. Another serving police officer, Jim Boyling, was placed undercover with the legitimate campaign group Reclaim the Streets. During a protest in London, Boyling was arrested as part of a group. When the matter went to court it is alleged that Boyling maintained his cover, even when questioned under oath. Other former secret policemen have confirmed this was a normal procedure to build-up the credibility of an undercover agent.

Still, as long as it’s just political activists they’re spying on, eh? Well, actually, it’s not just political activists – they’re also spying on you.

In the North Yorkshire countryside, near the town of Harrogate, there is an RAF base that sprawls over 545 acres. Well, that’s the official UK Government line. In fact, the base – Menwith Hill – is operated, not by the RAF but by the American National Security Agency. Menwith Hill is the world’s largest electronic eavesdropping centre.

The site contains 30 huge golfball-shaped ‘radomes’, which house satellite receivers. It is staffed by around 1,500 US personnel and 400 from the UK Ministry of Defence.

So, what does Menwith Hill do? Officially, it is part of the US missile defence system, and that is certainly part of its work. However, in reality, Menwith Hill is a major part of a US global spy system called Echelon, which is shared with Britain’s GCHQ, the Canadian Communications Security Establishment, the Australian Defence Signals Directorate and New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau.

Echelon intercepts vast amounts of telecoms traffic, including private telephone calls, emails and other communications. The system uses powerful, automated voice-recognition software that picks-up specific key words. Any telephone call, email, Facebook posting or Twitter feed that uses such words or phrases is set aside and checked by intelligence analysts, with relevant information then fed-back to the US National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. Part of the deal allowing the US to use Britain as a spy-base involves information being shared with the British Government by way of the UK’s own spy centre at GCHQ in Cheltenham.

The UK claims to be a democracy, but any country that condones infiltrating and spying on legitimate political parties and protest groups, which listens-in to private telephone calls, reads private emails and brands ordinary workers as ‘the enemy’, is no better than the dictatorships who operate police states.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com November 12 2011.

'The markets' and the November 30 strike

Having plunged much of the world into economic crisis, the faceless money-men of ‘the markets’ are now deciding who should run individual countries.

Already they’ve engineered the demise of the democratically-elected prime minister of Greece – ‘the markets’ let it be known they would be ‘very unhappy’ if the Greek people were asked their opinion on the imposition of even more ‘austerity measures’ in order to pay debts owed to foreign banks. Then, just days later, ‘the markets’ turned their attention to Italy.

Silvio Berlusconi is an easy person to dislike, but he was democratically elected as prime minister by the Italian people. Such things don’t bother ‘the markets’. The money-men decided Berlusconi had to go, so interest rates on Italian loans were raised to ‘unsustainable’ levels, and ‘the markets’ let it be known the prime minister was the problem. If Berlusconi resigned, they argued, the rate at which Italy had to repay loans would be reduced. Otherwise, the country – the third-largest economy in Europe – could face a situation where it was unable to meet its financial obligations…to foreign banks.

So, Berlusconi announced he would step down, but that wasn’t enough for ‘the markets’. They want to be sure whoever replaces him will do exactly as they want, so the punitive interest rates charged to Italy remained in place.

‘The markets’ and those who operate them caused the economic crisis, and now they’re dictating how countries respond. The measures demanded of individual nations always include slashing public spending, throwing hundreds-of-thousands out of work; forcing-down wages, pensions and benefits, cutting public services and selling-off public assets...all to ensure private companies can infiltrate the public sector, maximizing their profits by driving-down wages, conditions and levels of service, while the bankers who operate ‘the markets’ are re-financed, allowing them to begin again their financial gambling.

Thankfully, in Scotland and across Britain, the fight-back is beginning. Many trade unions representing public sector workers have balloted members and have received a mandate to take strike action on November 30. The unions have made clear they are available – any time, any place – for talks with the UK Government, but it is unlikely the Tory-Lib Dem administration will be persuaded to end its attacks on ordinary working men and women. Even if there had been no collapse of global capitalism, the Tories would still be attacking the public sector – it’s what Tories always do. The Liberal Democrats, supporting the Tories every step of the way, will be wiped from the political map for their treachery, which is exactly what they deserve.

On November 30, in addition to the large public sector trade unions, such as UNISON and the PCS, strike action will also be taken by the Educational Institute for Scotland (EIS), which means we will see the first strike by Scottish teachers in 25 years. Although the Royal College of Nursing is not involved in the proposed action, many nurses are members of other trade unions and have supported the strike. Of course, as has been the case in the past, nurses and unions will agree levels of cover for the day of the strike to ensure no patient is put at risk.

No-one takes strike action if it can be avoided, so we can be sure those who will withdraw their labour on November 30 feel they have no option. Striking is the last resort, a very serious course of action taken in an attempt to get through to the government in London. However, the chances that the Tory-led Government will listen are not good.

The attitude of Cameron and Clegg was emphasised by the Government’s response to the unions’ mandates to strike. Immediately, Ministers attempted to split workers by announcing that those within 10 years of retiring could keep their previously-agreed pension levels, but everyone else would have to work beyond the age of 65, pay increased contributions, and receive less when they finally do retire.

The attempt won’t work, workers know this isn’t just about pension entitlement: it is about a sustained attack on the public sector and on ordinary men and women. The Government’s action is about slashing public expenditure, but not because it has to be done – the UK’s debt as a percentage of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is currently much lower than it was for the majority of the 20th Century. Nor is it about public sector pensions being ‘unaffordable’ – the current bill is less than 2 per cent of GDP – and the current average pension paid to a local government worker is just £4,000.

The reason the UK Government is slashing public expenditure, throwing hundreds-of-thousands of people onto the dole, and is increasing the pension contributions of teachers, nurses and local government workers is to generate ‘financial savings’, which will be redirected to provide liquidity for private banks – the same banks that caused the economic crisis – and to finance ‘the markets’ operating out of the London Stock Exchange.

One final point: the UK Government and the right-wing media will attempt to split workers by telling those employed by private companies that their counterparts in the public sector are getting one over on them by having better pensions. Here is the reality: directors in the UK’s top 100 businesses currently rake-in pensions of more than £200,000 per year. The most senior executives at these firms are sitting on pension funds worth £5.2million – giving them a yearly pension of £333,400. Bosses are robbing their own workers to feather their pension nests, while the Tory-Lib Dem Government attempts to convince us that the solution is a race to the bottom, by dragging-down the pensions of public-sector workers.

The Westminster Government of Toffs – the original Cabinet after the 2010 General Election had 23 millionaires and 4 ex-bankers – is waging war on ordinary men, women and children. They are attempting to force us to pay for bailing-out their well-heeled friends in ‘the markets’ – we’ve already contributed over £1trillion.

It’s time we fought back. Support the striking workers on November 30.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com November 5 2011.

Only told what they want us to know

Broadcasters are supposed to be impartial, but night after night we are subjected to indoctrination on television news programmes.

The BBC is not the worst offender, but it does frequently take sides rather than simply reporting the facts of a news story. Supporters of Scottish independence will be aware of countless occasions over the years where the BBC has failed to impartially present the facts on issues relating to Scotland’s constitutional future.

Almost every night, in our so-called ‘national news’ broadcast from London, we hear stories about law and order, the health service and education, none of which have any relevance to Scotland. Those areas of government policy are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, yet the BBC broadcasts English news into Scottish homes.

‘National’ news bulletins on the British Broadcasting Corporation also frequently refer to something having happened in ‘the north’, but they don’t mean Ullapool or Inverness. In fact, while we have Reporting Scotland, the ‘local’ BBC news programme for a region located over 100 miles south of Ayrshire is called ‘North-West Tonight’.

For the past few months we’ve had BBC, ITN and Sky reporting from Libya on how heroic freedom-fighters were attempting to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi and his murderous thugs. We were also informed of how NATO forces, including from Britain, only became involved to prevent a bloody slaughter of civilians in Bengazi.

In reality, what recently occurred in Libya was a civil war, and while Gaddafi was without doubt a brutal dictator, his regime also retained significant levels of support amongst a large section of the Libyan population.

None of the UK-based news organisations told the true story of what was happening in Libya: instead, they reported the UK Government line. One very serious question broadcasters should be forced to answer, is why they did not report on the bloody massacre and total devastation that happened in Sirte, as rebel fighters, supported by NATO air strikes, closed in on Gaddafi. Why was it imperative to protect the ordinary people of Bengazi but not Sirte?

With the murder of Gaddafi, London-based broadcasters are now telling us that Libya is moving towards its first democratic elections in over forty-years, but what they aren’t telling us is how America and Britain are working to ensure the next government of the country – which will include former members of the Gaddafi regime – will be supportive of western interests, in particular with regard to accessing Libya’s abundant oil fields.

NATO’s involvement in Libya had nothing to do with democracy or saving human lives, it was all about securing access to oil reserves, as was the case with the illegal invasion of Iraq. However, those who rely on Britain’s London-based broadcasters for their news will have heard little of the truth.

Perhaps, though, the biggest misrepresentation of the facts by British news organisations occurs when they report on the current economic situation.

Again, the BBC, ITN and Sky News are guilty of carrying stories that portray capitalism as the only viable economic system. We are told how European governments must impose severe austerity measures in order that funding can be provided to save international banks and financial institutions. Even when acknowledging it was the banks and financial institutions that caused the economic crisis, television news reports tell us there is no alternative to a programme of refinancing them. How often have you heard news reports recently warning that ‘the markets’ will not be happy if some country or other does not impose savage cuts to public spending? These markets with such power over entire nations are the very spivs and speculators that caused the collapse of global capitalism – and let’s get that fact absolutely right: it is the corrupt capitalist system that has collapsed not individual nations.

Just the other night a BBC news reporter warned how action by the Greek Government could plunge Europe into disaster. So, what catastrophic move was planned by the administration in Athens? They planned to ask the people of Greece whether or not they agreed with an economic plan that would mean further savage cuts to public spending – resulting in more job losses and increased poverty – in order to repay loans to mainly American-owned banks.

Contrary to the BBC reporter’s dire warning, Europe would not have been plunged into disaster if the people of Greece had been asked their opinion, and had decided to put the interests of their society before those of global capitalism. The world should not be operating to make a small elite ever more wealthy, while the majority struggle to survive. Capitalism is all about exploitation: the rich exploit the poor, ‘the markets’ exploit entire nations; the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation work to increase the profits of banks and multi-national corporations, while forcing relatively poor countries to impose strict austerity measures and to privatise their publicly-owned assets, including their water supplies.

Capitalism causes inequality, poverty and ecological devastation, yet our ‘impartial’ news organisations tell us it is the only game in town. How often have you seen politicians on news bulletins given free rein to advance their argument that there is no alternative? Contrast that with how often you been allowed to see opponents of capitalism given airtime to explain the viable alternative?

Currently an anti-capitalist protest in London has received headlines because it has caused problems for St Paul’s Cathedral – but the protestors have no axe to grind with St Paul’s. They actually wanted to take their protest to the London Stock Exchange, the heart of capitalism in the City of London, but the forces of the establishment were deployed to prevent that happening. Police threw a cordon around the Stock Exchange to protect the capitalist system from the general public. How often has that been explained by our ‘impartial’ news organisations?

Meanwhile, don’t expect to hear anything about the socialist alternative to the corrupt capitalist system. Our ‘impartial’ broadcasters also practice censorship...censorship by omission.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com October 29 2011.

Delivering independence

Last week the SNP gathered in Inverness for its annual conference. It was the first time the party faithful have been together in such numbers since last May’s historic election result and, understandably, there was some back-slapping and celebrations.

Only the most curmudgeonly of political opponents could begrudge the Nationalists a moment of self-satisfaction as they reflected on the result that was never meant to happen. The whole devolution settlement was designed to prevent the SNP – or any other pro-independence party – from securing an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament, yet that is exactly what the people of Scotland delivered.

It is perfectly understandable that SNP delegates travelled to the highland capital with a feeling of wha’s like us. After all, in terms of Scottish Parliament elections, there has been no one like them. But while party members were raising their glasses and toasting King Alex, it would have been nice if they had spared a bit more time to firm-up plans in relation to what is supposed to be the SNP’s raisons d’etre – delivering independence for Scotland.

SNP members, at all levels in the party, should not allow themselves to get carried away with what they achieved last May. For all of its 69 MSPs and overall parliamentary majority, the SNP is still only managing devolution on behalf of the imperial British parliament in London. The seemingly all-conquering Nats still have to dance to Westminster’s tune: Salmond and his ministers have to play the game by London’s rules, or else the government with the real power will rap their knuckles and further cut their pocket money.

The SNP needs to remove its collective head from the clouds, descend from the jubilant heights of election victory and realise that the British unionists are gearing up for a fight. British parties, normally at each others throats, will unite against their common enemy, those of us who would return to Scotland the status of a normal, independent nation. There is no depth to which Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrats will not stoop to defend the Union that has shackled and restrained Scots for 300 years. Expect to hear again about border posts at Gretna, about not being able to visit relatives and friends in England, about not being able to watch Coronation Street or the X Factor; expect to be told how Scotland is too wee and too poor to govern itself, and how Scots should be grateful for the bountiful largesse bestowed upon us by a benevolent Westminster.

In other words, expect to hear lies, misrepresentation and bogus, fake, fraudulent and fictitious arguments – but make no mistake, the Unionists will fight, tooth and nail, to keep a hold of Scotland, our wealth and our natural resources.

Against that background, the SNP seems to be sleepwalking in a post-election euphoria. There is a pro-independence counter-movement, but the largest political party backing national self-determination seems to be, at best, lukewarm towards the organisation.

The Scottish Independence Convention has representation from all pro-independence parties, from civic Scotland and from individuals who simply care about our country’s future. Our fight-back against the combined forces of the British Union would be stronger if co-ordinated through the Independence Convention, yet the SNP seems to want to go it alone. No-one doubts the SNP’s position as the largest and, currently, most successful pro-independence party, but not everyone agrees with its pro-capitalist, pro-big business vision for an independent Scotland.

The fight for independence is too important to be left to the SNP, particularly when the party seems to have taken its eye off the ball through a combination of post-election euphoria and a misguided sense of its own importance. The SNP may be the big beast in the Scottish jungle, but if we are to defeat the combined forces of British unionists political parties and a compliant media, all pro-independence parties and organisations will have to work together.

The SNP has never whole-heartedly embraced the Independence Convention: at its beginning the organisation met without official SNP representation. Eventually, though, the Nationalists did send delegates, but the attitude of the party seemed to be that they would deliver independence, and other parties or bodies were a sideshow, an irrelevance.

Such a position cannot be allowed to prevail. Even with the Independence Referendum still possibly three years away, British unionists are building their war machine, and those of us on the pro-independence side need to be doing the same.

While retaining our respective differences in terms of the independent Scotland we want to see, all of the pro-independence parties, organisations and individuals must unite if we are to secure victory and deliver independence.

The question SNP members need to ask themselves is: what is more important – the Scottish National Party or independence?

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com October 22 2011.

Are you getting what you expected from the Scottish Government?

As a former member of the Scottish National Party, one of the things that most disappoints me about the SNP Government is how its members have so quickly morphed into clones of New Labour or the Tories.

For many years I believed the SNP was different, and given the chance would prove itself in government. Don’t get me wrong, I think Alex Salmond is head-and-shoulders above any other Scottish politician in terms of ability, and there are others within the government who are very capable, such as Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, but so many SNP Ministers and MSPs are simply doing and saying the same things as Labour before them.

Be honest: have you noticed any real difference or improvement to life in Scotland since the SNP came to power in 2007?

The first Salmond administration had an excuse, of sorts, for its relative inaction. It was, after all, a minority administration and had to rely on the support of other parties in order to get its budget and policies through parliament. The current government, though, has no such excuse.

The people of Scotland elected the SNP last May and gave the party an overall majority. Therefore, within the admittedly rigid confines of devolution, the SNP Government has the power and authority to do, basically, what it likes. Unfortunately, though, the SNP has decided that proving its competence in government requires it to play by London’s rules.

Gone is the radical SNP that promised to ‘stand up for Scotland’. Gone is the party that was actually a national movement for self-determination. Gone is the voice that shouted from the rooftops about how it would end Westminster’s stranglehold on Scotland. Gone are the party activists who would, literally, have manned the barricades in Scotland’s interests.

The SNP Government now dances to Westminster’s tune, accepting savage cuts to the Scottish Parliament’s budget, despite the Tory-Lib Dem Government in London having no mandate to impose such cuts in Scotland, and despite the vast wealth that has poured from Scottish oil fields to the UK Treasury since the 1970s.

Finance Secretary John Swinney, looking and sounding every inch a Tory, accepted London’s cuts and, in turn, announced a Scottish Spending Review that, over the next three years, will see around £39billion of funding removed from the public sector in Scotland, which means job losses, reduced pay and conditions for workers, and the reduction or complete removal of services used by Scots in towns the length and breadth of the country.

Just last week Met Office forecasters began predicting we are in for yet another freezing winter, which means more Scots will die because they are poor and can’t afford the prices charged by private gas and electricity companies. Well that’s not the fault of the SNP Government, you might be saying, and you would be right. But what doesn’t help is the decision of the SNP to slash funding for fuel poverty initiatives – from £70.9million last year to £48million this year. The Salmond administration has also altered what had been a commitment to ‘eradicate’ fuel poverty in Scotland by 2016: it now promises simply to ‘address’ fuel poverty.

These are the type of actions and sophistry we got used to from New Labour, the Tories and Liberal Democrats, but many Scots who voted SNP last May expected better from the party that claimed it would ‘stand up for Scotland’.

In addition, while Scots lose their jobs and vital public services are slashed, and while over 2,000 people in Scotland are expected to needlessly die this winter because they are poor and cold, the SNP Government remains committed to retaining – and partially funding – the opulent and cosseted lifestyle of Queen Elizabeth II and all her freeloading offspring. Contrary to popular belief, the SNP is not a republican party.

If you voted SNP last May and you did so on the understanding that a government led by Alex Salmond would accept Westminster’s savage cuts to Scottish public spending; and would, in turn, implement its own cuts agenda, severely impacting on local councils and voluntary organisations; and if you also understood that the SNP would cut the funding for fuel poverty initiatives, while Scots shiver and die because of the cold; and if you were aware that the Nationalists were a pro-British monarchy party and would continue to help fund the lifestyle and palaces of one of the wealthiest families in the world, while many Scots can’t afford to feed their children, then presumably you will be content and happy.

I would speculate that such a group of voters will be in a very small minority. For the others who elected an SNP Government and gave it an overall majority in parliament, only to discover the reality of ‘New SNP’, the feeling must be of immense disappointment. A feeling shared by those of us who spent so many years campaigning and fighting for a party we firmly believed was different from the others, and would actually ‘stand up for Scotland’ once elected.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com October 15 2011.

No longer the party of real independence

The Scottish National Party no longer supports real independence for Scotland.

The SNP is now what can only be described as a semi-unionist party. Rather than restoring Scotland’s independence as a sovereign nation, the SNP sees our future as a state with financial powers, within a confederal body comprising England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In other words, rather than independence, the SNP wants to see a new British Union.

There would be a massive, possibly irreparable dent to the SNP’s credibility if, after years of portraying itself as ‘the party of independence’, it suddenly admitted that, actually, it no longer supported that outcome. So, instead, the party has simply re-defined the meaning of the word.

In the old days – before the ascent of the modernisers within its ranks – the SNP was totally committed to restoring independence to Scotland. Back then, independence was accepted as being the restoration of full sovereignty, all the powers needed to govern ourselves and take our place as a normal nation on the world stage, including a seat at the United Nations. Now, the SNP definition of independence is Scotland having control of the nation’s finances but remaining within a redefined British Union and sharing sovereignty over certain areas of government, such as foreign affairs, defence and social security benefits. What the SNP now proposes is not independence; it is a confederation, an alliance of states.

Within the SNP there used to be discussion over how independence was to be reached – some wanted it as quickly as possible (the fundamentalists), while others were prepared to take their time (the gradualists) – but both sides of the argument were agreed that the restoration of full sovereign powers (independence) was the best constitutional settlement for the nation of Scotland. Today, it appears there are no longer such discussions within the party: the gradualists have won the argument. In fact, so gradual is the current SNP philosophy that it stops short of independence. For SNP gradualists we should now read ‘new unionists’.

Despite this new reality, the SNP is attempting to portray itself as all things to all Scots. It is a trick the party has successfully pulled-off in the past – styling itself as a fiscally-prudent, centre-right organisation in former Conservative-voting constituencies in North-East Scotland, while in the central belt it vied for ‘old Labour’ votes by articulating a left-of-centre agenda. Last week, in the same edition of the BBC’s Newsnight Scotland, the SNP had two representatives commenting on different issues: during questioning, one spokesperson said independence meant ‘full sovereignty, with a seat at the UN’, while the other described it as ‘fiscal autonomy, with shared sovereignty’. It can’t be both.

For many years the SNP was a moderate, centre-left political party, but around the same time as Tony Blair turned the Labour Party into a carbon-copy of the Tories, a group of ‘modernisers’ ascended into positions of power and dragged the SNP to the right. Chief amongst the right-wingers in ‘New SNP’ was former leader John Swinney, but he was far from being alone. Even with Swinney toppled and replaced by Alex Salmond, the SNP has continued to occupy a centre-right position on the political spectrum, alongside the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Back in 2006 – two years after Swinney was forced to resign – another prominent SNP ‘moderniser’ published a book in which he argued the party should abandon the traditionally-accepted definition of independence (full sovereignty) in favour of a new union with England. Also in the book was a plan for the SNP that would see it embrace free-market capitalism to an extent that would have made Margaret Thatcher look like an old lefty.

The author of the book, now a minister in the SNP Government, argued the party should ditch its social democratic policies and, instead, should slash the welfare state; cut taxes by up to 30 per cent; introduce vouchers for education and hospitals; and dismantle the NHS in favour of an insurance-based health service, where if hospitals didn’t make a profit they should be closed.

More recently, First Minister Alex Salmond has argued his government should have the power to reduce corporation tax to just 12 per cent, a move he claims would stimulate growth but which would more likely have the effect of seeing large corporations generate, and retain, greater profits. Around the same time, an SNP backbencher who suggested it might be an idea to ask the rich to pay a bit more in tax was ‘slapped down’ by his own party, according to the Sunday Herald, which quoted a spokesman for Alex Salmond as saying, “The First Minister does not agree”.

As happened when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown created New Labour, the SNP under its own ‘modernisers’ has abandoned its previous centre-left positioning and has become just another pro-capitalist, pro-big business party. However, the redefining of ‘independence’ to mean simply a ‘new British Union’ is the SNP’s Clause 4 moment.

By ditching Clause 4 of its constitution – the part that argued for a redistribution of wealth and public ownership of the means of producing that wealth – the Labour Party abandoned its principles and the people it had been formed to represent. Likewise, by cynically redefining what it means by ‘independence’ – a definition that falls far short of the status, powers and responsibilities held by normal, independent nations – the SNP, too, has renounced its core principle and has turned its back on those who trusted it to deliver for Scotland.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com October 8 2011.

What 'the cuts' actually mean in North Ayrshire

If anyone needed evidence regarding the strength of opposition to the ‘austerity measures’ being imposed by governments in London and Edinburgh, last Saturday’s ‘People First’ march in Glasgow must surely have provided it.

Fifteen-thousand people from across Scotland braved torrential rain to make their voices heard, and the message they sent could not have been clearer – stop the cuts!

I travelled to Glasgow with two friends, neither of whom are members of political parties. Both, however, have seen how cuts imposed by Tories and Liberal Democrats in London – passed-on by the SNP in Edinburgh and Labour councillors in North Ayrshire – are having a devastating effect on local people and communities.

The march left Glasgow Green at mid-day, travelled through the city centre, eventually arriving at Kelvingrove Park at 2:00pm. Even some of the wettest conditions this Century could not dampen the enthusiasm and commitment of the marchers, all of whom were determined to show that ordinary Scots will not accept savage cuts to jobs, cuts to public services, cuts to benefits, even cuts to pensions, and all to pay debts run-up by multi-millionaire bankers in London.

It was significant that on a march opposing attacks on ordinary Scots by a Tory-led Government in London, the SNP was conspicuous by its absence. Where was the party that claimed it would ‘Stand up for Scotland’? Actually, to be fair, I did see one SNP MSP at Kelvingrove Park. Sandra White, MSP for Glasgow Kelvin, is a hard-working, dedicated politician who cares about the people she represents, which was why she attended last Saturday. Sadly, it seems the majority of Sandra’s party colleagues don’t share her values or concerns. I never saw even one SNP banner or poster on the march.

Of course, the SNP was not on the march opposing cuts because, in Scotland, it is the party implementing the cuts. Scotland’s Finance Secretary, John Swinney MSP, meekly accepted Westminster cutting our finances by £1.3billion for this financial year. Swinney then introduced his own austerity budget (he called it a Spending Review), which over the next three years will see our public sector hammered by £39billion of cuts. Add to that the SNP Government’s extension of the Council Tax freeze for another five years, which reduces the amount of money local authorities can raise to provide services, and you reach a position where policies implemented by Tories (and Lib Dems) in London are filtered through an SNP prism in Edinburgh, and land on the doorstep of a Labour-controlled Council in North Ayrshire. Suddenly, abstract references to ‘cuts’ become local men and women losing their jobs, public services being reduced or removed, vulnerable and ill people having their benefits stopped, school-leavers faced with no jobs and colleges that can’t afford to run courses; those still in work hit with wage cuts as bills soar, while public sector workers are forced to work longer, pay more for their pensions and receive less when they retire.

Last week a Labour councillor on the Executive Committee that runs North Ayrshire Council admitted the local authority had achieved a financial saving by making 400 workers redundant. I understand the true figure is nearer 600. With reduced funding and 600 fewer members of staff, there is no way North Ayrshire Council can provide the services it has previously identified are needed by the local public.

That situation is being replicated in local authority areas the length and breadth of Scotland, and it is why 15,000 people took to the streets of Glasgow last Saturday. Had the demonstration not coincided with some of the worst weather imaginable, many more would have marched and demanded an end to government policies that target the poor and force ordinary men, women and children to shoulder the debts of multi-millionaire bankers and financial speculators.

People power ended Thatcher’s hated and grossly unfair Poll Tax, and the strength of a united public can also force a u-turn from the current Tory-led Government (and the compliant SNP administration in Edinburgh).

Trade unions are currently balloting members regarding a possible one-day, UK-wide withdrawal of labour in the public sector. If backed by workers, the strike will take place on November 30, St Andrew’s Day. Of course, the Tory-supporting English media – including newspapers sold in Scotland, like the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express – will tell us the workers are being greedy and that strike action will hurt the public. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

If public sector workers do decide to withdraw their labour on November 30, they will do so to protect the public, to safeguard the services we all need and use. It is not greed that lies behind proposals for a strike: most public sector staff have already seen their wages frozen or reduced and their working conditions slashed. They have accepted these cuts and their withdrawal of labour will be taken, not for any self-reward but to protect the services they provide to us and our extended families. They deserve our wholehearted support.

One final thought: while 600 Council workers in North Ayrshire have been made redundant, and their colleagues still in employment consider strike action to protect our services from further cuts, the small, elite group of bankers who caused the current economic problems awarded themselves bonuses last year totalling £70million.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com October 1 2011.

Why we need to 'do politics' in the Three Towns

Last week a woman in Saltcoats told me she didn’t “do politics”. Politics, she said, was nothing to do with her.

We then had a chat about how much she is paying for her gas and electricity, how her husband had recently lost his job, how her grandmother struggled to pay her bills and had recently seen a reduction in the level of care she receives within her home; we also spoke about how the woman could no longer afford to run her car, and how she had begun to buy cheaper brands of food at a less expensive supermarket than the one she had previously used.

By the end of our conversation, it had become transparently clear to the Saltcoats woman that, whether she liked it or not, much of her life was determined by politics and decisions taken by politicians. It was politicians who allowed unregulated banks and financial institutions to pursue ever greater profits, causing the collapse of global capitalism, and it is decisions taken by politicians that are forcing ordinary people, like the ‘non-political’ Saltcoats woman, to pay for the debts run-up by multi-millionaire bankers and speculators.

At a recent public meeting in Ardrossan I gave examples of how decisions taken by politicians have had a detrimental impact on each of the Three Towns. For example, the harbour used to be the beating heart of Ardrossan. At one time it was a busy, successful commercial port, employing over 100 Dockers at its peak, alongside cranemen, electricians, mechanics and a range of office-related staff – not to mention workers employed in harbour-related businesses, such as HGV drivers, ships chandlers and companies who used the dock to ship their products worldwide.

Ardrossan Harbour used to belong to us, the people. It was operated on our behalf by the National Dock Labour Board. Then, along came Margaret Thatcher, a woman who, like the current UK Government , despised the public sector and public ownership of assets. Thatcher and her Tory Government set about privatising just about everything that was publicly owned, including docks around the UK.

Ardrossan Harbour was handed over to a private company, which decided to ‘rationalise’ its operations. The result of which was to direct commercial shipping-operations away from Ardrossan and to one of the other ports it had been given by Thatcher. The company’s master plan would see Ardrossan transformed into a yachting marina. In addition, land at the harbour, which had formerly belonged to us, was sold for housing developments, with the private company keeping every penny of profit.

The company did actually pay for the assets it secured when the docks industry was privatised, but the amount it handed over did not come anywhere close to being a fair price for so many prime waterfront sites. It should also be borne in mind that we, the people, did not see any of the money, despite the fact the assets sold by Thatcher and her government were not theirs to sell, they were ours. It’s also worth remembering that Scotland never, at any time, voted for Margaret Thatcher or endorsed her government’s policies, but because Scotland is part of the British Union, she was able to sell-off the harbour we owned and which had played such a vital role in the development and vibrancy of Ardrossan.

The company that was handed so much public land and a profitable docks industry now posts multi-billion pound profits every year, while, as the3towns again reports this week, Ardrossan Harbour is crumbling through a lack of basic maintenance.

Some years ago, Saltcoats was designated by local councillors as the main shopping centre for the Three Towns. That decision had a negative impact on retail developments in Ardrossan and Stevenston, but greater public mobility meant it was relatively easy to access the larger shops in Saltcoats and, as the central location within the Three Towns, it was logical that, if there was to be one main shopping area, then it should be in Saltcoats.

However, a few years later, another group of councillors developed that argument and decided there should, in fact, be one main shopping centre for North Ayrshire, which they designated as Irvine. Any retail operator who subsequently expressed an interest in establishing a business in North Ayrshire was encouraged to locate to Irvine, a policy that undoubtedly had a major detrimental impact on Saltcoats and, by extension, Ardrossan and Stevenston.

Then there was ICI’s withdrawal from Ardeer. Not so very long ago a fleet of buses and special trains used to transport thousands of local people to relatively well-paid jobs in ‘the factory’. Of course, it wasn’t politicians who took the decision to move ICI’s production of explosives and chemicals to countries where labour costs are much lower than Scotland, but the negative impact of that decision was certainly compounded by an agreement between the company and successive UK Governments in London.

I’ve mentioned before how ‘the agreement’ only came to light when an Ardrossan man, doing his PhD at university on the subject of ‘Inward Investment to North Ayrshire’, stumbled across it in previously secret government papers. Essentially, ICI had told Labour and Tory governments that it would take any available labour in North Ayrshire – in other words, anyone looking for employment in North Ayrshire could get a job at Ardeer – and so politicians and civil servants then actively discouraged any other major employer from setting-up in the vicinity of the Three Towns. Any company that expressed an interest in establishing a presence in our part of North Ayrshire was, instead, given incentives to locate to Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire or Inverclyde.

For many years ICI’s part of ‘the agreement’ was fulfilled, with the factory employing thousands of skilled and unskilled men and women. However, when ICI decided it could make explosives and chemicals much cheaper in countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, and the company closed its plants at Ardeer, ‘the agreement’ meant there was no other major employer in the area.

So, the fact North Ayrshire has the highest unemployment in Scotland is not down to chance. It isn’t our bad luck, nor is it the result of an evil spell cast by the bad pixies. North Ayrshire has the highest unemployment and some of the worst poverty and deprivation in the country because of decisions taken by politicians.

Politicians have also overseen the costly but misguided and largely ineffective local regeneration carried out by the publicly-funded Irvine Bay Regeneration Company. Painting a few buildings and allowing expensive private housing to be built – with prices way beyond the average income of local couples – is no substitute for creating well-paid sustainable jobs.

Decisions taken by politicians impact on us every day of our lives, so it’s time we all ‘did politics’ and, at the very least, removed from office the politicians - local, Scottish and UK – whose actions have harmed local communities and the lives of Three Towns’ residents.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com October 1 2011.

New SNP

I spent 27 years in the Scottish National Party, but if I were still a member today I couldn’t look myself in the mirror.

The Spending Review announced last week by Finance Secretary John Swinney will make ordinary, working Scots much poorer, and will result in further savage cuts to public services. From a party elected last May, partly on a promise to ‘stand up for Scotland’, that is an absolute disgrace.

By their actions, Swinney and his fellow Scottish Government ministers have aligned themselves, shoulder-to-shoulder, with David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne as they attack the public sector and force ordinary workers to pay the debts of multi-millionaire bankers in London. The SNP could have stood up for Scotland, they could have told the Tory-led Westminster Government to stuff their cuts, but they didn’t. Instead, the Nationalists meekly accepted a funding reduction of £1.3billion and have announced financial plans that will see the public sector in Scotland hit with cuts totalling £39billion over the next three years. Cuts to the public sector will mean job losses and much-needed services reduced or completely withdrawn.

Independent economists predict the effect of the SNP implementing the Tories’ cuts could result in expenditure in Scotland remaining below 2010 levels for the next 15 years.

Swinney’s Spending Review also extended for another year the pay-freeze imposed on public sector workers on salaries above £21,000. With inflation at 5-percent and rising, this will be another financial body-blow to many ordinary, working Scots. Even a ‘moderate increase’ to salaries promised for the following year would actually be a real-terms wage cut, as it would be pegged below the rate of inflation.

Non local government public sector staff will receive a ‘double-whammy’ from the SNP Government, with Swinney’s plans imposing a 50-percent increase in their pension contributions. Meanwhile, a continuation of the Council Tax freeze for another five years will restrict the ability of local councils to raise money for the services we all use, and will see millionaire mansion-owners, like Sir Fred Goodwin, pay little more than hard-working Scots living in council houses.

Throughout my time as an SNP member the party always claimed to be a broad church. Many different political views were held, but the glue that kept the party together was a belief in independence and a determination to restore that status to Scotland at the earliest possible opportunity. That, too, has changed.

So-called ‘modernisers’, like John Swinney, drove the party from its ‘broad church’, moderate centre-left position onto centre-right Tory ground. Although Swinney was eventually forced from the position of party leader, the centre-right positioning has been retained under Alex Salmond’s second term as National Convener. Salmond, himself, is instinctively left-of-centre in political outlook – he was a socialist while at St Andrews University – but many at the top of the party hold firm centre-right views.

So, what difference does it make that the SNP is now a moderate, centre-right party? The difference is that the people of Scotland, in general, remain on the left: the SNP’s change of political positioning has seen it leave the people behind. The SNP has distanced itself from the public that voted it into office and gave it a majority in parliament just six short months ago.

During the party’s drive to the right, the SNP also changed its policy on independence. While it was still a moderate centre-left party, the SNP’s position was that a majority of votes or a majority of seats achieved at a UK or Scottish parliamentary election was a mandate for independence. When either of those benchmarks was achieved, the SNP would negotiate the independence settlement with Westminster, which would then be put to the people of Scotland in a referendum.

However, that policy position was changed to the benchmarks being a mandate, not for independence but simply to hold a referendum on independence. Under the old policy, the result achieved by the SNP last May would have seen Scotland become an independent nation, but now it just means there will be a referendum on the subject, at some unspecified time in the future – and this from an organisation that still claims to be ‘the party of independence’.

Many within the leadership of ‘New SNP’ are quite content managing a devolved Scotland within the British Union. It was more important to them to get their backsides onto the backseats of ministerial Mondeos at Holyrood, rather than securing all the powers we need to deal with the problems that continue to blight Scotland, powers that only come with independence. I know of at least two very senior Nationalists, both currently in Government, who would settle for devolution. One even went public, stating that ‘the independence thing’ should be parked while the SNP Government ‘proved itself’ to the Scottish people by managing devolution (within the British Union and on behalf of the Imperial British Government in London).

Petty British unionists often criticise the SNP for ‘picking fights with Westminster’, but never has that claim been less valid (and it wasn’t very valid before). The Tory-Lib Dem Government was soundly rejected in Scotland at the 2010 UK General Election: Cameron, Clegg and Osborne have no mandate from the people of Scotland to implement their savage cuts. The government that did receive a mandate from the Scottish electorate – and an overwhelming one at that – was the SNP. The Salmond administration could have ‘stood up for Scotland’ and told the Tories and Liberal Democrats to stick their cuts where the sun don’t shine, but they didn’t. When there was a perfect reason to ‘pick a fight with Westminster’, New SNP rolled over and did nothing. In fact, worse than doing nothing, the SNP became the Tories’ little helpers and implemented cuts that will devastate Scottish public services, communities and lives.

There are many decent people still members of the SNP. Perhaps it’s time they looked for another party, one that really does stand up for the ordinary people of Scotland, and one that has never wavered in its commitment to independence.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com September 17 2011.

Political mysteries

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is why trade unions continue to fund the Labour Party.

The current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was heckled at last week’s conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) after he said workers had been wrong to take strike action in defence of their wages and conditions back in July. Miliband was wrong, the workers were right, and union delegates were correct to let the Labour leader know how they felt about his position. However, the trade unions Miliband chastised for supporting their members will continue to provide 80-percent of Labour Party funds.

Trade unions exist to represent the interests of their members, yet they fund a political party that refuses to support the interests of working men and women, and which, during its thirteen years in government between 1997 and 2010, kept in place the most draconian anti-trade union laws in Europe. Seriously, any member of a Labour-affiliated trade union who can explain that one to me, please get in touch.

I fully appreciate the historical bond between trade unions and the Labour Party – the clue is in the name, after all. The Labour Party was formed to give a parliamentary voice to the working class, and for many years that is what it did, with, it has to be said, varying degrees of success, but at least it knew whose side it was on, and attempted to raise the living standards of ordinary people.

Of course, that Labour Party was finally killed-off in the 1990s, when Tony Blair was elected leader – yes, he was elected, so Labour members only have themselves to blame. To be fair, Blair simply continued the ‘modernising’ process initiated by his predecessor, John Smith, who since his death has been all-but beatified by the Labour faithful.

The defining moment of New Labour was the ditching of Clause IV of the ‘old’ party’s constitution, which had been adopted in 1918 and read:

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

That one sentence had enshrined what the Labour Party was all about: fighting for workers to receive in payment the full value of their labour, rather than being exploited by capitalist bosses; with public ownership of industry and utilities, so they would operate in the public interest.

Blair and the ‘modernisers’ (sounds like a Sixties pop group) smashed a juggernaut through Labour’s history and long-standing beliefs, replacing them with centre-right ideologies and Tory policies. Former left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn – who will be speaking at the ‘People First’ rally in Glasgow on October 1 – accurately described New Labour as “Thatcher’s greatest achievement” but, it has to be said, the Blair-led Tory clone was popular in England, where they have a history of voting for right-wing parties. The mystery is why Scots, traditionally more left-of-centre in outlook, also continued to vote Labour in significant numbers.

The argument can be made that, initially, Scots thought Blair and New Labour would ditch the Tory policies once elected – in other words, they were only saying Tory things to secure the vote of Middle England – and would revert to a more traditional left-wing stance once in power, but the party went on to win a further two elections, with Scottish support, long after they had continued to implement policies that even Thatcher had considered too right-wing.

Even at the 2010 UK General Election, when England was voting Tory (and Liberal Democrat in certain areas), Scotland again elected a majority of Labour MPs. Once again the party had run with the slogan ‘You have to vote Labour to keep the Tories out’, despite the fact Labour was made from the same Tory mould, and had been for around fifteen years.

Admittedly, one year later, Labour got the biggest hammering of its political life, when, at the Scottish Parliament Election, we elected an SNP Government and gave it an overall majority. However, if there were a UK Election tomorrow, Scots would almost certainly re-elect the centre-right Labour MPs that were returned in 2010.

It’s now absolutely clear that Scottish voters are prepared to switch allegiance at different elections. For the Scottish Parliament they will vote SNP, but on a UK basis, they will remain with Labour – yet both parties are securing that support on a false basis.

The SNP is every bit as much a centre-right, pro-capitalist party as New Labour (or ‘Beyond New Labour’, as ‘Buzz’ Miliband called it during his leadership election campaign). Neither party supports ordinary working class men and women, far from it. The SNP and Beyond New Labour both endorse a free-market, capitalist agenda that puts the interests of big business and multi-national corporations before the needs of ordinary Scots. Don’t take my word for it - have a look at their respective Manifestos.

So, as with the mystery of why trade unions continue to fund a Labour Party that works against their members’ interests, we have Scots voting for political parties, at UK and Scottish elections, whose policies put big business and maximising private profit ahead of meeting the needs of the ordinary men and women of Scotland.

When asked, Scots, in general, still say they want governments to implement left-of-centre, socialist policies, yet at recent elections we have voted for centre-right parties, the SNP and Labour. If we want socialist policies, like we say we do, then we have to vote for a socialist party – the Scottish Socialist Party.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com September 10 2011.

We're bailing out millionaires, and cutting the care of vulnerable children

Although the collapse of the capitalist system began more than two years ago, we, the general public, haven’t yet begun to experience its worst effects.

Yes, prices have gone up, and for those who have lost their jobs it might seem like things couldn’t be worse, but in reality we are only just beginning to feel the pain.

Last Tuesday I joined staff from local Quarriers facilities as they took strike action. They were some of the most caring and decent people I’ve met in a long time. Right-wing newspapers and Tory politicians would have us believe we are ‘all in this together’, and that it’s totally selfish to be taking strike action when so many people are suffering, but the Quarriers workers felt they had no alternative when they were faced with an employer determined to slash their pay and conditions.

The people on the picket line at Seafield School last week normally spend their days caring for vulnerable children, and that is what they would rather have been doing instead of taking strike action. Of course, despite the problems they face themselves, before they came out on strike they made sure there was enough cover in place so that the children would not be adversely affected.

These were no rabid militants, intent on sabotaging the machinery of the decadent bourgeois bosses. The Quarriers strikers were ordinary women and men driven to the point where they had to take a stand – and this is the beginning of so much more to come.

Quarriers is a social charity, set up to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable children. The work it does across the UK is mainly funded by local authorities, such as North Ayrshire Council. According to the charity’s management, it must cut workers’ pay and conditions because the funding it receives from councils has been slashed. Think about that: because bankers and financial speculators in the City of London embarked on a reckless pursuit of ever greater profits, some of the most vulnerable children in Britain now face having their care cut or removed.

The other reality behind the situation now being faced by local Quarriers workers and the children in their care, is the lie that opposition political parties are standing up to the Tory-Lib Dem Government in London as it carries out a programme of savage austerity measures. Far from protecting us from Cameron and his cabinet of millionaires, the SNP Scottish Government has meekly accepted funding cut by over £1 billion, and has simply passed on the cuts to local government. In our case, here in North Ayrshire, we have the SNP blaming the Tories and Liberal Democrats in London, and Labour councillors blaming the SNP Government in Edinburgh. Meanwhile, as politicians bicker, funding to care for vulnerable children is being cut, and the staff who look after them are faced with bosses attempting to impose pay cuts that could result in them losing as much as £400 per month.

These cuts are being carried out in order to refinance the capitalist system and allow the spivs and speculators to start gambling all over again. We have governments – in London and Edinburgh – who are giving a higher priority to the interests of bankers and stock-brokers than to the needs of the children looked after at Seafield School. That is a disgrace.

Of course, those same politicians and the loyal right-wing media tell us it cannot be any other way. We have been indoctrinated into believing capitalism is the only game in town, and we just have to refinance the banks and let it all begin again – but that is not the case.

Instead of pandering to the rich, we should be introducing a progressive system of taxation, under which they would pay their fair share. Since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, the top level of tax has been cut from 83 percent to 40 percent. In addition, the richest 1,000 people in the UK have around £400 billion of wealth that presently goes untaxed. Meanwhile, the Tory-Lib Dem Government proposes to cut Corporation Tax to 24 percent, meaning it will have been halved since it was introduced in 1965. The SNP Scottish Government wants Corporation Tax devolved to Holyrood, so they can cut it to just 12 percent.

Then there are the twin evils of tax avoidance (which is legal) and tax evasion (which is illegal, but still happens). Together, these dodges by the richest people in the country steal around £70 billion from the public purse every year – that is £70 billion stolen from you, me, the Quarriers workers and the children in their care.

The Quarriers workers are amongst the first in this area to be forced into strike action to defend pay levels that are already pretty low. They won’t be the last, far from it. As the3towns reports this week, North Ayrshire Council’s Corporate Director (Finance and Infrastructure) has voiced the opinion that “the outlook for the foreseeable future is pretty bleak” with some economists predicting “the slump will continue for 15 years”.

Things are only bleak because we are going along with the lie that capitalism is the only game in town, and because we allow the wealthiest people in the country to avoid paying their fair share in taxation.

We need to escape the indoctrination of the ruling elite, the politicians, the newspaper and satellite television owners, the bankers, the financial speculators. We need to put people before profit, we need to introduce an economic system that operates to meet the needs of the public, rather than panders to the interests of multi-national corporations.

We need to put decent people like the Quarriers workers and the children in their care before the multi-millionaires who fund the political parties and media outlets that tell us there is no alternative to capitalism.

We need socialism.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com September 3 2011.

Why I've joined the SSP

I passionately believe in an independent Scotland. If we are to tackle the social problems that continue to blight our country, we need all the powers that only come with independence.

Having said that, I see no point in securing independence for Scotland only to remake our new country along the lines of the failed British model. Sadly, under the millionaire-funded SNP, that is exactly what we would get.

Even before it was elected to government, the SNP had begun to move its political positioning – some in the party argue they simply moved to the centre-ground, as did the Labour Party under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. However, by abandoning its left-of-centre position, the SNP followed Labour in moving away from the people of Scotland. The Nationalist victories in 2007 and 2011 were not endorsements of the SNP in its new centrist position, but rather were rejections of New Labour and the war-mongering, free-market, pro-big business, capitalist organisation it had become. The ‘slightly-less-to-the-right’ SNP simply benefitted from being seen as the party best-placed to beat New Labour at those elections.

The reality is, though, if the SNP delivers its Independence Referendum – and with a majority in parliament, surely it must – and if a ‘yes’ vote is secured in that referendum, the independent Scotland we would have under an SNP Government would be one remarkably similar to the Tory and Labour British Governments we have had over the past fifteen years. The SNP is now a ‘moderate centre-right’ political party, which would continue to endorse the capitalist economic system that has brought the western world to its knees. The ‘moderate centre-right’ SNP’s big idea for jobs in an independent Scotland is to reduce the taxation paid by multi-national corporations, so they could come here for a few years, take all the hand-outs going, exploit ordinary Scots men and women by paying wages so low they would still qualify for social benefits – as is the case now – and then those companies would disappear, ‘like snaw aff a dyke’, as Alex Salmond might say.

With independence, Scotland would once again become a sovereign nation, but under a government of any so-called ‘mainstream’ party – SNP, Labour, Tory, Liberal Democrat – an independent Scotland would remain answerable to the capitalist overlords of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the spivs and speculators of global financial markets.

Instead, independence should be the catalyst that allows us to tackle the bread-and-butter issues that affect every one of us, every day of our lives. With the full powers that only come with independence, we can radically transform Scottish society - putting people before profit; taking power companies into public ownership, so elderly Scots don’t needlessly die in winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes; building affordable homes for rent, creating construction jobs and addressing the massive housing waiting lists across Scotland; providing hope and opportunity to our young people through the creation of real apprenticeships; maximising the educational attainment of every child; organising national production and international trading agreements to meet the needs of Scottish society; allowing ordinary Scots to once again know the dignity of work, the pride that comes from being able to support themselves and their families; building communities where everyone is valued and where each individual, irrespective of age, has a role to play.

This is the Scotland we need if we are to meet the aspirations of ordinary Scots. Thankfully, the political party offering the policies to create that Scotland is still with us, having survived an experience that would have killed-off lesser bodies. Everyone knows how traumatic the last few years have been for the Scottish Socialist Party. Issues far removed from politics dealt a body blow to the socialist movement in Scotland, but the SSP held to its principles and has emerged stronger in its commitment to deliver a better country for all the people of Scotland.

The corner has been turned and a radical, socialist alternative for Scotland is back on the table.

All the so-called mainstream parties in Scotland are now on the right of the political spectrum, to varying degrees, and all are totally committed to the failed capitalist system. It is only the SSP that’s over there, on the left, with the people of Scotland. That’s why I’ve joined the Scottish Socialist Party, to help in the fight for a better, fairer Scotland.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 27 2011.

Whose side is the SNP on?  Now we know.

This article is critical of the Scottish National Party. Now, you might think such a theme should not be surprising from me, given I was expelled from membership of that particular party. However, my past criticisms of the SNP are relatively rare.

In fact, even back in 2004 when I was expelled, my criticisms were not of the Scottish National Party but rather of its then leader, John Swinney. Without going over old ground in great depth, I pointed out Swinney’s leadership of the party had been disastrous – listing numerous facts to back-up my assertion – and called on Alex Salmond to return as leader, suggesting it required his talents to unite the party and turn-around its fortunes. In all modesty, I think history has proved I was right.

During my time as an SNP member (27 years in total), I always knew the party, as a whole, was not quite as far to the left on the political spectrum as my own personal views. I’ve always been a socialist, but back in 1977 when I joined the SNP there was no pro-independence socialist party in Scotland, so I joined the moderate, left-of-centre Scottish National Party. I compromised my personal socialist beliefs in order to be part of a political party committed to restoring Scotland’s independence.

For the vast majority of my time in the SNP the party held and articulated centre-left political views with which I could feel relatively comfortable, although I would have preferred an outright socialist approach to tackling Scotland’s problems. Then, along came the ‘modernisers’, SNP members who believed Tony Blair had been right to transform the Labour Party by abandoning its socialist roots and principles. Along came Swinney and others whose personal political beliefs were more centre-right than anything previously seen in the leadership of the modern SNP.

Swinney admired how the Labour Party had been repositioned to the centre-right, in the process embracing free-market capitalism and adopting many policies of the Conservative Party. He then attempted to do the same with the SNP. Ultimately, however, Swinney’s poor leadership qualities led to his demise as SNP National Convener, but by then other ‘modernisers’ had found their way into senior positions within the party, and the ‘New-Labourfication’ of the SNP continued.

Alex Salmond, a socialist in his student days, returned as leader and did rejuvenate party fortunes, but the SNP continued on its rightward drift, propelled by the small group that had previously surrounded Swinney. Today, the structure and positioning of the SNP is almost indistinguishable from British Unionist parties, other than on the constitutional future of Scotland, although even on that crucial issue there are members of the Scottish National Party who would settle for increased devolution rather than independence.

As a nation, we remain in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s. The global capitalist system lies in tatters, brought down by the greed of its own practitioners.

As a result, ordinary people are being ground-down by rising unemployment, wage restraint for those still in work, increasing inflation, cuts to public spending and services, soaring food and utility bills – while those who caused the crisis have been bailed-out by the UK Government using public money - our money – and when that proved insufficient, by borrowing more against our names.

Capitalism has failed, yet while ordinary men and women suffer, the capitalist spivs and speculators are being refinanced. Of course, in Scotland, we’re told we have our own parliament and our own government. Not only that, we elected an SNP Government last May, and gave it a majority in parliament: so what have we to worry about? The Tories and Liberal Democrats might be right-wing capitalists, in bed with the wealthy bankers that caused the economic crisis – but in Scotland we are led to believe things are different. Surely even a moderate centre-right SNP Government would better represent the interests of ordinary people than the UK Tories, Liberal Democrats or even Labour?

You may think that, but you would be wrong. The reality, here in Scotland, tells a very different story.

Scots are also suffering soaring unemployment, rising inflation, cuts to public spending and services - and the SNP is powerless to do anything about it. We elected an SNP Government last May, but the Scottish Parliament has no control over the economy, taxation or social security – all of which remain reserved to Westminster.

So, you might think, if only we had our independence, then the SNP Government would protect the ordinary men and women of Scotland.

Sadly, you would be wrong again.

In the past week, the SNP announced its ‘big idea’ on the economy, which is to reduce the amount of tax paid by corporations and big business. Then, in the last couple of days, when an SNP back-bencher voiced the opinion that the well-off should pay more tax, he was ‘slapped-down’ by his own government. The Sunday Herald reported that a spokesman for the First Minister said Alex Salmond did not agree with his MSP.

There is now no escaping the fact that, while ordinary Scots continue to suffer, the SNP has declared itself to be on the side of big business and the rich. Far from being ‘left-of-centre’, as the SNP still claims to be, it now stands firmly on the political right, ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with the Tories, Lib Dems and the Labour Party.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 20 2011.

We're failing our children

One of the favourite questions posed by panels at job interviews is ‘Where do you see yourself in ten-years?”

It’s probably best not to give the answer, “Well, with the quality of staff I see before me, I should think I’ll be running the company.” You might think it, you might really want to say it, but it’s almost-certainly not the answer they want to hear.

When was the last time you thought about ten years from now? Take a moment: where do you see yourself in ten-years? Will you still be in the same job? Will you still have the same friends? Will you still be living in the same house, the same town, the same country?

Now, imagine you’re a teenager growing up in North Ayrshire – yes, I know, for many of us that really does stretch our imagination to its limits. It’s a serious question, though. What must it be like for our young people growing up in the area that has Scotland’s highest unemployment?

In North Ayrshire there are very few jobs and hardly any apprenticeships. Still, if our teenagers stick-in at school there is always college or university. Well, that used to be a ‘safe’ route for continuing education after school, with a view to enhancing opportunities in the employment market. This year, though, many universities and colleges have cut courses – the result of the Tory-Lib Dem UK Government slashing public funding, which is then passed-on by the SNP Scottish Government. Some colleges have turned away hundreds of applicants for courses, which has meant schools are being all-but overwhelmed by the number of pupils returning for Fifth and Sixth Year: young adults who thought their schooldays were behind them have this week looked out their uniforms and returned to the classroom rather than do nothing, which, without a job or college place, was the option they faced.

Still, there is always next year, when they can apply for Further and Higher education courses all over again. Except that, next year, things won’t be any better economically – the Tory-led Government will still be hacking into public funding, and the SNP will still be passing-on the cuts – and next year there will be another tranche of Fourth Year pupils to add to those completing Fifth and Sixth Year.

Of course, the sons and daughters of City bankers – the spivs and speculators who caused the collapse of global capitalism – and the offspring of Tory MPs will still be able to use the cash and connections of Mummy and Daddy to secure college or university places, or job placements with prospects. Once again, it is those who had nothing to do with the corrupt capitalist system, and its implosion, that are being forced to pay the price.

Don’t believe SNP Government ministers when they say their policies are protecting Scotland from the worst ravages of cuts imposed by Westminster. Without the full powers that only come with independence – including over the economy, taxation and social security, which are all still ‘reserved’ to Westminster – the Scottish Government cannot protect us. Look at the reality right here in North Ayrshire: the highest unemployment in the country; colleges full to bursting, with eager young students turned away; social and Council services being cut across the board, hitting some of the most vulnerable in local communities; drug-addicted young people placed on Methadone programmes because rehab centres are overwhelmed and can’t cope; thousands on housing lists, waiting years for an affordable home. All of which is happening with an SNP Government in Edinburgh and SNP MSPs representing the two local constituencies.

It is Tory and Liberal Democrat politicians in London who are responsible for the savage cuts to public spending, but SNP ministers in Edinburgh are doing little more than passing-on those cuts to councils, public bodies, social companies and voluntary organisations around Scotland.

Scotland needs the powers of a normal, sovereign nation – which will only come when we retake our independence – but even after securing that status, there is no point in re-making our new country along the lines of the failed British model. Sadly, even if Alex Salmond delivers an Independence Referendum, and we vote to take control of our own lives, the SNP Government in an independent Scotland would still embrace the failed and corrupt capitalist system. An independent Scotland under the SNP would still be answerable to the faceless money-men of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the spivs and speculators of ‘the markets’ – all of which would mean little or no change to the situation faced by teenagers and young adults here in North Ayrshire.

Scotland desperately needs to retake our independence, not so we can pull down the British Union flag over Edinburgh Castle and replace it with a Saltire, but so we can go our own way economically and socially, putting people before profit, putting the needs of ordinary Scots before the interests of multi-national corporations. Independence should simply be the starting point, after which we build a better nation in which everyone pays their fair share in taxation, so that we can deliver the services our young and old need, and create sustainable, well-paid employment, providing hope and opportunity to teenagers and old-stagers alike.

As things stand, in a devolved Scotland within the British Union, we are failing our young people. Ask any of the teenagers and young adults in the Three Towns who can’t find a job or a college place, ask them where they see themselves in ten-years? Are we really going to tell them they just have to grin and bear it? Are we really saying they will have to take anything, irrespective of how hard they worked for their qualifications? Are we going to tell our own children they will have to leave the area, leave Scotland, if they want any chance of a job and a better life?

We are the people who allow a Tory-Lib Dem Government in London to impose savage cuts to public spending, despite the fact we didn’t vote for them. We are the people who believed the SNP when they said they would stand up to London and would protect us: they knew they didn’t have the powers to do that, and their pro-capitalist policies mean that, even with independence, an SNP Government would still cut public funding and services, rather than introducing a progressive taxation system where everyone paid their fair share.

It’s time we stopped blaming young people for being unemployed. It’s time we acknowledged that it is us who have created the situation where teenagers and young adults in North Ayrshire look at the future without any real hope of a better life.

Where will the young of North Ayrshire be in ten-years? If we don’t radically change our society in Scotland, those who can get out will do so, and the rest of us will be left to struggle on meagre pensions in a country that doesn’t care about its people.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though. In a democracy we can radically change society, we only have to vote for it. We have to vote so that Scotland re-takes its independence, meaning that never again will we have a Tory Government imposed on us by the electorate of another country, and we need to vote for a socialist agenda that puts people before profit. Otherwise, don’t expect life to get any better for the young people of North Ayrshire.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 13 2011.

Riots

The scenes of rioting in the past week, firstly in London and then across other major cities in England, will have shocked many. At first glance there appears no legitimate reason for such destruction to property, with associated violence and theft, but many of those responsible feel their actions are justified.

So, how can that be: what possible justification can be made for the lawlessness we have all seen on nightly news bulletins? Actually, there is no justification, but if we fail to understand why some individuals firmly believe their actions are legitimate, then we will continue to produce a level of society that sees rioting as a valid expression of its anger.

Recently I took part in a discussion about poverty. One of those also taking part was a journalist from the BBC and, nice man though he was, his input starkly illustrated how out of touch with reality he, and so many others, remain. In well-paid, full-time employment, the man from the BBC thought living on benefits meant ‘tightening your belt’ and ‘having to go without some of life’s luxuries’. The discussion took place at West Kilbride public hall and I invited the BBC journalist to go with me to Asda in Ardrossan, where he would see a queue at the ‘marked down’ section, with people desperately trying to snap-up items reduced in price because they were about to pass their ‘sell by’ date.

Living on benefits doesn’t mean ‘tightening your belt’, it means not being able to afford a belt. Living on benefits doesn’t mean ‘having to go without life’s luxuries’, it means having to go without food. Living on benefits means not being able to buy shoes; it means hoping the washing machine doesn’t pack-in; it means not being able to afford clothes – even Primark’s low-cost range; it means eating until the money runs out and then living on whatever food is left and hoping it will see you through to the next benefit payment. Living on benefits is an existence, not a life.

When you are on benefits the only way to buy high-cost items, like televisions, washing machines, cookers, laptops and mobile phones, is by borrowing money – and the only people that will lend you money are those that charge the highest interest. If you are on benefits, banks won’t even consider offering you a loan, so you have to turn to those who will, such as Wonga.com with its APR rate of over 4000-percent, club books where prices are two and three-times those of shops, and illegal money-lenders, where interest rates are sky-high and failure to make a repayment brings a little more than an angry letter in the post.

Living on benefits means living in poverty, and living in poverty places you on the margins of society. On the margins you become isolated and totally disenfranchised. You cannot take part in ‘normal’ social activities. Going for a social drink is out of the question; the cinema is way beyond your reach; running a car, no chance; going to the football, even a Junior game with an entrance fee of £4.00 is beyond your reach. Then there are the necessities: new clothes for kids going back to school; paying gas and electricity bills; trying to give children nutritious meals – all to be achieved from benefits that can be as low as less than £10.00 per day.

Of course, anyone ‘feckless’ enough to be unemployed should just get off their lazy backsides and get a job, shouldn’t they? In North Ayrshire, at the last official count, there were 27 Jobseekers for every vacancy, and that doesn’t take into account the skilled nature of some of the vacancies. It doesn’t take very long on the buroo to eat into someone’s self-confidence: see how worthless and isolated you feel when job application after job application is unsuccessful, and when prospective employers don’t even deem you worthy of a reply.

With your hopes and aspirations smashed, with the knowledge that you are a failure for not being able to support yourself and your family; with no money; little food; holes in your shoes; and no positive role in society, how do you get your voice heard?

One of the criticisms levelled at rioters in English cities is that they are smashing-up their own communities, but that is not the case. The areas being attacked are town centres and shops – parts of towns that the dispossessed rarely visit. Looters are helping themselves to the things ‘normal’ people buy from shops but they, as sub-normal, can’t afford. The rioting is an expression of the anger felt by those our society has placed on the margins.

London, where the rioting started, has an additional racial element. A young black man in London is seven-times more likely to be subjected to ‘stop and search’ by the Metropolitan Police than a white man of the same age. Compound the anger of being placed on the margins with the belief that you are being targeted by those who police the society that has discarded you, and a volatile mix is created, just waiting to be ignited. Last week’s shooting-dead of Mark Duggin by police officers in Tottenham was the spark that lit the flame.

The immediate reaction of politicians has been to call for tough action against those who have rioted: water-cannons, plastic bullets and long jail sentences are just some of the initial proposals, but none of the highly-paid MPs and Government ministers has stopped to question what lies behind people taking to the streets and violently expressing their anger. Put quite simply, happy people don’t riot, and the reason so many people are extremely angry is because of the society created by politicians.

The young men and women who have rioted over the past week did not create their own unemployment, they did not put in place the capitalist economic system that has all-but bankrupted the Western world; they did not create the consumer society, where credit has financed purchases of ‘must have’ high-cost items; they did not build sub-standard housing; they did not waste billions of pounds on unusable nuclear missiles and on illegal foreign wars; they did not create a society of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’; they did not allow the marginalisation of entire communities. These things are the result of policies put in place and carried out by politicians.

No-one should attempt to justify violent disorder and lawlessness, but we do need to understand why people are angry, and why they feel that rioting is the only expression of anger to which politicians take any note. Sadly, rather than addressing the issues that have created the anger, politicians seem intent on cracking-down even further on society’s marginalised communities, thereby making the problem even worse.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 6 2011.

Breaching the bounds of tolerance

On July 22 the world was stunned as news channels began to report a story from Norway. Firstly, we saw photographs and film of the carnage caused by a bomb detonated on an Oslo street, then reports began to emerge of a gunman shooting innocent teenagers and young adults at a summer camp on Utoya Island.

As we now know, 77 people died in the two attacks, with one person responsible for both atrocities. Norwegian far-right Nationalist Anders Behring Breivik killed his fellow countrymen and women because he believed there was an Islamic plot to impose Sharia law, not just in Norway but across Europe, and that the policies of left-wing political parties were responsible for allowing Islam to grow in the West: the people Breivik shot were attending a Norwegian Labour Party camp and were considered to be the next generation of centre-left politicians in the Nordic country.

Although Breivik acted alone in his attacks, he is known to have been a member of far-right internet forums and chat-rooms, where the main topic for discussion was the supremacy of ‘indigenous’ Europeans (i.e. whites) and how all the problems in western society were the fault of Muslims in general, and radical Islamists in particular. Many of the contributors to these chat rooms were based in the United Kingdom, with some openly identifying themselves as members of the English Defence League (EDL).

Before he launched his attacks in Oslo and Utoya Island, Breivik posted on one internet forum that he was “impressed” by the EDL and voiced the opinion that a similar organisation should be formed in Norway. After the attacks, an EDL spokesperson denied the group had any “official” contact with Breivik.

However, the English Defence League shares Breivik’s warped logic, believing that England is being overrun by Muslims and that, one day, if the EDL don’t stop them, these Muslims will somehow be able to impose the strict Islamic Sharia law across the whole country. Like the Jews in 1930s Germany, Muslims are the EDL’s scapegoats for all the ills afflicting England.

Of course, in reality, unemployment, poverty, poor housing and lack of opportunity are the result of policies carried out by successive UK Governments, bodies where the number of Muslims is extremely low. It is predominantly white, capitalist politicians that have created the problems being experienced by ordinary men and women, not just in England but also Scotland and right across western Europe. It is completely irrational to blame Muslims or any ethnic minority for the social problems of the UK, but we have to recognise that members of the EDL are not capable of rational thought. After all, this is the group that even hates the racist British National Party because, they believe, it is too soft on immigrants.

Shamefully, there is a copy-cat organisation in Scotland, the Scottish Defence League (bet they were up all night thinking-up that name). The SDL are also racists and bigots, blaming Muslims for Scotland’s social problems. Apparently, they also think we are about to succumb to Sharia law north of the border.

We should, though, keep things in perspective: the English Defence League is very much a minority organisation and, thankfully, there are even fewer intellectual and social inadequates drawn to the perverted cause in Scotland. The SDL can usually scrape together around 40 knuckle-draggers for one of their ‘big’ protests and, on every occasion they have tried to hold a march or rally in Scotland, even with support from their fraternal racist organisation in England, they have been heavily outnumbered by anti-racism protestors and police officers. Normally, the police corral the ‘thick boys’ of the SDL, allow them to howl at the sky for a wee while, and then run them out of town.

That is what happened last Saturday in Irvine. Just eight-days after the killings in Norway, the Scottish Defence League brought its racist bile to North Ayrshire. Thankfully, when the Muslim-haters attempted to hand out their racist leaflets, the people of Irvine shunned them. In fact, as he refused a leaflet, one local man loudly said, “If that’s the master race, God help us!”

The small group that had managed to find its way to the Bridgegate – at the Irvine Cross end of the Mall – were outnumbered, at least 3-to-1, by a cross-section of Scottish society brought together under an anti-racism banner. The intellectually-challenged SDL were no match and, rightly, were sent packing.

As a socialist, I believe in free speech and the right to protest. In fact, in the past, I have even argued, from a minority position, that those of us on the Left should be prepared to share a platform with the BNP, only because it gives us the opportunity to expose them for what they are, a despicable bunch of social inadequates who resort to racism to apportion blame for their own failings. However, when you have an organisation that shares many of the views expressed by a man who indiscriminately killed innocent people, and who want to hold a public ‘protest’ just days after that man’s attacks, then I think the outer reaches of tolerance have been breached.

Questions have to be asked over why SDL members were allowed to assemble in Irvine last Saturday – albeit there were only around 30 or 40 of them. Little more than a week after Anders Behring Breivik shot and bombed innocent people in reaction to his warped perception of the influence of Islam on Norwegian society, the SDL were spouting the same perversion of reality in North Ayrshire. That is not acceptable.

SDL members have carried racist banners and have verbally abused non-whites at almost every ‘protest’ they’ve had – their English counterparts, the EDL, have left a trail of violence in cities south of the border – yet both organisations remain legal. That, too, is unacceptable.

The Scottish Defence League and the English Defence League should be classified as extremist organisations, with the police tasked to monitor its members and their activities. Racism is a crime, and so should being a member of a racist organisation.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 30 2011.

The Strange Consequence of an SNP Government

For a nation with a Nationalist Government – and one with an overall majority in parliament – it’s strange how little we currently hear about independence.

We know there will be an Independence Referendum some time towards the end of the current Scottish Parliament administration, maybe 2014. The SNP promised the referendum in its Manifesto and it now has the parliamentary majority to deliver. So, we will finally get to have our say on whether or not we want Scotland to be a normal, independent nation.

That’s great, and I will certainly vote for independence when I get the chance. Unlike Scots in British Unionist political parties – Labour, Tory, Lib Dem – I have faith in the abilities of my fellow Scots. I know we can successfully run our own country, and I know we have the wealth and resources to provide a higher standard of living for our citizens.

However, I’m concerned that having an SNP Government in Edinburgh is lulling us into a false sense of security. Recent opinion surveys suggest many Scots believe we don’t need independence because we already have an SNP Government, a Scottish Government, standing-up to the English and protecting Scotland. That being the case, so the argument goes, why would we need ‘total separation’, to use the emotive language of the British Unionists?

It seems that a relatively successful SNP Government – within the constraints of devolution – is having an adverse affect on support for independence. Actually, that might be putting it too strongly, but what certainly seems to be the case is that, despite the relatively successful SNP Government, support for independence has not grown, which gives the lie to the argument of ‘gradualists’ within the SNP, that people would support independence only after they saw an SNP Government prove its competence in running a devolved administration.

Of course, in the run-up to the referendum, we can expect the SNP and other supporters of independence to make the case for Scotland re-establishing itself as a normal nation, with all the concomitant powers and responsibilities. At the same time, though, the British Unionists will trot-out the usual scare stories about border posts at Gretna, the elderly not getting their pensions and us not being able to visit our relatives in England, or watch Coronation Street on the telly. The referendum campaign will be a period of intense activity and much misinformation, so it would be helpful if the arguments for a normal, independent Scotland could be made now, and on a continuous basis, so that the voters who will decide Scotland’s future can do so from an informed position.

A clear illustration of the ‘false sense of security’ arising from there being an SNP Scottish Government in Edinburgh is the complete lack of any public action over the Tories having no mandate to force their right-wing policies on us, as the government of the United Kingdom. When the Tory Governments of Thatcher and Major were imposed on Scotland by the voters of England there were cross-party organisations formed, protest marches were held in Scottish cities, and newspapers were filled with letters highlighting the ‘democratic deficit’ that saw Scotland reject the Tories at the ballot box, only for them to end up governing us.

In May 2010 the people of Scotland again soundly rejected the Tory Party: only one Conservative was elected north of the border at the UK General Election. Overall, the Tories finished fourth in Scotland, one place behind the Liberal Democrats, and yet it’s those two parties that form the UK Government and are currently imposing on Scotland spending cuts running to billions-of-pounds. So why no cross-party groups opposing this action, why no marches in Scottish cities, why no letters pointing out the democratic deficit of Scottish votes counting for nothing in a UK context?

The answer is because we now have a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh and an SNP Government. How can there be a democratic deficit if we have our own parliament and a Scottish Nationalist Government? And so the false sense of security embraces Scottish thinking.

The reality of devolution is that our current Scottish Parliament is entirely answerable to the UK Parliament in London. Within the Scotland Act 1998, which established the Scottish Parliament, there are clauses that allow the UK Parliament to overrule any decision taken by the Scottish Parliament, and even one that permits Westminster to entirely abolish Scotland’s parliament, if it ever sees fit. Neither of those clauses will be deleted by the new Scotland Bill currently going through its legislative process in London.

As others long ago pointed out, power devolved is power retained. Westminster’s granting of a devolved parliament to Scotland was the British Unionist attempt to address Scottish anger over the democratic deficit. More importantly, from a British Unionist perspective, it was a device that would keep Scotland – and its oil wealth – within the Union, without giving us any major legislative powers.

Scotland has a parliament and a Nationalist Government, so we don’t need independence. That is the British Unionist argument, and it’s one that seems to be accepted by many, according to the polls mentioned earlier – but the argument and the apparent Scottish sense of security are false.

We may have a parliament building in Edinburgh, and SNP ministers legislating in areas of government for which Westminster has granted them competency, but the Scottish Parliament does not have any control over vital issues affecting Scotland, not least of which is the economy. The Tory-Lib Dem UK Government decides policy on Scotland’s economy: that’s the same Tory-Lib Dem parties Scots rejected at the ballot box – and they tell us there is no longer a democratic deficit.

Scotland’s parliament also has no say in the following areas of government:

Employment; Social Security; the constitution (including powers of devolved parliaments); foreign policy (including negotiations within the European Union on issues such as fishing and the Common Agricultural Policy); Immigration and Nationality; Defence and national security (including whether or not members of Scottish Regiments are sent to war); Fiscal, economic and monetary systems (including general taxation); Transport safety and regulation; Company law; Equality Rights; the naming and funding of political parties; Elections (including elections to the Scottish Parliament); the Civil Service (including Civil Servants working at the Scottish Parliament); Firearms; Intellectual Property; and Energy.

Just for good measure, Westminster also decides what we watch on TV in Scotland through its control of broadcasting legislation. Even the National Lottery is a Westminster responsibility.

So, Scotland may have a parliament and an SNP Government, but we remain very far from a position where we control what happens in our country. In fact, most of the powers we need to be able to govern Scotland in the interests of Scots are retained by Westminster and are still controlled by British Unionist politicians we rejected at the ballot box.

For us to regain the powers we need to build a better Scotland, we have to shake-off the false sense of security that polls appear to show is affecting many of us, and the SNP needs to raise its ambitions above competently running a devolved administration within the United Kingdom.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 23 2011.

Funding local government

The Poll Tax was ended because ordinary people would not tolerate its unfairness.

It speaks volumes about the Tories that they considered it a ‘principle’ that ‘we all receive the same local services, so we should all pay the same for them’, which was how they attempted to justify the flat-rate system of the Community Charge, to give the tax its proper name.

Tories believed – and probably still believe – that a Lord in his mansion should pay no more towards the provision of local government services than the amount also paid by his butler or gardener. The fact ordinary workers were paying a much larger percentage of their disposable income was acceptable to the Tories.

However, ordinary people saw through Tory propaganda: it was clear the Poll Tax did not take into account a person’s ability to pay, and was, therefore, unfair. The greater burden of local taxation had been transferred to those who could least afford to pay, which prompted protests, direct action and, eventually, riots.

Opponents of the Tories in ‘mainstream’ political parties still claim they brought down the Poll Tax but, in reality, it was the power of ordinary people that secured its demise.

To be fair, some parties did play a role in making the Poll Tax unworkable – for example, the SNP was at the forefront of the “Can Pay, Won’t Pay” campaign in North Ayrshire, where some activists put themselves between ordinary people and the Sheriff Officers sent out by the local Labour-controlled council to collect the Tory tax.

For those SNP activists, defending the poorest members of local communities wasn’t just a theory, they put it into practice by physically preventing Sheriff Officers from gaining access to people’s homes in order to carry out a poinding – the action where household items were sold-off, at rock-bottom prices, to raise a few pounds towards a person’s Poll Tax arrears.

Of course, that was in the days when the SNP was still a left-of-centre political party. None of the SNP activists who took on the Sheriff Officers in North Ayrshire are still members of the party.

Today, the SNP is in government and is the architect of the ‘Council Tax Freeze’, which is portrayed as saving money for ordinary people through there having been no rise, since 2003, in the tax that funds local government services.

On the face of it, the ‘Council Tax Freeze’ appears to do what it says on the tin – Council Tax has been frozen – and the policy is seen as a vote winner, which is why the Labour Party abandoned its own position and adopted the ‘Freeze’ ahead of last May’s Scottish Parliament Election. However, there is more to the SNP flagship policy than meets the eye.

It’s certainly true that individual households have ‘saved’ money, on the assumption that councils would have raised Council Tax levels each year since 2003, but those savings have to be seen against local authorities having less money with which to provide the services we all use. The SNP Government has provided councils with additional funding to ‘compensate’ for revenue lost by local government being unable to increase the Council Tax, but the amount provided does not take into account the specific needs and spending requirements of particular areas. So, notional savings can be more than wiped-out by councils having to cut services and staff numbers, which impact on all of us.

Another issue with the SNP’s ‘Council Tax Freeze’ is the way in which it diminishes the ability of individual councils to raise as much revenue as they require to deliver services in their areas, and to account to the public for those actions. What we have with the ‘Freeze’ is central government telling local government how to run its budgets, and essentially bribing council administrations into keeping down Council Tax levels.

The reality is that the ‘Council Tax Freeze’ cannot go on for ever. We cannot expect to be paying 2003-levels of tax and yet receive local government services that meet our 2011 needs. Given a free-hand, most council administrations, of whatever political complexion, would raise the Council Tax. They would take that action, not because they want to hit the public for more money, but because without increased funding, councils’ failure to meet our expectations will continue. Councillors, like politicians at every level, need to be able to make their own decisions and fund their policies: they also have to be wholly responsible for their actions, and face the public at the ballot box on that basis.

However, the SNP’s success in presenting the ‘Council Tax Freeze’ as a good thing hides another significant problem – the fact that the tax is also unfair.

The Council Tax was the Thatcher Government’s compromise, introduced when their first choice, the Poll Tax, was discredited and finally defeated. The Poll Tax itself had replaced the ‘rates’, a system where the amount you paid in local taxation depended on the rateable value of your property. Under the rates, the differential between the highest and lowest bills was 14 to 1: under the Council Tax it’s just 3 to 1. This cap on payments made by the richest members of communities has recently seen multi-millionaire banker Sir Fred Goodwin pay £2,338 in Council Tax for his Edinburgh mansion, while a registered nurse living in a council house paid £1,160. The nurse, as a percentage of her income, paid 120-times more than Goodwin.

For a tax to be fair it has to take into account a person’s ability to pay. One such system is the Scottish Service Tax proposed by the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP).

Under the Scottish Service Tax, and using the UK Government’s latest full-year financial figures, the Scottish Government would be able to raise an additional £1.5-billion a year. This could be achieved by utilising the tax’s sliding-scale of payments, which the SSP has set-out at:

Under £10,000 – zero
£10,000 - £30,000 – 4.5%
£30,000 - £50,000 – 10%
£50,000 - £75,000 – 15%
£70,000 - £100,000 – 18%
Over £100,000 – 20%.

As an example of how this would work, someone earning £25,000 would pay an annual Scottish Service Tax bill of £675 – the first £10,000 of their income would be exempt and the remainder would be taxed at 4.5-percent.

No-one likes paying tax, but it is through this system that we fund the services we all want and need. Therefore, if local government is to meet our requirements, we need to abandon the falsehood that freezing the Council Tax is ‘saving’ us money – ultimately it is costing us more. However, we must also ensure fairness is introduced to the funding of local government , by changing to a system that factors-in a person’s ability to pay, and ensures the wealthiest in local communities pay their dues in full. 

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 16 2011.

Why Scottish football isn't producing an Andy Murray

In the Gossip Section of last week’s the3towns, a piece referred to the English media’s attack on Andy Murray for having again failed to win Wimbledon.

Rightly, a reader of the3towns had pointed out that Murray is currently the fourth-best tennis player in the world, and had the Scotland football team reached such an elevated position in the FIFA World Rankings, we would all be absolutely delighted. It would be brilliant if Andy Murray actually won a Masters tournament, but his achievement in being amongst the world’s best players is something of which Scotland can be proud.

Murray’s world-ranking, and the likelihood he will continue to improve, is all the more remarkable when we consider how few Scottish children play tennis, and how thin on the ground are good facilities and coaches to allow development.

When we contrast how much money is directed into grassroots tennis and youth football, it is incredible we have managed to produce a world-class tennis player, while at the same time delivering a mediocre international football team. Is tennis getting things right and football wrong?

The answer is, ‘sort of’, with regard to tennis, and ‘definitely’ for football.

It would seem Andy Murray’s success may owe as much to his own personal drive, skill and commitment, coupled with the determination of his mum, as to anything done by the sport’s governing body in Scotland. However, it is fair to say that once the raw Murray talent was identified, the sport was able to nurture and develop it to the stage where ‘outsiders’ and better facilities were required to take it to a higher level.

Meanwhile, with professional football clubs in virtually every area of Scotland – including two that still aspire to competing on the European stage – very few ‘raw talents’ make it to national prominence, never mind the level of international recognition and achievement reached, even so far, by Andy Murray.

So, why is that the case?

One reason is the short-termism that pervades managers’ offices at football clubs up and down the country. Few managers can expect more than a year or two in the job before fans and directors begin to question the lack of success on the park. In the Premier League, how are teams other than the Old Firm supposed to build sides that can ‘be successful’ when pockets aren’t deep enough to secure top international talent and, more importantly, youth teams are broken-up when the players are too old to take part in the 19s League?

From 19s squads – even very successful ones - maybe a handful will be offered full-time contracts with their clubs: the others will be told its time to fend for themselves. Is it any wonder, then, that Scotland no longer produces the majority of Old Firm players, not to mention other Scottish sides in the Premier and lower divisions, when we discard potential at the age of 19?

Costs are cited by most clubs as the grounds for being unable to retain the services of all the players who have come through the ranks, but – as with the situation relating to youth teams – most young players would be willing to play for the jersey – and possibly out-of-pocket expenses – in order to have the chance to further develop their talent. Surely there is scope for allowing our young men to stay within the senior game - and all that comes with it in terms of professional attitude, training and skills development – than see them drop down to the Juniors or Amateurs, where they will play games, but any chance of nurturing talent is lost?

How many young Scottish players could be retained at senior clubs beyond the age of 19, enhancing the possibility they could develop into top players, for the money forked-out by Scottish teams – and not just the Old Firm – on buying run-of-the-mill foreigners and paying them upwards of £10,000 per week?

Again, the precarious nature of football management and the short-termist attitude of directors and fans means seasoned foreign professionals are seen as a higher priority than spending money to allow young, Scottish talent to develop and reach the highest possible standard.

When Celtic were winning the European Cup with eleven players from within a 30-mile radius of Glasgow, abandoning the next generation of players at the age of 19 would have seen the Parkhead club miss out on such talents as Kenny Dalglish, Danny McGrain, David Hay and Lou Macari. Of course, it can be argued that those particular players would have made it anyway, they would have been the ‘handful’ that was retained under the modern system, but other young Celts also benefitted from playing in the reserves alongside first team players returning from injury, like Bobby Murdoch, Bertie Auld and John Hughes. Even reserve football allowed further development of skills and attitude, and many who never made it at Celtic Park – in a team of European champions – went on to have relatively successful professional careers with other clubs, and enhanced the quality of the Scottish League.

Today, those young players, cut from the senior game at 19, could find themselves lining up for a Junior side and playing against teams whose idea of competing on the park is to make sure opponents don’t get a kick of the ball, one way or another.

It would seem there is no way of turning back the short-termist tide – managers want to keep their jobs. Directors and fans demand instant success, even if that is a relative term, so foreign players will continue to be bought, but if Scotland ever wants to field a successful national team, then those who run the game need to face-up to the fact that so many potential top-flight footballers have their dreams ended at the tender age of 19, when many could be brought forward into a strong Reserve League where their talents could be nurtured and developed.

Nineteen is too young to be turning away raw talent. Scotland will never have a national football team ranking as highly as Andy Murray if we don’t invest in our young players and give them as much opportunity as possible to develop to their full potential.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 9 2011.

News of the World

The News of the World died as it had lived....destroying people’s lives.

As a member of the National Union of Journalists, I’m appalled that so many reporters and newspaper production staff have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. It was not rank-and-file Journalists or sub-editors or printers who hacked into people’s phones, including those of murder victims and members of their immediate family. The senior editors and executives who sanctioned such heinous acts are still in their jobs, but around 400 dedicated staff members have been given their P45s, without consultation or just cause.

Rupert Murdoch, the arch-Capitalist who runs News Corporation, the News of the World’s parent company, took the decision to close the tabloid newspaper because of the general public’s reaction to how its bosses had behaved. People were shocked and angry. Businesses pulled their advertising. Murdoch looked at the situation and decided to close down the News of the World before it affected other parts of his global news corporation. The action had nothing to do with any contrition or feeling of having done wrong by Rupert Murdoch and his senior managers: the motivation was financial. Murdoch wanted to safeguard his profit margins, and staff members who had nothing to do with the scandal that engulfed the News of the World were considered to be expendable and paid with their jobs.

Already there is speculation that Murdoch saw an opportunity to reduce staff numbers and production costs by closing the News of the World and rescheduling working-time rotas at the Sun, moving that paper to seven-day publishing and introducing a ‘Sun on Sunday’ to replace the News of the World. It would seem that, when you are a money-grabbing Capitalist rogue like Rupert Murdoch, even dark clouds cast by your company being caught hacking into the phones of murdered schoolgirls and dead soldiers can have a financial silver lining.

Of course, I’m biased in this matter. I’m a Journalist and a socialist. I stand on the side of ethical journalism. I stand on the side of the people’s right to know and of full disclosure.

Readers have to be able to trust a newspaper’s content and know that reporters have secured information on a legitimate basis.

However, the News of the World appears to think ethics is a county in England. Along with its sister title - the Sun - the News of the World was most responsible for the low esteem in which tabloid journalists are held by much of the public. Yet even those who already despised the newspaper and its gutter content must have been shocked at the latest revelations regarding the phone-hacking scandal.

What started as a run-of-the-mill story about a private investigator working for the News of the World and listening into the voicemail messages of Z-list celebrities and wannabes, suddenly became extremely serious. Allegations that News of the World bosses sanctioned the hacking of mobile phones belonging to murder victims and their immediate families took the paper to new, previously unimaginable depths.

It’s also been common knowledge that certain newspapers will pay for a story, but disclosure that the News of the World broke the law by paying serving police officers for information about live investigations raised issues of corruption at the heart of an organisation the public must be able to trust. The demise of the News of the World leaves unanswered questions, such as, who was calling the shots in these investigations, and to which paymaster were police officers answering?

In addition to the latest revelations, the News of the World had a long history of what it liked to call ‘stings’, where covert recordings were made of celebrities or public figures making unguarded or tactless comments. Another word for what the paper did is entrapment.

Meanwhile, at the time of writing, it was being speculated that the former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson – who was subsequently head of the prime minister’s press office – might be facing arrest. Certainly, evidence now exists that suggests Coulson perjured himself at the Tommy Sheridan perjury trial. It would seem Mr Coulson doesn’t do irony.

When asked by Tommy Sheridan if the News of the World had ever paid corrupt police officers, Andy Coulson replied, under oath, “Not to my knowledge.” Unfortunately for him, though, the News of the World had apparently retained copies of e-mails that record Mr Coulson as the senior official at the newspaper who signed-off payments to individual police officers. Perhaps the former Downing Street spin-doctor will argue he gave an honest answer to Tommy’s question, on the basis that when he authorised the payments the police were not corrupt, but they were when they pocketed the paper’s money.

Journalists need to cultivate sources, and must be prepared to protect those who speak-out and reveal issues that are of public interest. However, there is a world of difference between legitimate sources providing information to substantiate a story, and what the News of the World did – which apparently included manufacturing stories, corrupting officials, illegally intercepting personal phone messages and even possibly misleading investigating police officers and grieving parents. Nothing can condone or legitimise the News of the World’s actions, and Murdoch’s decision to sack the workers, while retaining the bosses behind the phone hacking and bribing of police, simply compounds the disgrace.

Few will mourn the passing of the News of the World – but the wrong people are paying the price of Rupert Murdoch’s greed and the malicious and unforgivable behaviour of his senior executives.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 2 2011.

How the global collapse of capitalism has impacted on the Three Towns

Recently, thanks to modern technology, I’ve been catching-up with a girl I knew throughout my school days. I say ‘girl’, but of course we are now both just a wee bit beyond the ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ stage in our lives.

She left Scotland in 1983 and has built a life in Australia. On the other side of the world she married, raised children and carved-out a career. She has, in fact, spent more of her life in Australia than she did in Scotland, and that situation made me think about the other people who shared our class at Stanley Primary school in the late 60s, and then Ardrossan Academy – in American parlance, we were the ‘Class of 76’.

Some of our contemporaries have died, far too young. Others, I haven’t a clue what happened to them. However, I do know that very few from our year still live in the Three Towns area. Some emigrated to far-flung parts of the world, corners of Britain’s imperialist past, like Australia, Canada and South Africa. Others moved to England, primarily London, to find work. Still more have relocated within Scotland.

Off the top of my head, I can think of maybe just four or five people who were members of the Class of 76, and who I still come across, now and again, in the local area. There could be more and I just don’t recognise them – it’s been a while – but that seems to be the reality, and I don’t think my year was in any way unique. The same situation was almost certainly replicated in other local schools, and in other years.

Another factor to bear in mind when we consider this apparent exodus is that when the Class of 76 left school, there were still plenty of jobs in the local area. ICI was in full flow at Ardeer – both Nobel’s Explosives Company and the Organics Division – and at the Nylon Plant. Smaller manufacturing facilities, like the Metallic, also employed significant numbers, while the local commercial and retail sectors offered work, too. Further afield, in relative terms, there was Hyster in Irvine, the MoD at Beith and, of course, the power stations at Hunterston.

Back then, there was work, and many males of my age were fortunate to be offered apprenticeships – ICI, alone, used to take around twenty school leavers in the summer, and another ten-or-so of those who left full-time education after the Christmas break. However, by the time my age group had completed their apprenticeships and emerged as qualified tradesmen, the world had changed. Well, maybe not the world, but certainly Britain.

In 1979 our neighbours south of the border elected as Prime Minister the woman who, for me, is the personification of evil, Margaret Thatcher. She set about ‘transforming’ the country. For ‘transforming’ read dividing, dislocating and destroying.

Thatcher’s Tory Government completely embraced the unfettered free-market, where all that mattered was a very small elite making huge amounts of money, even if that meant closing-down the country’s manufacturing industries, in order that goods could be produced more cheaply in foreign, sweatshop economies, where employers paid poverty wages, and small matters like Health and Safety could be entirely ignored.

As a result, many of my contemporaries found they had to move further and further afield to find work, and things got progressively worse for subsequent local school-leavers. Apprenticeships got fewer and fewer, until the companies offering them finally closed their operations, transferring entire production lines to countries like Vietnam and China.

In other parts of the country, perfectly viable coalmines were closed, because it was cheaper to ship inferior coal from countries like Columbia – it was cheaper because wages were minimal, virtually nothing was spent on keeping miners safe underground, and many of those digging-out the coal were children. Thatcher was one of those people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Her policies resulted in a massive rise in unemployment, manufacturing industries being permanently closed, entire communities having their hearts ripped-out and decent, hard-working people being thrown on the scrap-heap.

Meanwhile, those who could get out, got out – and who could blame them.

Since the 1980s and the devastation wreaked by Thatcher and her Tory henchmen, we’ve had more of the same from Tony ‘Tory Boy’ Blair and his New Labour Party, which, if anything, attempted even to out-Tory the Tories. Gordon Brown went further, removing regulation from the banking industry and the financial sector, leading to unbridled greed and corruption by the so-called ‘Masters of the Universe’ in the City of London, which, in turn, played such a significant part in the collapse of the Capitalist system.

Now, we have David Cameron, the ideological son of Thatcher, whose Government – backed by the Liberal Democrats, to their shame – is forcing ordinary men and women to pay for the economic carnage caused by Capitalists, both in and out of government.

For more than thirty years we have been told there is only one game in town – free-market capitalism. Even now, in the aftermath of the collapse of the capitalist system, the austerity measures and cuts we’re all facing are designed to refloat the markets and allow the capitalists to begin all over again. We bailed them out, so they can re-establish the system that grinds us down.

So many of my former school-mates didn’t leave the local area because they fancied an extended, working holiday abroad or in England. They left because the capitalist system, in its pursuit of ever-greater profits, decreed that manufacturing, and the jobs that go with it, should be based where costs were lowest – in other words, where workers and suppliers could be most exploited.

The same economic system that caused the financial disaster for which we are all now paying, is also directly responsible for the demise of towns like Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston, and for the significant numbers of our fellow citizens who’ve had to move away.

If we really want to change things, if we really want to create a society that provides hope and opportunity for our children and grandchildren, then we need to put people before profit and allow local communities to be rebuilt by creating sustainable, well-paid employment in jobs where we produce to meet our needs.

We need to break free from the indoctrination that, for so long, has told us Capitalism is the only game in town. Capitalism is based on the rich ‘few’ exploiting the poor ‘majority’, and we can end it by creating a more just, more equitable society.

Of course, that will only happen when we are prepared to embrace socialism.

Now, how did that last sentence appear to you? Did you feel socialism is a viable alternative? No? See how well the capitalist indoctrination has worked.

(c) the3towns.com 

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the3towns.com June 25 2011.

Time to ditch the 'Scottish cringe'

Last Tuesday night I caught some of the debate as the House of Commons discussed the Scotland Bill.

Just before 10:00pm the Chamber was beamed live via the BBC’s Parliament Channel and, believe me, it was perfect viewing...if you wanted to drift off to sleep. I appreciate those taking part in the debate at that time of night might not have been at their best, but I will never again listen to those who would have us believe that the level of debate at Westminster is superior to the Scottish Parliament.

The speeches were woeful and, on a number of occasions, were entirely bereft of relevance – mainly when English Tories were speaking. Given the Bill being debated proposes a new devolved settlement for Scotland, it would have helped if some of the Tories had even a tenuous grasp on the realities of either devolution or Scottish affairs: knowledge of both was clearly asking way too much.

Time after time, Tories – and, notably, former Labour minister Frank Field – attacked the actions of the SNP Scottish Government in introducing free prescription charges, free personal care for the elderly and free tuition fees for Scottish students. Field said Scotland receiving all these things, while his English constituents did not get them, was “souring” the relationship between the two countries. Others stated that any referendum on Scottish independence should be voted on by the entire electorate of Britain, with more than one MP voicing the opinion that Scotland might reject independence, but the people of England would tell us we should have it.

One English Tory bleated, “No one from Scotland can tell me why it is that Scotland should have free this and free that, while my constituents south of the border have to pay, and pay too for Scotland to have these things for free.”

Sadly, the response from one of the SNP MPs left a lot to be desired: all he could come up with was, “The difference is we have an SNP Government in Scotland.” Now, that reply might pass for a witty put-down at 10:00pm on a Tuesday night, but given there was a glaring opportunity to, metaphorically, knock an ignorant Tory all over the chamber, it has to go down as a missed chance.

Firstly, the Tory, like so many of his British Unionist colleagues, appears to be still labouring under the idea that a benevolent England simply hands Scotland some of its money and allows the Jocks to get on with it – only for them to spend it on mad things like providing social care, health benefits and free access to higher education. In fact, the money the Scottish Government receives as a block grant from Westminster is just part of the total sum we, as Scots, contribute. Scots pay income and corporation taxes, and two of the biggest annual contributors to the Westminster Exchequer are revenues from North Sea oil and the Scotch Whisky industry. Scotland more than pays its way, and the money used to provide free prescriptions, free personal care and free student fees is Scottish money.

Secondly, if people in England are missing out on such ‘free’ services, then that is a matter for the English Government in London. Yes, I know, it calls itself the British Government, but as there is a parliament in Edinburgh and legislative assemblies in Belfast and Cardiff, the body that has responsibility for domestic issues in England is Westminster, so it is the English Parliament. It was just a tad ironic that Tories were complaining their English constituents were getting a poor deal, when it is their own party that leads the English Government and has decided its priorities do not include the policies pursued by the SNP administration in Scotland.

As for the notion that the English should get a say on Scottish independence: if, as was suggested during the Scotland Bill debate, they would overwhelmingly vote for us to go our own way, then I’m all for it.

Now, setting aside the MPs lack of knowledge about Scotland and the financial and constitutional relationships between us and our southern neighbours, the actual speaking abilities of Honourable Members was dire. Again, I appreciate the late hour of the debate, but some of the MPs could barely string together a coherent sentence. However, such a failing did not stop them from going on, and on, and on, and on. It really was truly awful at times.

The Scottish Parliament has regularly been criticised for the poor quality of its debates and speakers, sometimes justifiably – but, compared with the Scotland Bill last Tuesday night, I have never witnessed a Holyrood debate where contributors were so ill-informed and apparently incapable of coherent speech.

It seems, once again, Scotland has been on the receiving end of English cultural imperialism – the argument being that Westminster is better than the Scottish Parliament, simply because it is Westminster. From what I saw on the BBC Parliament Channel last week, those MPs are very Second Division compared with some MSPs I could mention.

It is high time Scots shook-off the indoctrination of 300 years and the belief that England and the English do things better than us. They don’t. Scots are perfectly capable of running our own affairs, governing ourselves at home and representing ourselves on the world stage. We also pay our way, contrary to the opinions of British Unionist MPs who seem to have forgotten how revenue from oil fields in the Scottish sector of the North Sea has kept afloat the British economy for the past thirty-years.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com June 18 2011. 

Why we should support the June 30 strikers

On June 30 many public sector workers will withdraw their labour, as is their right in a democracy.

Contrary to the opinion of right-wing English newspapers – most of which are also sold in Scotland – workers do not take strike action at the drop of a hat or just to have a day off. Striking is always the last resort because the immediate effect of withdrawing your labour is a reduction in take-home pay and, with things already very difficult for most families, no-one would voluntarily make things worse unless they felt there was no alternative.

If you listen to editorials in newspapers like the Daily Mail, Daily Express, the Telegraph or the Sun, public sector workers are being greedy. Tory politicians – and, to their shame, Liberal Democrats too – attack ordinary people for seeking to defend their right to a decent pension, and for trying to protect jobs and public services.

Last Wednesday evening, Sky News – part-owned by Tory-supporting billionaire Rupert Murdoch – gave ten minutes of almost uninterrupted airtime to Conservative minister Francis Maude, who used it to attack the PCS trade union for calling the June 30 strike. According to Maude, leaders of the PCS had no legitimate mandate for strike action because ‘only’ 61% of members had supported it, on a turnout of 32%. If we apply the ‘logic’ of Francis Maude to the 2010 UK General Election result in Scotland, we find there was a turnout of 64% across the country and that, between them, the Tories and their Lib Dem coalition partners achieved just 36% support. Clearly, therefore, the Tory-Lib Dem Government in London has no legitimate mandate to impose their cuts and austerity measures in Scotland... but they’re doing it.

Maude also argued that public sector workers couldn’t expect to retain their current pension entitlement because it was better than what is on offer in the private sector. Let’s look at that ‘logic’ again: Tories never tire of telling us that the private sector is so much better and more efficient than the public sector – which is the line they use to ‘justify’ handing over public services to profit-driven private companies – so how can it be that the private sector can’t ‘compete’ with the public sector in terms of pension provision?

One reason is that, while directors and bosses of private companies have vastly increased their own pension pots, employer contributions to staff pensions have been slashed. Over the same period the value of wages has declined from almost 65% of GDP in the mid-1970s to 55% today, while the rate of corporate profit has increased from 13% to 21%.

Another line often trotted-out by Tories is that public sector pensions are unfair because we, as taxpayers, have to fund them. In fact, there is a very good reason why we, as taxpayers, help fund the pensions of those who work in the public sector – those workers are employed to provide services for us, and we are their employers. Incidentally, we also fund private sector pensions. Every time we buy a product or service from a private company we contribute to their turnover, and the only reason some workers in the private sector have pensions that don’t come up to the standard of those in the public sector, is because company bosses are maximising profits by cutting wages and employer’s pension contributions.

Rather than attacking supposedly ‘high’ pensions in the public sector, questions should be asked over why private companies, in general, care so little for their employees that they have consistently presided over the erosion of wages, conditions and pension entitlements, while maximising profits and remuneration for directors and senior managers. Actually, there is no need to ask such questions – we already know the answer. It’s capitalism, which is all about making huge amounts of money for the few by exploiting the majority.

Faced with attacks from Government and employers, it is little wonder that many public sector workers have said ‘enough’, and have agreed to begin a fight-back by withdrawing their labour on June 30.

In fact, its worth having a closer look at why many public sector workers will take strike action. The Tory-Lib Dem Government has decided council and NHS employees, and many others, will have to work longer and pay more for a reduced pension in retirement. This, the UK Government says, is necessary because the country is skint.

Now, the first point to make is that, if we are skint, then that situation was not caused by nurses and council workers. If we are ‘all in this together’, why are ordinary workers footing the bill while the bankers who caused the collapse of capitalism are once again awarding themselves massive salaries and, in many cases, bonuses running to six-figures?

Secondly, we are told savage cuts and grinding austerity measures are necessary because Britain’s national debt currently stands at around 60% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total output produced within the UK. However, between 1918 and 1961 the national debt was over 100% of GDP, and during that period we saw the creation of the welfare state and the NHS, state pensions were introduced, as was comprehensive education, and millions of council houses were built. In addition, the public sector and the economy both grew.

The fact is, even if there had been no crisis in capitalism, the Tories would still be slashing public spending, they would still be privatising public services, and they would still be demanding workers take pay cuts and accept reduced pensions. That’s what they always do. It’s ideological and is driven by a philosophy based on naked self-interest and a willingness to exploit others.

Margaret Thatcher began the process of dividing Britain between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. The policies implemented by her government destroyed industries, entire communities and people’s lives. Today, towns like Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston continue to carry the scars of lost employment and cuts to public spending: and make no mistake, David Cameron is truly Thatcher’s ideological son.

There is no need for austerity measures. There is no need for public spending to be slashed. There is no need for public sector workers to be forced into working longer, paying more and receiving less in pension entitlement.

The Tories are waging war against the public sector and the ordinary men and women of this country. We should support those who are prepared to fight back and, on June 30, we should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the public sector workers who will withdraw their labour. Their fight is our fight.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com June 11 2011.

There is always money for war

As the UK Government’s austerity measures result in cuts to public services, people losing their jobs and increasing hardship in communities the length and breadth of the country, isn’t it strange that we can still find the money to wage wars in Afghanistan and Libya?

It’s now ten years since young British soldiers were sent to kill and be killed in Afghanistan. Can you remember the reasons why that country was invaded by the US and Britain? Okay, I’ll save you Googling it: in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocity in New York, the US administration of George W Bush launched its ‘War on Terror’ and decided Afghanistan was the most urgent target. This was despite almost all of those who took part in the attack on the Twin Towers having been Saudi Arabian.

The American argument was that al Qaeda training camps were located in Afghanistan – they were also to be found in Pakistan, but the latter country is considered a ‘friend’ of the West and, for good measure, possesses nuclear weapons. The aims of the strike against Afghanistan were: to capture Osama bin Laden; to overthrow the Taliban; and to destroy al Qaeda’s ability to attack the West.

The first of those aims was only recently achieved, sort of, if we stretch the meaning of ‘capture’ to include ‘kill’. Setting aside the fact that bin Laden was finally tracked down to a house in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, there was no way the American Special Forces who dropped into his compound were ever going to take him alive. Can you imagine Osama bin Laden in the dock of an American court, telling the world’s media about how the US Government funded and supported his movement while it fought the forces of the former Soviet Union in the late seventies and through much of the eighties? Not only did the CIA supply money and weapons to bin Laden and the Taliban, they also arranged for Mujahideen fighters to be trained by American forces.

Of course, those stories are the ones the CIA doesn’t any longer try to deny. What America feared about putting bin Laden in the dock – other than potential reprisal attacks on US cities during a trial – was all the other information he could have divulged. Things like the long-standing business links between the bin Ladens and the Bush family. Things like who actually knew about the attack on the Twin Towers before it happened. Things like continued covert links between US government agencies and organisations the same American government officially lists as terrorists. All of which is only scratching the surface.

Perhaps summary execution is all bin Laden deserved, but if we – countries of the West - now condone such action, rather than arresting and bringing fugitives to justice in a court of law and forcing them to answer for their actions, then what separates us from the terrorists?

As for the other two aims behind the invasion of Afghanistan: neither has been achieved. Ten years down the line – and after the deaths of hundreds of young British men – the Taliban still control much of the country and will re-take the rest once US and UK forces withdraw. Meanwhile, the 2005 attacks in London and the 2007 car-bombing at Glasgow Airport show us that indiscriminate terrorist plots are as likely to be carried out by Bradford community workers or Renfrewshire Doctors as by Wahabi fanatics tutored in remote Afghan madrassas.

Then there was the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. As virtually everyone now acknowledges, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, lied to the UK Parliament and the people of this country in order to make a case for war. There never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that country never, at any time, posed a threat to Britain. The whole reason the USA and the UK unleashed ‘shock and awe’ on the innocent people of Iraq was to topple the country’s leader and gain unfettered access to the country’s massive oil reserves. Saddam Hussein had once been a favoured friend but had fallen from grace after he began restricting American access to Iraqi oil fields and threatened to sell oil in currencies other than the Dollar.

During the six years of the Iraq war and occupation, official Ministry of Defence figures show 179 young British men paid with their lives for America to gain control of Iraqi oil. In addition, over 5,000 UK armed services personnel were, as the MoD terms it, ‘injured’. These injuries were not a grazed knee or a twisted ankle. Thousands of young men lost limbs, some were blinded and others will never again be able to enjoy a life without pain.

Now, despite the country facing the worst economic conditions since the 1930s, and with the Conservative-led UK Government punishing ordinary people for the gross incompetence of Tory-supporting bankers and financiers, we are embarked again on another war – this time against a section, possibly a majority, of the Libyan population.

The ongoing occupation of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq has cost UK taxpayers billions of pounds – in addition to the horrendous and needless loss of life. In Libya, British, American and French war planes are flying around 50 ‘sorties’ per day, firing missiles that cost hundreds-of-thousands of pounds each, and killing innocent Libyans. Meanwhile – expressly against United Nations Resolution 1973 – US and British Special Forces personnel are on the ground in Libya, directing fire and assisting the ‘rebels’ to overthrow the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. It is conservatively estimated that this ‘conflict’ will also end up costing UK taxpayers over a billion pounds.

Again, totally against the United Nations Resolution that sanctioned military action in Libya, America, Britain and France are seeking to effect ‘regime change’ in Libya. The UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has already said there can be no resolution to the conflict until Gaddafi has gone.

Muammar Gaddafi has, in the eyes of the US and UK, gone from bad guy to good guy – who can forget his kiss and cuddle in the desert with Tony Blair just a few years ago – and back to bad guy. Now UK armed forces are supporting Libyan ‘rebels’ to overthrow him – but just who are these rebels? It is believed some of them want to restore the Libyan monarchy overthrown by Gaddafi in 1969, while others are sympathetic to al Qaeda.

While ordinary people across this country are struggling to survive because of austerity measures and funding cuts imposed by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government in London, it seems we have plenty of money to wage war in Libya and help fund a disparate group of armed rebels.

Of course, Scotland did not vote for the Tory-Lib Dem Government that prioritises foreign wars over the interests of people in this country, but while we remain just a region of the UK, rather than a normal independent nation, Scots will continue to have Westminster decisions and policies imposed on us.

You may also wonder why Gaddafi suddenly became a bad guy again and why the UK and US see it as an imperative that he is removed from his role as leader of Libya. Prior to the current conflict a number of foreign companies were involved in extracting oil from the Libyan desert, including Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil, Marathon and Occidental (mainly British and American). In 2009, Muammar Gaddafi indicated the Libyan Government was considering the nationalisation of foreign companies due to the, at that time, low price of oil. In a national television broadcast, Gaddafi said, “Oil exporting countries should opt for nationalisation because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously.”

The Libyan leader also said, “Oil should be owned by the State, so we could better control prices by an increase or decrease in production.”

We were told Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction and removing a brutal dictator, when it was actually all about oil. We are now being told Libya is about protecting people and removing a brutal dictator but, again, it’s all about oil.

What sort of democracy do we have in Scotland when a government we didn’t elect can spend millions-of-pounds of our money waging a war abroad, while imposing devastating funding cuts at home, and where national broadcasters and newspapers simply regurgitate government spin as to the reason for our bombardment of a foreign country?

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com June 4 2011.

Private companies in the public sector

During my time as an MSP I dealt with many public and private organisations, pursuing constituents’ cases and trying to resolve issues of concern. That’s part of what elected politicians do.

The reason I mention it now is because, of all the private companies I had cause to speak with on behalf of a constituent, one, above all others , sticks in my mind for the negative way in which they conducted themselves. That company was Southern Cross, providers of 750 care homes around the UK.

The reason I had to speak with Southern Cross was because an elderly relative of a constituent had died while a resident of one of the company’s homes. There had been money outstanding to Southern Cross when the woman died, and, as there had been insufficient funds in the deceased’s estate, the company sought payment from the relatives.

I won’t go into great detail here, but the relevant point is that Southern Cross was not prepared to listen to reason and, instead, indicated their determination to recover the full outstanding amount, which was a few hundred pounds. I was equally determined they should write-off the debt, so things had reached a period of stalemate when the 2007 Scottish Parliament Election intervened. Unfortunately, as I was not returned at that election, I was unable to further pursue the matter.

However, the reason I raise the name of Southern Cross and their hard-line attitude in pursuing money they believed was owed to them will be obvious to anyone who has seen television news bulletins or read national newspapers this week. Southern Cross is in financial trouble and has asked people to whom they owe money to accept less than the total outstanding. Suddenly, when it is them that owes money, the company looks for others to be reasonable and to offer assistance.

Specifically, Southern Cross has sought a one-third reduction in rent from the companies that own the care homes they lease and operate. Now, that may seem a strange arrangement. The country’s largest care home provider doesn’t actually own the buildings in which its homes are located. It is even more strange when we consider that Southern Cross did own them at one time.

At the height of the property boom Southern Cross decided to sell all of its property, raising a multi-million pound sum and securing significant dividend payments for the company’s share holders, which is what capitalism is all about – profit.

This deal meant that hundreds of care homes in Britain became owned by a wide range of businesses, including private banks and pension funds. Some were bought by other care home operators. However, part of the sell-off deal was that Southern Cross would lease back the properties, with annual rent increases factored into the agreement. Southern Cross has now broken those agreements and has asked its landlords to accept considerably reduced payment.

Lurking in the background of Southern Cross’s attempts to renegotiate its rental payments is the threat that care homes could close and hundreds of vulnerable, elderly people could be thrown onto the street. Of course, such considerations don’t even come close to penetrating the stone-like hearts of the venture capitalists who bought the care homes as a means of generating income. They have agreed to rental reductions so that Southern Cross stays in business, the logic being that a reduced income is better than no income – but the residents of care homes are not their concern.

That said, the vast majority of people resident in Southern Cross care homes are placed there by public bodies, such as local councils and the NHS. Those organisations and the Scottish Government are closely monitoring the situation and, if necessary, will step in to safeguard the health, wellbeing and residential status of each individual caught-up in Southern Cross’s financial problems.

So, yet again, it looks like the public sector will be expected to bail-out a failed capitalist enterprise, just like we did when privately-owned banks collapsed because of their own profligacy and greed.

Southern Cross presently has around 31,000 people resident in its homes, and there are many other private operators of such facilities. Surely, now, even those who support private enterprise encroaching into the public sector must question the logic of placing so many vulnerable, elderly citizens into the hands of companies whose primary function is not the provision of care but the maximisation of profit and share-holder dividends.

Just last week, in this column, I told the story of an 89 year-old Saltcoats man who has been failed by a private company contracted by North Ayrshire Council to provide ‘care at home’ services. On a number of occasions the company has not even turned up at the man’s home, which meant that, had his 73 year-old neighbour not stepped in, he would have been left without food and vital care over a period of many hours.

Cash-strapped local councils, like North Ayrshire, see the contracting-out of some services as a cheaper option than providing them ‘in-house’. Indeed, private companies will submit tenders that clearly undercut council departments, but mostly those bids for contracts are not comparing like-for-like. For example, staff of the private contractors will be paid considerably less than council workers – most are on the minimum wage; they will have to buy their own uniforms and use their own mobile phones; they will have no ‘travel time’ – meaning less time actually spent with ‘clients’ – and will receive minimal, if any, training.

At the very least, contracting-out is a false economy. At worst, when it relates to the care of vulnerable, elderly people, it can produce failures that could prove life-threatening. Then, of course, as we have seen with Southern Cross, when private companies fail, the public sector is expected to step back in and save the day.

As citizens we all require certain services, which we pay for through general taxation. Funding raised by taxation is public money, which should be used to pay for public services, provided by the public sector. Private companies, whose motivation is financial profit, should not be allowed to exploit public services and often vulnerable people.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 28 2011.

The disgrace of 'care at home' in North Ayrshire

In England, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government has announced a major overhaul of the National Health Service. Essentially, what is being proposed is something similar to the previous changes that happened under the Thatcher administrations of the 1980s – they’re privatising the NHS.

Of course, this action on the part of a Conservative Government should come as no surprise. After all, privatisation – allowing private companies to cherry-pick potentially lucrative areas of public services - is standard Tory ideology. As for the Liberal Democrats? Well, they have already begun to pay the electoral price of their actions in facilitating such right-wing policies – hundreds of seats lost at local government elections in England, and reduced to just five MSPs in the Scottish Parliament.

In Scotland, we have our own government and, therefore, will not have imposed on us the Tory-Lib Dem privatisation of the Health Service. However, as Scotland currently remains merely a devolved region of the UK – rather than a normal, independent nation - any reduced funding of the NHS in England will result in a consequential cut to the block grant that funds the work of the Scottish Government in Edinburgh. So we won’t emerge entirely unscathed from the ideologically-driven health reforms carried out by a Tory-Lib Dem UK Government we soundly rejected at the polls.

Also, here in Scotland, we have to face the reality of slashed public sector budgets – Westminster-imposed cuts have resulted in the Scottish Government having its funding cut by almost £2-billion this year, with a knock-on reduction in money made available to local councils. Again, this is the result of ideologically-driven policies from the Tory-led Government in London. We don’t need to be making cuts: we should be investing in our public services and creating well-paid jobs, which would result in a greater tax-take for the government and a boost to the commercial retail sector from increased personal spending power.

So, let’s be clear, disgracefully-high unemployment levels and cuts to local services in North Ayrshire have not happened by chance, nor are they the result of an evil spell cast by pad pixies. These things are the consequence of decisions taken by politicians – in London, Edinburgh and Irvine.

Now, against that background, I want to tell you a story that should shame and shock us all. It relates to a man who lives in Saltcoats. He is 89 years-old, served as a wartime fighter pilot in the RAF and then had a successful career in business.

Since the death of his wife some years ago the man has lived on his own. He is now registered blind and has also had a catheter fitted. However, with adequate support, he is able to remain in his own home.

The crucial words in the last sentence are “with adequate support”. North Ayrshire Council administers the provision of ‘care at home’ services for people like the man in our story. My understanding is that Council staff generally provide a very good level of service, but senior management at North Ayrshire – backed by the Labour councillors who run the Council – have embarked on privatising much of the ‘care at home’ work. According to figures presented in the Council’s budget for the current financial year, NAC anticipates ‘saving’ around £400,000 by withdrawing from directly providing care to approximately fifty-percent of local people who need it. Instead, they will continue to award contracts to private companies to provide the service.

The motivation for these contractors, like all private companies, is to make money. Private ‘care at home’ companies often spend less time with ‘clients’, resulting in less being done for those requiring care. Such firms also pay their staff much less than the Council workers they replace, and many expect their employees to buy their own uniforms and use their own mobile phones when contacting the office. At least one such private company with a North Ayrshire Council contract also does not provide staff with ‘travel time’ between ‘clients’. In other words, it is impossible for staff to maintain the schedule of ‘visits’ unless they cut-short the time they spend with each ‘client’.

Clients’ needs are assessed by the Council and our 89 year-old Saltcoats man needs four ‘visits’ per day. During these visits care staff should help him wash, dress and, crucially, ensure his catheter is emptied. Now, there is a very long list of failures relating to this man’s care but, for the purpose of this article, I’m going to restrict my references to just one day last week. Staff from the private company did not turn-up for the last two ‘visits’ of the day, meaning the man’s 73 year-old female neighbour – not a relative – had to make his dinner, prepare him for bed and ensure his catheter was emptied. This was far from the first time she’d had to perform the role of carer in such circumstances.

Had the neighbour not done the work for which the private company is paid by the Council (as we fund the Council it is us who pay them), the man would have had no food from lunchtime one day until breakfast the next. Disgracefully, his catheter would not have been emptied either, with potentially fatal consequences.

On a number of occasions when this private company has failed to deliver the care for which they are paid, the man’s neighbour has had to call-out staff from the Council’s Alert service, resulting in a double-hit on public finances – we pay the private care company and also fund Alert.

North Ayrshire Council has consistently been advised of the failures relating to the care of this vulnerable man, but they still happen on an almost daily basis. If a child was left without food and care for almost 24-hours, and through that was exposed to a potentially life-threatening situation, then people would be facing prosecution.

While North Ayrshire Council is looking to ‘save’ money by privatising services, the level of care being provided to some of our elderly relatives, friends and neighbours is nothing short of a disgrace.

The incident described above – just one of many – is completely unacceptable, and North Ayrshire Council cannot claim it does not know such appalling failures in care are happening: our 89 year-old man’s neighbour has kept a log and has regularly complained to the local authority.

Do we have to wait until someone dies before action is taken?

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 21 2011.

Scotland and the monarchy 

Recently the taxpayers of Britain forked-out millions of pounds to pay for ‘security’ at the wedding of two millionaires. Last week, the grandparents of one of those millionaires – themselves not short of a bob or two - paid a four-day visit to Ireland, which cost Irish taxpayers in the region of 3-million Euros. It’s just as well Britain and Ireland are both awash with cash and have nothing better to do with their money.

You will need to ask a British unionist monarchist why it is a good use of public money to continue cosseting an already super-rich family. As a Scottish republican socialist, I’m afraid I can’t even begin to imagine what might be a persuasive answer to that question.

‘The royal family are good for tourism’ is one line often trotted-out by apologists for unearned wealth and privilege, but America and France, both republics, don’t seem to have a problem attracting millions of tourists every year.

We’re asked, ‘Would you rather have a President Blair?’ No, I wouldn’t: nor, I suspect, would the majority of people in Scotland. As Scots, we should have control of our own country, one benefit of which would be that we could not have imposed on us a war-mongering, failed English Prime Minister, in any role. Yes, I know, Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh, but do you know of any other ‘Scotsman’ who has gone on record stating his favourite sporting moment was watching England win the World Cup in 1966? I rest my case, m’lud.

I could accept a President Salmond or even President Connery, if that was the will of the Scottish people. I certainly would favour either of those people as my country’s head of state over a wee English wummin who considers us her subjects.

If we believe in democracy – and surely we must – then there can be no place in a fair society for a monarch and royal family. They may well be very nice individuals; I don’t know, I’ve never met them, but they certainly owe their privileged place to nothing more than the fact their ancestors were the biggest murdering thugs of their day. The rest is down to accident of birth and the control exerted over Scotland (and the other nations of the United Kingdom) by the unelected and mostly faceless apparatchiks of the British establishment.

Those Whitehall mandarins and their underlings are the people who really run Britain, and their power should never be underestimated. Numerous memoirs and documents exist that make reference to a well-advanced plot by the ‘establishment’ to overthrow the democratically-elected Labour Government of Harold Wilson in the 1970s. Apparently, it was felt in certain quarters that Wilson and his colleagues were becoming too close to the Communist regime in the Soviet Union – this was in the days when the Labour Party still had a semblance of socialism – and therefore could pose a threat to the Queen and her position as head of state. According to many who have written about the plot, both the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, and her cousin, Earl Louis Mountbatten, were heavily involved in what could have led to a British military coup.

Ultimately, Wilson resigned and a coup was deemed to be unnecessary: but make no mistake, those who run Britain will always put first the interests of the elite establishment – personified by the Queen – over those of the people.

The monarchy in an independent Scotland is one issue on which I part company with the SNP. No politician agrees 100-percent with every policy advocated by his or her party, and retaining the Queen as head of state is one of two major policy areas I had a problem with while I was an SNP MSP: the other was membership of the European Union. I’m very pro-European but not pro-EU.

The European Union has travelled very far from its original objective – raising the living standards of peoples across Europe – and has now become little more than an adjunct of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Now, rather than putting people first, the EU’s primary roll is to allow access for multi-national corporations to the internal markets of member states, generating ever-greater profits in the process.

I would much rather an independent Scotland was free to trade and enter into agreements with anyone whom it saw fit. It seems strange to throw-off the constraints of the British Union, only to embrace another.

That aside, the SNP’s policy is to retain Queen Elizabeth II as head of state in an independent Scotland. As an SNP member I had to support that position while representing the party – that’s democracy. When the party has debated the issue, as it has on a number of occasions over recent years, the majority of delegates to National Conference have always rejected moves to adopt a republican position. So the SNP is a pro-monarchy party, even though the present Queen bears a title that does not apply to Scotland – she is, of course, the first Elizabeth we’ve ever had.

The most likely way for Scotland to re-take its position as a sovereign independent nation is by Scots backing the SNP’s Independence Referendum and giving the Salmond-led Government a mandate to begin negotiations with the UK administration in London. I, for one, will do whatever I can to make that happen.

However, in the warm afterglow of the SNP’s landslide victory at the Scottish Parliament Election, it’s possible to overlook that the party’s vision of an independent Scotland is one where we would remain ‘subjects of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’. The SNP’s independent Scotland would also be expected to dance to the tune called by the European Union’s Council of Ministers.

Of course, neither of these things would be the end of the world, and I’d much rather live in an independent Scotland with a monarch and membership of the EU than a virtually powerless devolved region of the so-called United Kingdom.

That said, it’s worth remembering that, once we retake our independence by way of the SNP’s Referendum and negotiations, there would then be the first General Election in our newly independent Scotland, where we would be free to vote for political parties, like the Scottish Socialist Party, which supports the establishment of a Scottish republic outwith the European Union.

It’s been a long tunnel, but at last we can begin to glimpse the light at the end.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 14 2011.

The Labour Party

The Labour Party was caught-out twice at the recent Scottish Parliament Election. Firstly, they did not reckon with the public turning against them in such huge numbers; and secondly, by arrogantly dismissing the Regional vote as of little importance.

In much of the country, at previous Scottish elections, Labour has won most constituency contests. This meant that, in areas like ours – West of Scotland - the party did not receive any Regional MSPs from the so-called ‘second vote’. In fact, this second vote is conducted under a form of Proportional Representation called the Additional Member System (AMS) and allocates Regional MSPs on the basis of the percentage each party receives in the ballot.

For example, in 2007 Labour won eight of the nine constituencies that make-up the West of Scotland Parliamentary Region. The SNP were second in most of these contests – but under the system used for constituency elections (First Past The Post), you don’t win anything for second place, only the winner is elected.

However, to give some proportionality to the overall election result, Additional Members are allocated based on the percentage each party receives in the Regional vote. As Labour already had eight MSPs elected in West of Scotland (from the ‘first’ constituency vote) the Regional seats went to other parties – the SNP got 4, the Tories 2 and the Lib Dems 1.

All of the Regional MSPs elected had also contested constituencies, so at least some members of the public had personally voted for them, as well as for their party.

However, Labour believed it was impregnable and would always win the constituency votes, so, unlike the other parties, it didn’t bother putting its best candidates on the Regional List. It never thought it would ever need the Regional ‘Additional Member’ system. Instead, the Labour Party filled its Regional Lists with backroom staff and ‘time-servers’, people that would never be elected and who allowed their names to go on the List on that basis.

Then came last week’s seismic shift in Scottish politics. The people decided they’d had enough of Labour and, instead, they voted for the SNP to form the government and for Alex Salmond as First Minister.

In constituency after constituency, Labour ‘big-hitters’ were voted-out; defeated, in the main, by SNP candidates. This turned the previous electoral pattern on its head: now it was the SNP who had the most constituency members, and it was Labour who received ‘Additional Members’ from the Lists. But, as explained above, none of Labour’s big names were on their List, so the party found itself losing its most experienced and (apparently) best people, to be replaced by the ‘no-hopers’ whose names were on the List but who were not supposed to get elected.

Which brings us to Margaret McDougall. Mrs McDougall is a Labour councillor for Kilwinning. I’ve attended a number of North Ayrshire Council meetings over recent years but I can’t recall her ever having contributed. Still, that isn’t unusual for a local Labour councillor. Mostly, they sit through meetings without even speaking – anything important is left to their Group Leader, Cllr David O’Neill.

So, it is safe to say that Mrs McDougall hasn’t exactly set the heather alight in her time as a councillor. She has, though, made the headlines of the3towns, when this newspaper revealed she had charged mileage for attending an Armistice Parade. Seriously, she charged the public purse for going to a parade held to remember those who gave their lives in two World Wars.

Now, because of the Labour Party’s arrogance – believing it would always win constituencies, and so could fill its Regional Lists with any no-hoper, safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t be elected – Margaret McDougall is now a Member of the Scottish Parliament, one of three Labour Regional MSPs for the West of Scotland, which includes the Three Towns.

This woman never contested the recent election; she was just a name on the Labour List. As she was not a constituency candidate, no-one actually voted for her. Yet, she is now an MSP, with the same rights and responsibilities as Kenneth Gibson and Margaret Burgess, the two SNP candidates who respectively won Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South.

The West of Scotland Regional MSPs from other parties all also fought constituencies, it was only the Labour Party that stuffed its List with ‘non-candidates’. Those other MSPs – two SNP and two Tories – have the legitimacy of having actually fought the election and faced the public. Labour MSPs, like Margaret McDougall, while they can claim some legitimacy in terms of having been elected on the basis of their party’s support in the Regional ‘second’ vote, must feel like frauds. That’s if they are honest with themselves, which is a big ‘if’.

The Labour Party deserved its drubbing at the polls – and what a drubbing it was – even previously rock-solid seats in places like Glasgow and Fife fell to the SNP. Complacent and arrogant Labour MSPs deserved to be kicked-out. They had taken the public for granted for years and they got their comeuppance.

However, what the result also did was expose the lack of talent within Labour ranks. Behind the frontline of previously-elected MSPs we now know there is, well, very little. Here, in North Ayrshire, the Labour Party has a group of councillors of varying abilities and very few activists. What once proclaimed itself to be the People’s Party is now a virtual husk. Without funding donated by Labour Social Clubs in Saltcoats and the Garnock Valley – and from trade unions, despite Labour having shafted their members throughout the Blair-Brown years – the party locally would wither and die. The question is: would anyone mourn its passing?

The Labour Party abandoned socialism and embraced the free-market capitalist philosophy of the Tories. You now couldn’t slip a fag paper between David Cameron and Ed Miliband (or Nick Clegg, for that matter).

What the Scottish Parliament Election showed is that the Labour Party is no longer trusted, it is no longer relevant to our needs and aspirations.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 7 2011.

Scottish Parliament Election - the outcome

The SNP’s Alex Neil described it as “a political tsunami”, and he was right. At the Scottish Parliament Election the SNP swept everything before it in a stunning victory that has shifted the political tectonic plates in Scotland, and the UK.

Never before has any political party achieved an outright majority in an election to Scotland’s Parliament. In fact, many believed such a feat was not possible. Until now, Labour architects of the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system arrogantly believed they had created a mechanism that would prevent the hated ‘ Nats’ from ever being in a position from which they could challenge, never mind defeat Labour. Those British unionist plotters forgot one factor – the will of the Scottish people.

In every part of Scotland those people turned out to elect local SNP candidates and to return Alex Salmond for a second term as our country’s First Minister. There can be no doubt that many new SNP MSPs owe their place in parliament, to a large degree, not to their own actions but to those of their party leader. It was Salmond’s abilities and credibility, backed by an extremely competent Cabinet of Ministers, that persuaded voters to endorse a second-term SNP Government.

That said, it is only fair to also record the SNP saw a number of people elected who will make excellent MSPs and who will enhance an already strong Nationalist team. People who may not yet be known on a national level, but who have worked tirelessly in their local areas and will now apply that commitment to representing their constituents and advancing the cause of independence.

Locally, both North Ayrshire seats – Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South – now have SNP MSPs. Kenneth Gibson, if he cleans up his act and kicks the habit of milking the public purse for every available penny, could begin to repay the faith placed in him by the electors of Cunninghame North.

As a member of the SNP for 27-years, I campaigned, long and hard, to raise the party’s profile in Cunninghame North and help move it into an electable position. That being the case, I cannot be disappointed at recent success in the constituency, far from it. I just wish the MSP would lay-off using taxpayers’ money to pay for virtually every step he takes around the constituency, and for things like evening meals and car parking. MSPs receive a good salary, they don’t need their meals paid by local people, many of whom earn the minimum wage.

I have no such reservations about the new SNP MSP for Cunninghame South. I was privileged to serve as an SNP councillor alongside Margaret Burgess, the woman who just turned a Labour majority of 2,100 into an SNP majority of 2,348.

In our time together as councillors, I don’t think Margaret claimed a penny in allowances or expenses. Clearly, she will not be able to maintain that level of public-spiritedness when she has a constituency office to operate and must travel back and forth to Edinburgh, but Margaret Burgess will work effectively and tirelessly for her constituents and will provide excellent value for public money. Cunninghame South now has a first-rate MSP.

As someone who believes passionately in the right of the Scottish people to govern themselves in an independent sovereign nation, the election of a majority SNP Government is a dream come true. The Salmond administration has a clear mandate to implement its Manifesto commitments, including the proposal to hold an Independence Referendum, scheduled for towards the latter part of its five-year term.

Independence is the normal state of affairs in virtually every nation in the world, but British establishment propaganda – and a British/English media – have succeeded in indoctrinating Scots into believing we are too wee, too poor and too stupid to govern ourselves or ‘stand on our own two feet’. Despite the fact the two biggest contributors to the Westminster Exchequer are revenues deriving from North Sea oil and the Scotch Whisky industry, we are told Scotland would be an economic basket case if we were ever ‘stupid’ enough to reclaim our independence. Ironically, stupidity only enters the equation when we consider our role in allowing our wealth to fund incompetent and often down-right anti-Scottish Westminster Governments, most of which Scotland rejected at the ballot box but we had imposed on us by the people of England.

Against that background, the majority SNP Government is a breakthrough. We already have the ‘Tame Jocks’ of the British unionist parties bleating that the SNP has a majority to govern, but not a majority for independence. Clearly, that is the case, as we haven’t yet had a referendum asking us our opinion on the future of our country. However, it is also clearly the case that Scots have liked what they saw from an SNP Government over the last four years, so much that we re-elected them with a hugely increased majority.

The SNP have proved their competency at managing the areas of government for which London allows us responsibility. As a minority administration, and with one hand tied behind its back because of the constraints applied by the very limited powers of devolution, the last SNP Government was, rightly, considered a success by people in every part of Scotland.

We should have confidence in the new SNP administration, and we should have confidence in ourselves. We are perfectly capable of governing our own country, of managing our own affairs and of being a normal, independent nation.

So, when the SNP Government we elected asks us if we want to return to Scotland all the powers we need to build a vibrant, prosperous country – which is what independence is about - we can answer ‘yes’, in the certain knowledge that the administration led by Alex Salmond has already scotched the British unionist myths about our incompetence and stupidity. 

(c) the3towns

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the3towns.com April 30 2011.

The Scottish Parliament Election

A few weeks back I nailed my colours to the mast in terms of my preference for First Minister and the party to form the next Scottish Government – Alex Salmond and the SNP.

Since then, I’ve had people ask me how I could support the SNP after the party expelled me. The answer to that question is simple: the SNP may have decided it could walk the road to independence without me, but that hasn’t diminished my passionate belief in the cause.

Perhaps it would help if I clarified how I came to be expelled from the SNP, after 27 years of membership. Put simply, I publicly called for the resignation of then party leader John Swinney, and stated that he should be replaced by Alex Salmond. Under Swinney’s leadership the party was on a downward spiral, losing members, votes and seats. Swinney was remote from rank-and-file members of the party, surrounding himself with a small clique of yes-men who were afraid to tell him the truth about his, at best, inadequate leadership.

I believed Alex Salmond was the only person who could unite the party and turn-around its fortunes. I think recent political events have proved me right.

Of course, criticising the leader, even calling for his resignation, are not grounds for expulsion, so the Swinney leadership had to concoct a ‘crime’. They finally came up with the lie that I had leaked to the press some Shadow Cabinet papers, and that I had told people not to vote SNP. These two ‘offences’ were bundled together under the catch-all heading of “actions inimical to the party” – in other words, I was accused of acting against the interests of the SNP.

Given that I didn’t leak the Shadow Cabinet papers to the press, and I didn’t tell people not to vote SNP, and John Swinney was a disaster as leader, and Alex Salmond did return to unite the party and turn-around its fortunes, I can hold my head high in the knowledge that it was not my actions that were against the interests of the party.

I appreciate that, having explained what happened back in 2004, it still might be construed that I would hold a grudge against the party that manipulated events to reach a position where I could be suspended and then expelled from membership, but that isn’t the case. I’m not a fan of Swinney or his spineless underlings who broke the party’s rules to expel me, but that doesn’t mean I hold the entire membership of the SNP to blame for what happened. There are a lot of very good people in the SNP and I am delighted the party has gone from strength to strength under Alex Salmond’s leadership.

If, as a nation, we are to re-take our independence – which is certainly in Scotland’s interests - then we need a strong SNP Government in the current devolved parliament, and that is what I hope we will have after May 5.

In terms of the local electoral contests – Cunninghame North (including Ardrossan and Saltcoats) and Cunninghame South (including Stevenston) – it will be the same as across Scotland, a close fight between the SNP and the Labour Party.

In Cunninghame South, the SNP’s Margaret Burgess is looking to overturn a Labour majority of just over 2,000 which, in parliamentary terms, makes the seat a real contender to change hands. Labour’s Irene Oldfather has held the seat since 1999 and, in her time as the area’s MSP, things have gone from bad to worse. Even although her party was in government for most of the time she represented the constituency, there is very little that Mrs Oldfather could point to as a success story for towns such as Irvine, Kilwinning and Stevenston. In fact, there have been more positive stories for Cunninghame South since 2007, when the SNP replaced Mrs Oldfather’s party as the government.

I had the privilege of serving as an SNP councillor alongside Margaret Burgess and have no qualms in stating that she would make an excellent MSP for the constituency in which she lives.

In Cunninghame North the result four years ago was even closer. The SNP’s Kenneth Gibson scraped home by just 48 votes ahead of the then incumbent, Labour’s Allan Wilson. This time, we have ‘Cunninghame North II – Battle of the Unwanted’.

Certainly, if correspondence to the3towns and conversations I’ve had over recent weeks are anything to go by, neither Kenneth Gibson nor Allan Wilson are particularly popular with voters. The other constituency candidates – Maurice Golden (Tory) and Mallika Punukollu (Liberal Democrat) – are simply making up the numbers: they have no chance of winning. Having said that, at least Mr Golden has actually contested the election. As usual, the Liberal Democrats simply have a name on the ballot paper. They have done nothing in the campaign, but they still expect local people to vote for them. Last week, at a hustings in Ardrossan’s Civic Centre, Ms Punukollu didn’t even bother turning up.

So, who is going to win Cunninghame North? Gibson or Wilson? Personally, I would abstain. I’ve spent most of my adult life telling people to get out and vote, irrespective of who they chose to support, and I’ve already said I want to see the SNP returned to government, but I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Kenneth Gibson. Local people need and deserve so much better than the man who over-claimed public money for staying at his pal’s hotel, failed to declare his outside income from renting-out a luxury flat he owns in Glasgow and even claims public money for evening meals, parking his car and travelling between his house and his local office (most people call that going to their work).

All three other constituency candidates are British unionists, content to see Scotland’s wealth flow south to the London exchequer, while one-in four Scots children and pensioners continue to live in poverty. I could never vote for a representative of a party that tells us the Scots, uniquely amongst the peoples of the world, cannot successfully govern themselves in the interests of our fellow citizens but, instead, should accept the status of nothing more than a region, ultimately governed by Tories and Liberal Democrats for whom we did not vote.

So, who is going to win Cunninghame North? The answer is that even the SNP and Labour don’t know. It appears to be so close neither party is prepared to say they are confident of victory. If the Garnock Valley turns out and maintains its historical loyalty to Labour, Allan Wilson could snatch back the seat. However, Kenneth Gibson may – for the second election in a row – benefit from a national swing to the SNP, where people vote for the party because they want Alex Salmond as First Minister rather than Kenneth Gibson as their MSP.

If I were a betting man, I’d keep my money in my pocket.

Oh, okay then – probably the SNP, despite rather than because of their candidate. 

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 23 2011

Colourful politics

The Scottish Parliament of 2003-2007 was known as the ‘Rainbow Parliament’ because it broke the conventional political mould and saw candidates elected from parties other than the big four.

There had been MSPs from smaller parties at the first election in 1999, but just one each from the Scottish Socialist Party and the Greens, with former Labour MP Dennis Canavan being the sole Independent. The difference in 2003 was that both of those parties substantially increased their representation – the SSP to six and the Greens to seven – while Margo MacDonald joined Dennis Canavan as an Independent. Also elected in 2003 was John Swinburne of the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party and Dr Jean Turner representing the Save Stobhill Hospital Campaign.

Dennis Canavan had represented his constituents since the 1970s and was greatly respected by the people he served. However, prior to the first Scottish Parliament Election, frictions within the Labour Party saw Dennis prevented from standing as the Labour candidate for the constituency he had represented for so long at Westminster. It was shameful behaviour by the Labour Party.

Never one to walk away from a fight, Dennis stood as an Independent and trounced everyone, including the candidate Labour selected instead of him, and in the process secured Holyrood’s biggest majority. This feat was repeated in 2003 and Dennis retired undefeated at the 2007 election.

Margo MacDonald had been elected in 1999 as an SNP MSP. However, like Dennis Canavan, she subsequently was on the receiving end of political skulduggery from within her party and, for the 2003 election, was ‘demoted’ and placed well down the SNP List for the Lothians, meaning she would not be re-elected. Again, like Dennis Canavan’s situation, Margo resigned from the party and stood as an Independent. The vote she received in 2003 was almost enough for her to have been elected twice-over.

So, Parliament had two strong political groups in the Scottish Socialist Party and the Greens, two formidable and experienced Independents and a member each from a party representing the interests of Scotland’s senior citizens and one campaigning to protect NHS facilities. The birth of the Scottish Parliament had promised a new type of politics in Scotland, and the 2003 election delivered just that.

I had the privilege of serving throughout the ‘Rainbow Parliament’ and of witnessing its work from different perspectives. I started as a member of the SNP, the second-largest group of MSPs and the official opposition, and ended up as an Independent, working with Dennis, Margo, John Swinburne and Jean Turner. I also had a close working relationship with the six MSPs of the Scottish Socialist Party and the official record shows I frequently supported initiatives brought forward by the Greens.

As Independents, Dennis, Margo and I were able to prioritise our workload so that we could best handle issues brought to us by constituents, while also contributing to parliamentary business, including attempting to hold to account the then Labour-Lib Dem Executive.

John Swinburne doggedly pursued every conceivable issue that impacted on Scotland’s senior citizens, even attempting to initiate legislation that would have ended the current situation where some elderly people are forced to sell their homes to pay for care. Unfortunately, John’s Bill ran out time in that session of parliament, and he was not returned at the 2007 election.

Dr Jean Turner did not restrict herself to simply campaigning on the ticket from which she had been elected – saving Stobhill Hospital – but instead was a constant and knowledgeable thorn in the side of the Executive on a broad range of health-related issues.

The Greens, with seven MSPs, were strong enough to be a loud voice in parliament and to ensure our environment and related issues were considered and factored into legislation.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Socialist Party’s six MSPs made the biggest impact of any political grouping. The work-rate of SSP members and their support staff was phenomenal. I saw first hand how committed they were to advancing the cause of an independent socialist Scotland, where the corrupt capitalist system would be swept away, to be replaced by socialist policies delivering a fairer society where government worked in the interests of the people rather than those of a small ruling elite or multi-national corporations.

Amongst Bills introduced by SSP MSPs were proposals to end poindings and warrant sales; provide free prescriptions; free school meals to ensure children had at least one nutritious meal a day; and free public transport to encourage us out of our cars, benefitting our personal finances and the environment.

The Scottish Socialist Party was also at the forefront of opposition to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. When the Scottish Parliament debated the issue, Labour and the Tories backed the invasion and the occupation that was to take the lives of hundreds of young British service personnel and hundreds-of-thousands of innocent Iraqis. The SNP and Liberal Democrats opposed the invasion, but once British boots were on the ground in Iraq, both parties’ positions were for troop withdrawal only once the situation had been stabilised, and the UN had become involved. Only the SSP truly backed our troops by demanding they were immediately withdrawn from the conflict. Actually, two other MSPs also voted for that position – Dennis Canavan and me.

Unfortunately, at the 2007 election, some sleight of hand by the Labour Government in London, which still controls elections in Scotland – even for the Scottish Parliament – meant ballot papers were significantly changed from the first two elections, a situation that caused much voter confusion.

One of the main outcomes of the changes imposed from London, was that smaller parties saw their vote squeezed, which resulted in the Greens dropping from seven MSPs to two, the SSP being completely wiped out (although internal problems and a split also contributed to that result), the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Part losing its parliamentary representation and Jean Turner not being returned in Strathkelvin & Bearsden. With Dennis Canavan retiring, Margo MacDonald was the only Independent elected in 2007, but even her vote was reduced by the ballot changes that favoured the larger parties.

The ‘Rainbow Parliament’ and the ‘new politics’ was ended by political manipulation of ballot papers and the order in which people were asked to vote for constituency and regional (List) MSPs.

This time, most constituencies, like the two in North Ayrshire – Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South – are being contested only by the four big parties – SNP, Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat. However, in our Region – West of Scotland – we have a much broader choice, including the Scottish Socialist Party, Green Party, Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party (All Scotland Pensioners Party), Socialist Labour Party and Solidarity.

When we go to the polls on May 5, we have the chance to reintroduce some colour to our politics and parliament. We should take it.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 16 2011.

Secrets

Anyone who has read a Robert Ludlum novel – from The Scarlatti Inheritance of 1971 to The Sigma Protocol, the last book published before the American author died in 2001 – will be familiar with the plot-line where a secretive group of individuals covertly plan to take over the world.

Ludlum’s heroes, like Jason Bourne - made famous by Matt Damon’s portrayal of the character in three hugely successful films - have to uncover what the shadowy group is about, who are its members and what have they been plotting. The task is made all the more difficult because, of course, no records are ever kept of meetings, who attended, what was discussed and what actions were agreed.

Now, if we make the admittedly considerable leap from the racy world of international espionage to the more mundane business of Scottish local government, it seems a senior official or Labour councillor at North Ayrshire Council has been plagiarising Ludlum’s work.

There is a secretive body within our local authority. It may not have as lofty an objective as taking over the world but, like Ludlum’s fictitious creations, it too does not publicise its membership, nor when it meets, nor what it discusses.

While the shady organisations in Ludlum novels had catchy names, like Tradestone, the North Ayrshire creation is called the Change Sounding Board.

So, what is this Change Sounding Board, what does it do, who are its members? Well, I could tell you, but I would then have to come round your house and ‘expedite’ you by administering a highly-toxic poison, probably by using a Smersh-produced lethally-adapted umbrella.

Sorry, I was off into a Ludlum plot there.

The Change Sounding Board is a cross-party group that meets, as required, to discuss proposals that might or might not be brought before the full Council. Officially, the Change Sounding Board does not take any decisions or actions, and no minutes are available of what its members discuss.

So, if it doesn’t take any decisions, what is its point? Well, the Board is not an official Council body, so no statutory remit exists but, unofficially, it is tasked with discussing what the Labour Executive might do on a given subject. Leaders of opposition groups are allowed to attend Board meetings, and they are expected to appraise their respective memberships of what has been discussed.

All pretty straight forward but, still, what is its point? Surely meetings of the full Council are the forum at which the ruling Labour Executive should present its position on any relevant subject, and where opposition councillors should question, discuss and hold to account. After all, full Council meetings are open to the public and recorded minutes, including decisions taken, are a matter of public record. Local authorities are supposed to be open and accountable, so why does North Ayrshire Council operate what appears to be an unaccountable ‘star chamber’, which meets in secret, keeps no minutes and provides no public record of its business?

The reason is simple: it is a ploy on the part of the Labour Executive – although it was almost certainly dreamed up, not be councillors but by senior unelected officers. The ploy sees opposition councillors drawn into an unminuted meeting where future Council business is discussed. Then, when that business does actually go before the full Council in a public and minuted meeting, Labour can claim that opposition councillors have already taken part in discussions about it and, if at the Change Sounding Board no opposition was recorded (bearing in mind nothing is officially recorded), then support for proposals is implied.

One such item of business is the hugely controversial plan to sell or give away most of our public halls and some libraries. That issue was discussed at meetings of the Change Sounding Board and, controversially, the timeline of activity in relation to the progression of the Halls and Libraries review records decisions and actions having been taken by the secretive and unminuted body.

At last week’s meeting of the Scrutiny Committee, which discussed a request to further examine the Labour Executive’s actions in the review of Halls and Libraries, one opposition councillor questioned how it was that the review had got as far as recommending the closure of many facilities, without the majority of councillors having had any input. In response, Council Leader David O’Neill stated that the matter had been discussed and agreed at the Change Sounding Board.

Of course, no minutes are available of Change Sounding Board meetings, so it is not possible to confirm or refute what Cllr O’Neill claimed. It is also not possible to access information about who attended any such meetings or what may or may not have been discussed. Certainly, nothing should have been agreed, as the Change Sounding Board is not supposed to take any decisions or actions.

Most opposition councillors are not allowed to attend meetings of the Change Sounding Board and some, such as the SNP’s Tony Gurney, are positively discouraged from attending. Cllr Gurney, in the eyes of the Labour Executive and some senior officials, asks too many questions and doesn’t passively accept statements and proposals simply because they are presented by officials or the ruling Labour Executive.

Likewise, Independent councillor John Hunter resigned from the Change Sounding Board when he discovered how undemocratic and secretive it is. John Hunter is another councillor who does not allow officials or the Labour Executive to get away with anything that might not be in the interests of local people and communities.

It is beyond logical comprehension why any opposition councillor would want to sit on an unofficial committee, with no public record of proceedings, which draws them and their party into decisions taken by the ruling Labour Executive. Opposition councillors are supposed to be scrutinising the Executive and holding them to account for their actions. How can they perform those tasks effectively if they are actually sitting side-by-side with the Executive and unofficially discussing and endorsing Labour proposals?

However, the main problem with North Ayrshire Council’s Change Sounding Board is that we have a local authority holding secret, unminuted meetings when it is supposed to be open and transparent. There may be nothing illegal about the Change Sounding Board, but its existence certainly seems to fly in the face of the principle that councils should be publicly accountable and their decision-making processes transparent and open.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 9 2011.

As others see us

On the basis that it’s best to know your enemy, I sometimes have a look at the Daily Mail. Online, of course: I wouldn’t give them a penny for the offensive, right-wing bile they publish.

As the Mail tells us, almost without fail, every day seems to bring new ways in which feckless working-class people - usually trade unionists – undermine the beneficial wealth-creating activities of the caring, happy-go-lucky bosses. Apparently – I’m paraphrasing a bit here - workers are greedy, demanding more money, when we all know they would only spend it on beer and fags. Meanwhile, our lovely Captain’s of Industry merely seek to make the world a better place by generating oodles and oodles of money, which they redistribute by employing more of the undeserving poor to clean their homes and serve their gins and tonic.

It is to such a fantasy world that the Daily Mail reports.

Other than working-class oiks, the Mail also intensely dislikes the Johnnie Foreigner types – particularly those who have the temerity to come and look for work in Britain. Never mind that Brits work all over the globe, that is clearly a completely different thing altogether. Foreigners should know their place – which apparently isn’t in the UK. After all, who do they think they are, coming over here with their craft skills and work ethic? The Mail would rather they stayed in whatever country it is they come from.

Immigrants! Don’t get the Mail started on immigrants. They simply should not be allowed into the country. Asylum seekers? Immigrants by another name, surely?

Ironically, the Daily Mail’s ideal scenario for Britain would be a state modeled on the free-market-obsessed, greed-is-good philosophy of the USA. You know, America. The same America that was built by immigrants from across the world.

As for asylum seekers: no amount of reasoned argument will ever persuade the Daily Mail to just look at the meaning of those two words. Asylum seekers are people seeking asylum: they are people fleeing persecution and, in some cases, torture. Many have witnessed family members being killed, simply because they opposed their country’s ruling regime. Asylum seekers need protection, a safe place to live, and we have a responsibility as human beings to offer that protection.

However, for the Daily Mail and its right-wing readership, wealth is the only criterion that should apply to anyone wishing to relocate to Britain. If they are rich, let them in, they’re welcome. If they’re poor, send them home, even if that means putting them back into the hands of torturers and killers.

We should never forget that, in the early 1930s, the Daily Mail wrote approvingly of the work being done in Germany by Adolf Hitler. One Mail editorial, from 1933, read, “The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing on Germany.”

The following year the paper carried a front-page headline, “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, which led a story in support of Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists.

Now, why am I telling you all this about the Daily Mail, when you probably know it already?

Well, one of the ‘benefits’ of reading the Mail online is that you get the ‘real’ newspaper, the English version, as opposed to the slightly different one sold in Scotland.

One day last week, the Daily Mail edition sold in England but not in Scotland – and the version published online – carried a story headlined, “Now Scots are promised council tax and water bill freeze... paid for by the English”. The story read, “Scottish voters have been promised a generous raft of handouts denied to their English neighbours across the border. They include a two-year freeze on water bills - while in England water bills are set to rise by 4.6 per cent on average. And while brutal cutbacks are being made in England, Scotland is safeguarding existing handouts.

“Another promise being made by Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister, is a two-year freeze on council tax bills, ahead of the Holyrood election on May 5. Free National Health Service prescriptions were brought in last week for Scots, as opposed to a £7.40 charge in England.

“Every resident in Scotland is estimated to receive £1,500 more in public money than those in England under the funding arrangement for Scotland known as the Barnett Formula”.

So, there you have it. According to the Daily Mail - and presumably its right-wing readership – those of us who live in Scotland are sponging free-loaders, living the high-life thanks to the generosity of the hard-done-by English.

Note how “brutal cutbacks are being made in England”, while the undeserving - and probably ungrateful - Scots get “handouts”.

The myth of the ‘subsidised Scots’ was ‘Scotched’ years ago but, as the news of who actually subsidises whom has not yet reached the London offices of the Daily Mail, here is a brief reprise: the two biggest contributors annually to the Westminster Treasury are revenue from the Scotch Whisky industry and North Sea Oil. According to the Continental Shelf Agreement, which is enshrined in international law, around ninety-percent of what is currently considered to be British oil lies in Scottish territorial waters. Scotland subsidises England. Without Scotland’s oil wealth, England would be an economic basket case. That is the reason successive London governments have been so determined to fight Scottish independence.

As for the Barnett Formula: anyone who uses it to claim Scotland gets a good deal from the British Union, doesn’t understand how the formula works. The Barnett Formula was created to ‘harmonise’ public spending in England and Scotland. In effect, Barnett works to reduce public spending in Scotland, irrespective of need. Because of Scotland’s distinct population spread, per capita it costs more to provide public services in Scotland than it does in England. Scotland doesn’t get more services than England, it gets the same, but it costs more to provide the same level of services in rural parts of Scotland. So, by automatically reducing public spending in Scotland – as Barnett does every year – Scottish services are cut to satisfy economic bean-counters in London.

Of course, the Daily Mail won’t let the facts get in the way of attacking and disparaging the Scots. In 2009 a Mail columnist called Harry Phibbs (as in, he tells great big Phibbs) wrote an article headed, “Scotland IS a welfare state paid for by the English - the wonder is we're not more angry”.

Actually, it’s the Scots who should be angry. For almost forty-years we’ve seen our natural resources exploited and our wealth ripped-off by successive British unionist governments – and they’re at it again. Scotland didn’t vote for the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, but that hasn’t stopped them funding a 1p fuel cut by imposing an additional tax on companies operating in North Sea oil fields – and all the while, every penny from Scotland’s oil flows into the Westminster coffers.

An independent Scotland, with control of our own resources, would have one of the highest standards of living in the world – just like Norway, our neighbours across the North Sea. Instead, as a mere region within the British Union, we have been robbed. We have a country where one-in-four of our children and our elderly live in poverty – and English newspapers, like the Daily Mail, tell us we should be grateful.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 2 2011.

Our role in electing the next government

The starting gun has sounded and across Scotland candidates from all political parties and none are campaigning to become one of our 129 MSPs.

Some of those candidates know they will be elected – those in seats where their party has a large majority, and others who feature at the top of their respective party lists. For many, though, the next four weeks and the counting of votes in the early hours of Friday, May 6 will be a nervous, fractious and exciting time.

In the two seats that sit within North Ayrshire – Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South – there is everything to play for. Well, there is everything to play for if you are the SNP or Labour. Both seats are on a knife-edge, with the incumbent candidate defending small majorities – in the case of Cunninghame North it is the smallest majority in Scotland. However, in reality, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates are just making up the numbers. Like Scotland as a whole, the two local seats will see a straight fight between the SNP and the Labour Party.

It’s in seats like Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South that ‘tactical voters’ can have an impact. For example, in Cunninghame North, where the SNP is defending a majority of just 48, the thousands of people who voted Tory or Lib Dem in 2007, to no effect, could switch their votes to the only British unionist party in contention, the Labour Party, which would see the SNP defeated this time.

Likewise, in Cunninghame South, Tory and Lib Dem supporters, fed-up with Labour representation since the Scottish Parliament was re-established in 1999, could switch to the only real contender, the Scottish National Party, thereby securing a change of MSP and victory for the SNP.

Of course, Tory and Lib Dem supporters could just as easily use their vote tactically to back the incumbent candidate – while not agreeing with their politics, it might be felt the person is a good constituency MSP.

Then again, people might not vote tactically at all. Who cares if the Tories or the Lib Dems have no chance of winning? If someone supports their policies, it’s perfectly right that they should endorse their candidates at the ballot box.

It is these electoral imponderables that lead to candidates and supporters enduring a nervous, fractious and exciting four weeks of campaigning.

Put quite simply, no-one knows how this election is going to turn out – here in the two local seats or across Scotland.

As we get nearer polling day I’ll take a closer look at the contests in Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South, but for now it’s worth noting a few things about the national situation.

Every vote, in every constituency and in every region, is going to be crucial. In 2007 the SNP emerged as the largest party by just one seat. Cunninghame North wasn’t the last constituency to declare, but with a majority of just 48, the reality is that had 25 local people voted Labour instead of SNP, then it would have been Allan Wilson that was elected rather than Kenneth Gibson; Labour would have been the largest party (by one seat) instead of the SNP, and Jack McConnell would have been returned as First Minister leading a Labour administration.

This time, early Opinion Polls showed Labour with a substantial lead, but as we get nearer to Election Day the SNP has caught up, even moving into first place in some polls.

This election could be as close as it was four years ago, but things won’t go exactly the same way. The SNP might lose some seats it won in 2007, possibly Cunninghame North, but could gain others – Airdrie & Shotts, for example, where Communities Minister Alex Neil is challenging Labour backbencher Karen Whitefield, with a notional Labour majority of just 633.

With everything so tight right across Scotland, candidates and parties will be campaigning ferociously over the next four weeks. The want our votes and they will make every effort to persuade us they deserve our support.

We should bear in mind the national picture when we cast our votes for constituency and regional MSPs, because our decisions locally feed into the overall result. In my opinion, Alex Salmond is by far the most competent politician in Scotland. In addition, he has very able Ministers in his Cabinet, people like Nicola Sturgeon, Kenny MacAskill and Mike Russell. In contrast, Labour’s candidate for First Minister, Iain Gray, appears to be a political plodder. He may well have good intentions, but I wouldn’t want him in charge of running our country. As for his Shadow Cabinet - the least said the better.

The Scottish National Party has done a good job over the past four years, particularly from the position of a minority administration. Of the two parties that could form the government after May 5, the SNP also has the much stronger political team. Obviously, as a minority administration, it was not possible for the Salmond-led Government to deliver all of its Manifesto commitments. Some, like an Independence Referendum, fell because the British unionist majority in parliament – Labour, Tory and Lib Dem MSPs – announced they would join together to vote it down: a decision that speaks volumes on how little the British parties care about the people of Scotland having their say.

The best future for Scotland lies in us retaking our political independence, governing ourselves, utilising our abundant natural resources (not least our people), taking decisions in the interests of Scots, and representing ourselves on the world stage. Until we retake our right to self-determination, and in particular with a right-wing Tory-led Government in London, I would far rather have the SNP fighting Scotland’s corner from devolved government in Edinburgh than Iain ‘Plodder’ Gray with the Scottish sub-section of the British Labour Party. Let’s not forget that Gray is not his own man, he answers to his British party boss, Ed Miliband.

One last thing to think about, in terms of our local votes feeding into the overall Scottish result and deciding who we have as First Minister: between Alex Salmond and Iain Gray, who do you think Tory Toff David Cameron would rather see leading Scotland?

Voting Labour plays into Cameron’s hands.

(c) the3towns.com

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Future of our public halls and libraries

Last week the3towns exclusively revealed how North Ayrshire councillors had savaged a consultants’ report that recommended the local authority should withdraw from owning and operating local public halls and some libraries. This week, the newspaper reveals more detail of just what the consultants, Grant Thornton, told our elected representatives in their long-awaited Outline Business Case (OBC) for the future provision of “Halls & Centres, Community & Culture and Sports & Leisure”.

Firstly, it is important to remind ourselves how much North Ayrshire Council paid Grant Thornton for this piece of work. The consultants were awarded two separate contracts: the first was to provide an OBC for the future provision of Sport, Leisure and Recreation in North Ayrshire, and the second to carry out a review on the same subject. In total, the Council agreed to pay Grant Thornton £122,185. According to information secured by the the3towns under Freedom of Information legislation, the contract for the Outline Business Case would see the Council pay Grant Thornton £99,685. However, at a recent meeting of the full Council, chief executive Elma Murray indicated the consultants had so far only been paid around £45,000 for this piece of work.

The document produced by Grant Thornton is a 120-page, ring-bound report that contains little, if any, information the Council didn’t already know. In fact, in most cases, the data quoted by the consultants was provided to them by Council departments. Grant Thornton has simply collated already-existing information about the usage and rental costs of local public halls, put it together in a report, did a few basic calculations, concluded the Council could save money if it no longer operated most of the facilities, and sold that back to the local authority for £45,000 (and counting).

It is also worth recording that many of the 120 pages in the Grant Thornton report are duplicated – the same information appears repeatedly under different section headings.

From the content of the document – which is still designated as ‘Confidential’ and not for the eyes of the North Ayrshire public - it is absolutely clear the report could have been compiled by the Council itself, saving the supposedly cash-strapped local authority at least £45,000. However, it is when closer inspection is made of the projected overall savings to the Council from hiving-off and selling publicly-owned community halls, that very serious questions begin to emerge over why this exercise was carried out in the first place.

From the data provided by the Council in relation to operating costs for all community halls and centres, Grant Thornton calculate that by getting rid of most of them, North Ayrshire Council could make a maximum saving of £1,679,000. So, for all of the disruption and potential loss of community facilities associated with the Council withdrawing from operating public halls, the ‘maximum’ saving would be just over £1.5m. That equates to 0.4-percent of the total North Ayrshire Council budget for the current financial year.

The Council knew the usage for each hall, it knew their running costs and income, so the local authority could have done the basic calculations itself and discovered that it would have to give away, sell or simply close virtually every public hall in every town across North Ayrshire to ‘save’ even as little – in total budget terms – as £1.5m. To put that into some sort of perspective, the ‘maximum’ one-off saving that could be achieved by shutting public halls or handing them over to an outside body represents only 15-percent of the money the Council spends every year on paying a private company to maintain just four schools built under the notorious North Ayrshire Schools PPP Contract.

It doesn’t make sense to destroy the long-established principle of a democratically-elected council providing public facilities for local communities. That lack of logic is compounded when such a fundamental change would bring about a comparatively small financial saving. Then, of course, there is the ridiculous use of costly private consultants to deliver information that Council departments already held.

So, who is responsible for embarking on this nonsensical and costly exercise, and why did they do it?

It seems some of North Ayrshire Council’s most senior officials formed a ‘Steering Group’ that met with Grant Thornton to brief the consultants on what the local authority wanted from a review of Leisure, Recreation and Sport. We are also asked to believe that, at the same time, and with no prompting from the Council, members of the North Ayrshire Federation of Community Associations (NAFCA) came up with a proposal that would see the voluntary organisation take-on the operation and management of public halls.

In October of last year, members of the Council ‘Steering Group’ and Grant Thornton met with NAFCA to discuss the Association’s proposals. In its report to the Council, Grant Thornton recommends that most of our publicly-owned community halls should be handed-over to NAFCA.

Certainly, from the evidence of the report, this whole issue seems to have been driven by senior officials of North Ayrshire Council. However, were that to be the case, then some of those involved should be submitting resignation letters and clearing their desks. Unelected council officials should not be developing policy.

As I’ve mentioned in articles before, there is within local government a fundamental principle known as the ‘Member-Officer Dichotomy’. Essentially, what it means is that Members (councillors) develop policy, and officers carry it out. So, what the officers in the Council ‘Steering Group’ were doing in this matter must have been sanctioned by, at the very least, the ruling Labour Executive, and must have been overseen by the responsible elected Member (councillor).

Ultimate responsibility for the actions of North Ayrshire Council in this matter lies, not with officers but with the councillor who accepts additional ‘responsibility’ payment for overseeing the Communities Portfolio within the local authority’s administration.

It is to be hoped that the full Council will reject the Grant Thornton report and its recommendations, and will, instead, retain in public ownership and operation the many community facilities used and enjoyed by the people of North Ayrshire.

In the meantime, the person who should be submitting a resignation letter and clearing his desk is Labour councillor Peter McNamara, the man paid handsomely to oversee the Communities Portfolio, into which falls the operation of our halls and libraries. This farce was initiated and developed on his watch. That being the case, he has to go.

(c) the3towns.com

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No future for nuclear

The devastation and, as yet, unquantified loss of life in Japan following last week’s earthquake and tsunami brings into startling focus the immense power that exists in nature.

Moving plates within the Earth’s crust and subsequent tidal manipulations are forces of our natural world. There is nothing man can do to stop them. Yes, we can take precautions to minimise the after-effects of earthquakes and tsunamis, such as reinforcing buildings in areas where we know underground ruptures are likely to occur – but we can’t prevent them from happening. Insurance companies call such natural occurances ‘acts of God’ – in many cases it is their ‘get out clause’ – but you don’t have to be an atheist to question what type of God would indiscriminately kill and maim innocent men, women and children.

Of course, there is another problem compounding the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami, a problem potentially as deadly and entirely man-made. A nuclear power station within the affected area of Japan has been seriously damaged, resulting in explosions near the reactors. Radioactive steam has been released into the atmosphere: Japanese nuclear industry representatives and government spokespeople initially issued assurances that leaks were within ‘safe’ limits, but within days had to raise the alert level to ‘five’, classifying the Fukushima situation as an “accident with wider consequences”. It also places the incident on a par with the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in the United States.

Here, in North Ayrshire, we are fortunate in that we are unlikely ever to experience an earthquake, other than the very minor ones that occur on a fairly regular basis: neither are we likely to face a massive wall of water gushing from the Firth of Clyde. However, we do have a nuclear power station in our midst, and while we can all-but rule out Hunterston being affected by devastating natural phenomena, we have to recognise the potential for appalling destruction that could occur if the safety of our ‘local’ nuclear reactor was ever compromised.

The nuclear industry is notorious for down-playing any dangers presented by radioactive leaks. Everytime one occurs, we are told it is within ‘safe’ levels. Of course, there are independent organisations whose role is to monitor nuclear stations and background radiation levels in surrounding areas. So, we can be assured that we are safe, then? From past experience as an elected representative, there are two incidents that cause me to have doubts.

The first is from my days as a councillor. Back then councils had subject committees, and I was a member of the one that scrutinised health in the local area. Every month the Health Committee would get a report regarding background radiation levels in North Ayrshire, and every month there was a clear ‘hot spot’ on the Isle of Cumbrae. In explanation, councillors were told this was because the outflow from the Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing Plant in Cumbria fed into a northerly-drifting channel of water, which flowed into the Firth of Clyde and washed ashore on Cumbrae. Seriously, that was the reason given for increased radiation levels near Millport. Councillors were ‘assured’ it had nothing to do with the massive nuclear installation located immediately across the firth at Hunterston. Of course, in addition, we were also told that, while radiation levels were raised on that part of Cumbrae, they were still within ‘safe’ levels.

The second incident happened around six months after the last serious outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease. Who can forget the footage on television news bulletins of cattle being slaughtered and burned to prevent the disease spreading?

Another precaution taken at the time was a ban on people accessing farmland. This prohibition meant nuclear industry monitors were prevented from testing land and air samples in the countryside around Hunterston. I know that to be a fact. No tests were carried out for six months.

At the time, I asked questions about the lack of background radiation monitoring, only to receive an answer that said I was wrong. The answer also said monitoring had been carried out, and supplied the figures to show radiation levels were normal and ‘safe’. These figures were supported by SEPA, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency.

All of which means the Hunterston insider who contacted me - concerned that no monitoring had been carried out for six months - was lying...or the nuclear industry was. I know who I believe.

As a politician, I also asked questions about the safety of the nuclear reactor at Hunterston in the event of a terrorist attack. Since then, UK Government sources have confirmed that nuclear sites were found on lists – alongside airports, railway stations and public buildings – which were uncovered during searches carried out at the homes of terrorist suspects in Britain.

Specifically, I asked how Huntertson would or could be defended against an aircraft flown into the reactor. I pointed out the close proximity of both Prestwick and Glasgow airports and questioned how any security measure could be activated in time to prevent an aircraft taking-off from either airport subsequently being launched into the nuclear installation on the Ayrshire coast.

In response, I was told the reactor was designed to withstand such an impact. One wonders what assurances were given regarding the safety of the Fukushima Daiichi installation in Japan.

Also, over the years, there have been concerns expressed about what appears to be a generally higher-than-expected level of cancer in parts of North Ayrshire, specifically around West Kilbride, the Three Towns, Fairlie and Largs. It’s argued that it is no coincidence these towns are closest to the Hunterston nuclear facility – suggesting there may be health-related problems associated with exposure to radioactivity, other than the obvious consequences of a catastrophic release of toxic material.

However, tests carried out, most recently with regard to the West Kilbride area, indicate the incidence of cancers in residents is no higher than other parts of Scotland that are not located close to a nuclear facility.

Like the ‘official’ findings of background radiation levels for the period during which a member of staff at Hunterston claimed no such monitoring was carried out, we simply have to accept the outcome of the investigation into local cancer levels. We have no way of proving otherwise.

That said, though, it is the case that stocks of potassium iodide tablets are held locally. In my days as a councillor, they were located at West Kilbride Police Station (now closed) and at the force’s office in Saltcoats. Potassium iodide helps stop the body from taking-in radioactive iodine that can be emitted during a nuclear discharge. Specifically, and in layman’s terms, it fills-up the thyroid gland, preventing it from absorbing radioactive material and thereby reducing the risk of cancer.

The North Ayrshire stocks of potassium iodide are held ‘just in case’, better to be safe than sorry. If there were to be a substantial leak of radioactive material from Hunterston, the tablets would be distributed to local communities, and people would be advised to remain indoors. However, in the event of a catastrophic discharge, caused by something like an earthquake or an aircraft being flown into a reactor, then potassium iodide would not protect the population from the radiation that would sweep inland on the prevailing wind.

When we hear politicians arguing for a new nuclear power station at Hunterston – and we’ll hear it again in the run-up to May’s Scottish Parliament Election – it’s worth remembering that, in the case of nuclear and radioactivity, operators have to be 100-percent safe, 100-percent of the time. The laws of probability and averages, and events in Japan, tend to suggest that such a level of safety is unachievable.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com March 12 2011.

The root of Scotland's sectarian problem

The ‘flare-up’ between Celtic Manager Neil Lennon and Rangers Assistant Coach Ally McCoist at the end of the recent Old Firm game was like two daft wee boys squaring up in the school playground.

The pair of them should reflect on how fortunate they are to enjoy privileged lifestyles simply because they were quite good at kicking a ball, and now from telling others how to kick a ball. They should also grow up and accept that with the jobs they hold comes responsibility.

Of course, there was more to the squaring-up between Lennon and McCoist than just a squabble over a football match. Anyone who has been brought up in the West of Scotland knows exactly what lay beneath the animosity and the bravado. It was why Scotland’s First Minister called a summit following the Old Firm game and, sadly, it was also why Saltcoats town centre was brought to a halt last week after postal workers discovered a suspicious package addressed to Neil Lennon.

Alex Salmond takes very seriously the historic and deep-seated problems of sectarianism and bigotry in Scotland. He would dearly love to see an end to the animosity, hatred even, that divides many Scots and which has again been splashed across newspapers and television screens far beyond our shores. Again, a Celtic – Rangers match has allowed the media to trot out headlines about “Scotland’s shame”.

Personally, I don’t think events last week at Celtic Park merited a high-powered summit chaired by the country’s most senior politician, but continuing sectarianism and bigotry certainly does. It was unfortunate, therefore, that the meeting appeared to focus mainly on current issues of concern to Strathclyde Police, such as violence at, and after Old Firm fixtures. Such violence is very serious, but in the context of Celtic and Rangers, and all the baggage the clubs drag along behind them, it is a symptom. The actual problem is historic. It is about division, but not only divided loyalties over football teams or even just religion. What lies at the core of “Scotland’s shame” is politics and British/English imperialism.

Six years ago, when the previous First Minister, Labour’s Jack McConnell, sought to address sectarianism and bigotry in Scotland, I wrote an article on the subject. The column appeared in both of Scotland’s ‘quality’ newspapers, the Herald and the Scotsman, and sparked further debate across the country’s print and broadcast media. It also managed to achieve the seemingly impossible: it united Rangers and Celtic – both of them issued statements saying I was talking rubbish.

As a result of the article, I also received hate mail from some of the knuckle-draggers who love to wallow in their respective cesspits of bigotry.

Bracing myself for more poisoned e-mails, here is the original article from six years ago. It goes beneath the superficial issues of Old Firm games, and highlights the real problems that will have to be addressed if we are ever to rid ourselves of “Scotland’s shame”.

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[January 2005]

Jack McConnell's attempt to address and tackle sectarianism in Scotland will fail. It will fail for two main reasons: firstly, the two Glasgow football clubs on either side of the religious divide need the revenue generated by their religion-motivated fans; and secondly, because Jack McConnell and his Scottish Government are unionists - and unionists are a significant part of the problem.

For British unionists to continue to dominate and govern Scotland, the status quo has to be maintained; and for the status quo to be maintained, Jack McConnell and unionist politicians have to ensure the people of Scotland - primarily the working class people of Scotland - continue to be divided.

The alternative to that would see us shake-off historic indoctrination and come together as the nation of Scotland. That alternative would unite the talents and abilities of all Scots. That alternative - the Scottish alternative - would see this nation's interests as paramount. The Scottish alternative would free Scots from the long-instilled notions that they should either aspire to be British or long to be Irish. The Scottish alternative would see Scots proud to be Scottish and focussed on making Scotland what Jack McConnell claims it is, 'the best wee nation in the world' - but that alternative could only come about after Scotland had retaken its place as an independent nation. A situation that British unionists, like Jack McConnell, will resist at all costs.

It's said that, in polite company, one should never discuss politics, religion or football. That may well be the case, but if Scotland is to tackle sectarianism, we have to accept that all three subjects are intrinsically linked in our country. So, we have to tackle them head-on, and anyone too polite to understand that reality should stop reading now.

Scotland's football is, of course, dominated by Rangers and Celtic. In public, both clubs agree sectarianism is a problem and state they will do everything they can to help eradicate it. In private, however, the clubs know the religious affiliation of their respective supporters is the fundamental driving force of their allegiance and, as a consequence, that to eradicate the sectarianism associated with Rangers and Celtic, both clubs would have to publicly denounce the linking of any religious persuasion with their teams.

To begin to break the sectarian links, Rangers Football Club would have to state publicly that it rejects anyone whose reason for supporting the club is a perceived link with the Protestant faith. In such circumstances, Rangers would have to say, “We don’t want you as a supporter”. Likewise, Celtic Football Club would have to reject any supporter whose principal motivation for supporting the club was the fact he or she was raised as a Roman Catholic.

Such rejection of religion-motivated supporters would be the first step towards Rangers and Celtic really beginning to tackle the sectarianism that blights their clubs, but it won't happen. It won't happen because, if it did, Rangers and Celtic would be rejecting the majority of their supporters. Yes, it is only a minority of supporters of both clubs who are openly sectarian, but the reality is that the majority of the supporters of Rangers and Celtic owe their footballing allegiance to their religious upbringing. That's a fact: and if Rangers and Celtic were to publicly reject anyone whose primary reason for supporting the club was the person's religious background, then their stadiums would be virtually empty and the clubs could well commit financial suicide.

That's the reality of the situation: Rangers and Celtic will talk publicly about tackling sectarianism, but both clubs - directors, officials and supporters alike - know they can only reject the ties that link the clubs to different religions at a very considerable financial cost.

The football-based sectarianism of the supporters of Rangers and Celtic is the most visible aspect of the problem, but it is only a symptom. The real problem lies much deeper and links us back to politics and British unionist domination of Scotland. Because of our country's religious history and the centuries-long domination of our land by our English neighbour, we have one significant section of the population that considers itself British and another that wishes it was Irish.

We can see the British at Ibrox, with their Union flags, singing Rule Britannia and showing how British they are by wearing England football jerseys. Meanwhile, across the city, the Irish will be at Parkhead, waving the flag of the Irish Republic and signing the Fields of Athenry.

Of course, the previously-referred-to religion-based divisions apply to this situation but, again, they represent simply a manifestation of a symptom of the problem. The football-based sectarianism in Scotland is born of the real issue - the divisions and resentments created by the historic English domination of its smaller neighbours, Ireland and Scotland.

The First Minister [at that time Jack McConnell] may well believe he means it when he says he wants to rid Scotland of sectarianism but, as a British unionist politician, can he do that and also maintain British unionist control over Scotland?

Scotland will only begin to tackle the sectarianism that blights our country when we, ourselves, get over the inferiority that drives sections of our population to aspire to being British/English or Irish. Scotland will remain divided and sectarian until we retake our place as an independent nation, and the positive focus of the people of Scotland is concentrated on the benefits of being Scottish.

Jack McConnell is a unionist: he believes our country should be a devolved region of Britain and that our Scottish Parliament should play a subservient role to the British Parliament in London. By definition, then, Jack McConnell defends the status quo that drives the aspirant British to fly their Union flags and sing Rule Britannia, and which, in turn, stokes the actions of the would-be Irish in shunning this British control. Why some of the would-be Irish then vote for unionist political parties, thereby securing continued British control of Scotland, is beyond logical comprehension.

For Jack McConnell's initiative to work in tackling sectarianism in Scotland, he has to recognise that we, as a nation, first have to dismantle the structures that have created the Protestant/British, Catholic/Irish divides in Scotland. To free Scotland of sectarianism, we need to free Scotland of the British State and the British media-indoctrination that drives our people into wanting to be something other than Scottish.

A Scottish people, united in our Scottishness and working to deliver a better country for all of our people, rather than divided on religious and British/Irish lines, is a prerequisite to leaving behind the bitterness that has stoked the flames of sectarianism.

A united Scottish people with the power to transform our nation will only come about when we re-take our independence and raise our children to be proud of being Scottish.

Meanwhile, British unionists will fight to prevent that happening - and anti-sectarian initiatives will continue to fail.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com March 5 2011.

How to tell there's an election coming

We must be getting near an election. Political parties are beginning to leaflet – the Tories and SNP were both delivering around Saltcoats and Ardrossan last week – but the main indicator of impending electoral battle is so-called Scottish newspapers turning their fire on the SNP.

None of the national daily papers sold in Scotland, or their Sunday equivalents, support either the SNP or independence. A situation that, in itself, is a clear illustration of how much our country is still dominated by England. The fact the SNP has actually managed to grow into a party of government, without any media backing, is nothing short of remarkable.

There are two main reasons for SNP success against the odds. Actually, make that three - the first two are connected. The reason the Scottish National Party exists is to re-establish Scotland as an independent nation. That core belief is based on rock-solid logic – independence is the normal state of affairs in virtually every country on planet Earth, and only by controlling a country’s resources and having the power to take decisions in the national interest, can governments deliver for their people.

The British Government and establishment that work tirelessly to prevent Scotland from re-taking its independence are usually amongst the first to support the right of self-determination for people in other countries. Just look at what is happening in the Middle East right now, and how Britain is talking about going as far as military action to support the Libyan people attempting to establish a free and democratic country. According to the British/English establishment and media, it is only Scotland, alone amongst the nations of the world, which cannot successfully govern itself. Unlike the people of, for the sake of topicality, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, we, as Scots, are too poor and too stupid to run our own affairs.

If Scotland really is too poor to stand on its own two feet, after three-hundred years of our economy being run by governments of the British Union, then whose fault is that? But, of course, Scotland isn’t poor – or rather, shouldn’t be poor. Norway is one of the richest nations in the world, with Norwegians enjoying a very high standard of living. Norway discovered oil in its sector of the North Sea at the same time as Scotland, and since then, as an independent nation, it has used its oil wealth to benefit its people, building a multi-billion pound ‘Futures Fund’ to ensure continued prosperity for the country. Meanwhile, Scotland, as part of the British Union, is the only country ever to have discovered oil and got poorer. Our oil wealth, so far, has been squandered by successive Tory and Labour British Governments.

Had Scotland been an independent country, like Norway, the wealth streaming from our natural resources could have been utilised to create a prosperous and healthy nation of five-million people. Instead, as a mere region of the UK, with no power over our own economy, we presently have one-in-four of our children and elderly citizens living in poverty.

Contrary to what British Governments would have us believe, there is as much oil left in the Scottish Sector of the North Sea as has already been extracted. That is why England is determined to hold onto Scotland. The British Government lied to Scotland in the 1970s – we now have official government papers that prove this to be the case. They told us then that the oil would run out within a few years. They knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, the then Labour Government was told by its own economic advisors that an independent Scotland, with control of our natural resources, would be one of the richest countries in the world.

The case for Scottish independence was strong back then, and it’s even stronger now. We allowed our wealth to be plundered once: we can’t afford to let it happen again.

The second reason for the SNP’s success against the odds is the calibre of its leader. Alex Salmond is, without doubt, the most capable politician of his generation. He was always a good campaigner in opposition but, since 2007, has proved himself to also be a very competent First Minister, leading a minority SNP Government. None of the other political parties in the Scottish Parliament has anyone who comes close to Salmond in terms of ability. Certianly, Labour’s candidate for First Minister, Iain Gray, couldnae lace Salmond’s boots.

So the SNP has prospered on the basis of a sound belief in what is right for Scotland, and by utilising the talents of its leader to articulate the vision of a prosperous and healthy independent Scotland, in contrast to the state of our country as a mere devolved region of Britain.

The third reason behind the SNP’s rise to the position where they currently form the government of Scotland is the ability of ordinary Scots to see through the attempts by mainly English-owned newspapers to indoctrinate us into voting the way they want us to. At the last Scottish Parliament Election, Scotland’s biggest-selling tabloid newspaper, the Daily Record – owned by the London-based Trinity Mirror Group – maintained its support for the British Labour Party and told Scots to continue voting for the failed Labour-led Executive at Holyrood.

The second-biggest-selling tabloid in Scotland, the Sun – owned by London-based News International – carried a picture of a noose on its front page on polling day. It told us if we were daft enough to vote SNP, we would be putting our collective national head into the noose.

Thankfully, thousands of Scots were not taken-in by these blatant attempts to manipulate how Scotland votes. Against the wishes of the London-owned ‘Scottish’ media, sufficient numbers of voters chose to elect an SNP Government and, contrary to what we had been told, the sky did not fall in.

Last week most of Scotland’s English-owned and British Union-supporting newspapers splashed headlines regarding an opinion poll that showed Labour with a nine-percent lead over the SNP in voting intentions for this year’s Scottish Parliament Election. If those intentions were transformed into votes on May 5th, Labour would be the largest party in the parliament and Iain Gray would be First Minister.

However, what most of those newspapers didn’t tell readers was that the actual poll result showed the SNP thirteen-percent ahead of Labour. The turnaround came about after the polling agency, YouGov, applied weighting to the result. Applying such weighting is normal polling practice, it usually helps to factor-in demographics and specific political issues, but the weighting applied by YouGov was based on the results of last year’s Westminster Election. The SNP always fares worse at UK Elections compared to those for the Scottish Parliament, and last year Labour’s vote increased markedly as Scots attempted to stop the Tories, seeing Labour as best placed, in a UK context, to achieve that goal. So, what was actually a poll showing a significant thirteen-percent lead for the SNP over Labour, was transformed into, and reported as, a nine-percent Labour lead over the SNP.

Aye, you know we’re getting near an election when British unionist distortions and anti-SNP/independence stories start appearing in Scotland’s English-owned newspapers.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 26 2011.

Who says council meetings are boring?

Last Wednesday’s meeting of North Ayrshire Council threw-up a number of things (threw-up probably being the most appropriate phrase to describe what happened).

The first thing to emerge was that Assistant Chief Executive and Solicitor to the Council, Mr Ian Mackay, isn’t half-as-smart as he appears to think he is. Apparently determined to impose his will on elected councillors, the unelected official tersely snapped at those who suggested a previous paper of his – submitted to an earlier Council meeting – may have been “incompetent”. One of the councillors who voiced that opinion was Matthew Brown, the wily old fox who leads the SNP Group, and who used to earn a crust as the Joe Beltrami of North Ayrshire. For anyone not totally up to speed with legal practitioners of the past forty or so years, Joe Beltrami was one of Scotland’s most successful criminal defence lawyers – the story goes that the call of “Get me Beltrami” could be heard from the cell of anyone in Glasgow charged with offences ranging from shoplifting to murder. Matt Brown successfully performed a similar service for a section of the North Ayrshire public faced with a potential loss of their liberty.

Now retired from legal practice, Mr Brown dedicates much of his time to representing his constituents in Irvine West, and pricking the pomposity of jumped-up town clerks.

During a debate on the rules governing Council meetings – Standing Orders – Mr Mackay interrupted to correct SNP councillor Alan Hill who, rightly, had raised concerns over changes to the rules initiated in a report to a previous meeting. The changes had made it more difficult for opposition councillors to hold the Labour Executive to account for their actions. Cllr Hill had said the initial report had come from the Chief Executive, Elma Murray, another unelected official. In response, Ian Mackay made clear that, in fact, he had been the author of the report, not the Chief Executive.

Immediately, Matt Brown piped up, “The Chief Executive is the only officer with the powers to do that.”

Mackay responded, “With respect, Cllr Brown, an officer can place an item on an agenda which they consider to be relevant to the business of the Council.”

“Not in relation to Standing Orders. Only the Chief Executive can do that,” shot back the SNP Group leader.

Mackay should have backed-off at that point, but his arrogance drove him on. At the suggestion the previous paper was “incompetent” if submitted by him and not the Chief Executive, he stated, “Of course it wasn’t incompetent. If you let me finish, Cllr Brown, it wasn’t incompetent. It was a properly considered report.”

Matt Brown came back, “You’re saying it was your paper. Not the Chief Executive’s?”

Suddenly Mackay seemed to realise he had walked right into the dock with ‘guilty’ written on his forehead in neon. He said, “Well, I don’t have the paper in front of me.”

“I do,” said Matt Brown, “and it has your name on it.” The SNP Group Leader then proceeded to read from the Council’s Standing Orders, which confirmed that any paper suggesting a change to the rules could only be submitted by the Chief Executive, making Mackay’s earlier report “incompetent”.

Next, Saltcoats & Stevenston Labour councillor Alan Munro showed he has few equals when it comes to being persistently and wilfully thick.

During a debate on Polling Places for May’s Scottish Parliament Election, Ardrossan SNP councillor Tony Gurney flagged-up his concerns over the town only having two Polling Places, compared to Saltcoats which, with a similar population, has four. Cllr Gurney asked that officials look at finding a third Polling Place for Ardrossan before the election, helpfully suggesting the local library might fit the bill.

That the library is potentially a target for the axe under Council plans to hive-off public facilities was not lost on members of the Labour administration. However, most of them acknowledged it was wrong that Ardrossan only had two Polling Places when Saltcoats had four, making it easier or more difficult to get along to vote, depending on where you happened to live.

Even the Chief Executive indicated she had sympathy with the concerns raised by Tony Gurney, saying she would “see what I can do” about finding a third Polling Place ahead of the election in May.

Then, as the Provost made to move to next business, up chirped Cllr Munro. “Can we also get the cost of it” he asked.

Heads turned in his direction. He said it again, “What would it cost for Ardrossan to have another Polling Station?” Then, just in case anyone had missed how incredibly stupid he is, he went on, “I put it to Cllr Gurney that this is just mischief-making.”

An angry Tony Gurney shouted, “That’s outrageous. I am seeking to allow my constituents to vote in an election and he’s telling me I’m making mischief.”

However, the matter was defused – and Alan Munro was further isolated in the Dunce’s Corner – when his fellow Labour councillor, Tom Barr, moved to second Tony Gurney’s proposal for a third Polling Station in Ardrossan.

Finally, there was the raw nerve exposed by Saltcoats & Stevenston Independent councillor Ronnie McNicol in his dogged determination to get answers over what happened to money set aside for a refurbishment of Saltcoats Town Hall.

Previous questions by Cllr McNicol to the Labour Leader of the Council, David O’Neill, had elicited the answer that, of the original £3-million budgeted for the work at the Town Hall, £1-million had been reallocated to a project in Largs. That still left £2-million for the Saltcoats refurbishment.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Ronnie McNicol quoted a Council report from 2008 that made clear the £2-million left in the Saltcoats pot was sufficient to secure and upgrade the Town Hall. The Independent then quoted Cllr O’Neill from December 2010, with the Labour man saying the Council would only carry out the refurbishment when it had “sufficient funds”. Said Cllr McNicol, “What happened to the money between 2008 and 2010...where did it go?”

David O’Neill did not answer the question. Instead, he told Ronnie McNicol, “The paper-trail for the decision-making process is clear, it is there for people to see. It has been explained to you. It’s unfortunate that you do not understand the explanation.”

Actually, what the paper-trail shows is that in 2007 there was £3-million allocated to refurbish Saltcoats Town Hall. In 2008 that sum was reduced to £2-million. By December 2010 there was zero in the budget.

Saltcoats Town Hall was closed to the public in April 2009 and may be sold-off to a private company at some point in the future. Meanwhile, the question Ronnie McNicol asked remains unanswered: What happened to the money between 2008 and 2010...where did it go?

We are talking about £3-million of our money. Rightly, Ronnie McNicol will continue to demand answers from the Labour leader of North Ayrshire Council. The longer Cllr O’Neill stalls and refuses to give an unambiguous answer, explaining exactly where the money went and why Saltcoats Town Hall went un-refurbished and eventually closed, the more it seems he, and Labour, have something to hide.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 19 2011.

The Big Society and Labour councillors

Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to have spent time in my company since last May will probably have heard me go on about how bad things are going to be once the Tory-Lib Dem cuts to public finances and services really begin to bite.

The cuts will be savage. They will devastate the public sector. Hundreds, if not thousands, of council workers and others who serve the public will be thrown onto the dole, with little hope of securing alternative employment. Lives will be destroyed.

In fact, you may well have endured my perspective on the economy even before the last UK General Election. I seem to remember writing in the3towns that, “if you think New Labour are bad, wait until David Cameron gets his feet under the table at Number 10.”

Of course, New Labour were bad, and New New Labour (or whatever they are calling themselves these days) are cut from exactly the same cloth. Tory attempts to brand the Labour leader Ed Miliband as ‘Red Ed’ are just laughable. Like Cameron and Clegg, Miliband embraces the capitalist free-market. ‘Tory-boy Ed’ would be a much more accurate description of the man who plunged the Labour-leadership dagger into the back of his big brother, David – himself a Tory clone. Under Miliband minor there will certainly be no return to old Labour values. The trade unions, which continue to fund the Labour Party, will find no warmer a welcome from Ed than they received from Tony and Gordon.

Actually, the trade union question is one of those great mysteries of the modern world: why do the unions continue to pay millions-of-pounds to Labour when, over the course of thirteen years in power, the party initiated policies that out-Toried the Tories - making ordinary working-class people poorer - and, significantly, steadfastly refused to repeal Thatcher’s anti-trade union laws? Meanwhile, many of those workers who diligently paid their dues for all of those years are left to the mercy of an uncaring Tory-led Government.

Of course, Cameron and his government – shamefully including Liberal Democrats – tell us cuts to public finances and services are absolutely essential. They tell us about the massive debt they inherited from the last Labour Government and how, if they did not slash spending, the country would be bankrupt. Don’t believe them, they’re lying.

Presently, the UK’s debt stands at around 60-percent of national income. In 1945 it was 260-percent. Now, obviously, there was a very good reason for the country having such a massive debt back then – fighting a World War doesn’t come cheap – but the government of the day, a Labour one, didn’t embark on a post-war austerity programme to reduce the amount we owed. It did the exact opposite – it spent its way out of the situation, creating jobs and embarking on the biggest-ever programme of social house-building. That was when the Labour Party still believed in socialism.

More people in work meant greater tax revenues and, gradually, the wartime debt was reduced. However, even in the 1950s, when Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan told the people of Britain they’d “never had it so good”, the national debt stood at over 100-percent of income.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the UK’s debt fell below 100-percent of national income, and the Sixties was a decade of full employment with high wages and high tax levels, exactly the opposite of now.

What the Tories (and their little Lib Dem helpers) are doing is not essential or even pragmatic, it is entirely ideological. Tories always cut public expenditure and services – hitting the poorest – while reducing taxation for wealthier members of society. The difference between this Tory Government and previous ones is that this lot can’t believe their luck at having the ‘excuse’ of a supposedly massive national debt. In reality, the Tories see this as their best-ever chance of dismantling the welfare state they so despise.

In the 1980s and into the 90s, the government of Margaret Thatcher embarked on a programme of privatising national companies and organisations. Assets owned by the people – such as British Telecom and British Gas – were handed over to the private sector at a fraction of their actual worth. Just for good measure, Thatcher’s administration persuaded some ordinary people to buy shares in the companies they had owned anyway before she privatised them.

Back then, it was widely acknowledged that Thatcher wanted to smash the welfare state – the government spin called it ‘rolling-back the state’, but dismantling the whole system of public sector provision of services was to have been the end result, whatever name was given to it.

Part of the Tory plan involved introducing to the public sector a requirement to carry out a Compulsory Competitive Tender (CCT) for just about everything done by councils. In effect, this meant opening up public services to the private sector, allowing private companies to tender for public works and services. In many cases, those private companies – often from outwith a council’s area – tabled low tenders and secured contracts by submitting bids that could only be viable if fewer workers were employed and were paid less, with poorer terms and conditions. CCT was the thin end of the wedge that ultimately led to the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), latterly Public Private Partneships (PPP), which have saddled the public sector – that’s us the taxpayers – with multi-billion-pound debts owed to private companies, many of whom are large donors to the Tory Party. In North Ayrshire, the local authority is committed, over a 30 year period, to paying £380-million for the building and maintenance of just four schools constructed as part of a PPP contract. Ultimately that public money is going from North Ayrshire into the bank account of a German building firm that has just been taken-over by a Spanish company.

What Thatcher really wanted to do with councils was stop them providing any services themselves. The Tory idea was to have local authorities, like North Ayrshire, meet just once a year to allocate contracts to private companies. However, even the arch-privatiser thought that might be a step too far for the general public. Fearing the people might rebel, as they had with the Poll Tax, Thatcher stopped short of all-out privatisation of council services.

Now, zoom forward to the present day and David Cameron’s Big Society. Strip-away the Tory spin and the Big Society is about getting the public to do for nothing what councils currently pay workers to do. This time, like CCT back in the 80s and 90s, the thin end of the wedge is libraries and public halls. The Tory line goes, “wouldn’t it be a great idea if these facilities were removed from council control and were run by the people”. Sound familiar?

As readers of the3towns will be aware, North Ayrshire Council’s Labour administration appears to be well along the road of complying with Cameron’s doctrine. Opposition councillors – in no small part Independents Ronnie McNicol and John Hunter, and the SNP’s Tony Gurney – have stalled Labour’s plans for at least a year, but if re-elected in 2012 Labour councillors intend to embark again on handing over many publicly-owned facilities to a voluntary group called the North Ayrshire Federation of Community Associations (NAFCA).

If those Labour councillors get their way and North Ayrshire Council removes itself from running public halls – and possibly libraries – then, because of reduced funding from central government, embarks on a series of tenders to allow private companies to take-on the operation of public services, like Care at Home, Meals on Wheels, maybe even maintenance of council houses, then how long would it be before the local authority ‘saves’ huge amounts of money by simply meeting once a year to allocate contracts to private companies and voluntary organisations?

Cameron’s Big Society and North Ayrshire’s Labour councillors are edging us ever closer to the nightmare scenario that even Thatcher backed-away from.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 12 2011.

Choices and decisions

At one time Ayrshire was at the leading edge of aircraft manufacture. Based at Prestwick, Jeststream Aircraft Limited, part of British Aerospace Regional Aircraft, manufactured the J31 and J41 turb-prop planes – that’s the ones with the whirly bits, or propellers, as more technically aware people call them.

The Jetstream aircraft had two main competitors in the field of regional turbo-props, Embraer of Brazil and Bombardier in Montreal, Canada. I say ‘had’, because, of course, Jetstream ceased production in the late 1990s. Despite being widely regarded as the best in their class, the Scottish aircraft could not compete in terms of price. Embraer and Bombardier could manufacture similar planes at lower costs.

So, eventually, British Aerospace, now BAe, pulled the plug on the manufacture of its two regional turbo-props – a larger version, the ATP (Advanced Turbo-Prop), had gone the same way some years earlier.

Part of the reason Jetstream production ended was because the then UK Labour Government refused to use public funds to subsidise the company – the argument was that government money could have been used to effectively reduce costs associated with manufacturing the aircraft, thereby making them more competitive in comparison with their north and south American rivals. The Labour Trade Minister who made the decision not to invest in Jetstream, and who therefore sounded the death-knell for aircraft manufacturing in Scotland, was Brian Wilson, then the MP for the local constituency of Cunninghame North. Ultimately, many of Mr Wilson’s constituents were amongst the Prestwick personnel who lost their jobs.

To be fair, the Labour Government said it could not invest in Jetstream, even if it wanted to, with European Union competition laws cited as the reason. The government could not support one British manufacturer over another and, as well as Jetstream, a smaller turbo-prop was built by Shorts of Belfast. So no public money was made available, which resulted in aircraft manufacture ending in Scotland, many highly-skilled jobs were lost, Ayrshire economies consequently lost-out from the reduced spending power of local families, and the knock-on effect of the closure severely impacted on all the smaller Scottish companies who had fed into the huge process involved in building and kitting-out state-of-the-art aircraft. Of course, across the Atlantic, Embrear and Bombardier celebrated the removal from the market of their highly-regarded competitor, and both companies remain very successful today.

Tragically, the Jetstream story is not unique. A similar thing happened with Ravenscraig, the Lanarkshire steel works that closed in 1992, with the loss of 770 jobs. Conservative estimates put at 10,000 the number of jobs lost indirectly as a result of the closure.

As with Jetstream at Prestwick, the UK Government – this time a Tory one – claimed it could not use public funds to help Ravenscraig compete with less expensive steel plants in other parts of the world. This time another British facility, in Wales, was cited to argue that a public subsidy for the Scottish site would have breached EU competition laws. Again, overseas companies benefited from Ravenscraig’s closure and now sell steel to Scotland.

The reality of both those stories is that, had Scotland been an independent country, a Scottish Government, even one constrained by membership of the European Union, could legitimately and legally have invested public money in the country’s only aircraft and steel manufacturing companies. No free-trade or competition laws would have been broken.

However, as a mere region of Britain, Scotland was seen by the EU as no different to Wales, Northern Ireland or, for that matter, Yorkshire, Northumberland or the Midlands of England. The Scottish interest was subjugated to the British model, with Northern Irish and Welsh manufacturing facilities classed as being in the same country as Prestwick and Ravenscraig, a decision that prevented public investment being made and which cost Scotland thousands of jobs.

Now, this isn’t just an argument for an independent Scotland – although if we had been independent in the 1990s we would now almost certainly still have a strong manufacturing base with well-paid and highly skilled jobs – which sounds like a compelling case to me. In fact, this is actually an argument for a whole different way of structuring Scottish society.

An independent Scotland is in the best interests of the people of this country. Having full control of the resources of our nation – both natural and physical – would allow us to construct the type of society that values people and encourages them to positively contribute to building a better country and a better life for themselves and their families.

An independent Scotland, pro-European but operating outwith the constraints of the European Union – building contacts and entering into agreements with whichever countries can provide a benefit to the Scottish people – could take a decision to specialise in manufacturing products in a few designated industries. For arguments sake, let’s say one could be building aeroplanes.

A nationalised aircraft manufacturing company would require tradespeople with a wide spectrum of skills. We would also need to train our young people, through apprenticeships, to take on these skills and develop the enterprise for the future. Designers, draftsmen, engineers, purchasing personnel and a whole range of other office-based workers would complement the actual shopfloor manufacturing process. Hundreds, if not thousands of jobs would be created in just one industry, if only we had control of our own country, and if only we were prepared to put the interests of the Scottish people before those of global capitalism and the profits of multi-national corporations.

Replicate the nationalised aircraft manufacturing company in other designated industries and, before long, Scotland would again be working, people would know the dignity of work, communities would see investment through an increased tax-take and the spending power of working families. Crucially, a population re-engaged with working and manufacturing could offer hope and opportunity to our young people, instead of the bleak future they currently face.

Scotland, as a region of Britain, does not have the power or ability to rebuild a successful and prosperous society. Only by re-establishing ourselves as an independent nation will we secure the resources and the powers necessary to radically transform the lives of our people.

British Unionist politicians constantly tell us the independence debate is nothing more than constitutional navel-gazing, but nothing could be further from the truth. Quite simply, whether or not we retake our independence will decide the type of future our children and grandchildren can expect. We can continue to stagnate as a region of Britain or we can take back the powers to govern ourselves, invest in our people and build a society that is prepared to put public money into creating jobs and healthy, prosperous communities.

These are the choices we must make and the decisions we must take.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 5 2011.

The Council's budget

The culmination of three-and-a-half hours last Wednesday afternoon saw North Ayrshire Council’s Labour administration pass its budget almost entirely intact.

The only concessions made were to reinstate a public subsidy to the private Auchrannie Hotel on Arran, in order that the upmarket establishment would continue to allow the general public to use its swimming pool, and a half-hearted commitment to look again at a possible repair to an Astroturf pitch in Beith.

A significant ‘saving’ came when the SNP’s Willie Gibson flagged-up a £500,000 payment being made to one Council department. The payment, it was revealed, was to compensate the department because it was no longer getting work from other sections of the Council. Apparently, they were no longer getting the work because they were so expensive and inefficient. “So why are we compensating them, then,” asked Cllr Gibson. Labour leader David O’Neill responded that it was hard to argue with what Willie Gibson had said, and so accepted the amendment, ‘saving’ half-a-million-pounds at a stroke. If only things were so simple. Willie Gibson was right to flag-up what appeared to be a half-a-million-pound subsidy but there was very little detail – the real story of this Labour budget – and so it was impossible for councillors to be sure about what, exactly, the money was being used for. We can only hope the lack of information on what this money was actually providing hasn’t resulted in the rug being pulled from under the feet of more Council services. One certainty is that some of the ‘saving’ will now have to be used to meet redundancy payments for staff in the department that has had £500,000 pulled from its budget.

Other far-reaching amendments were rejected, such as Tony Gurney’s call for Labour councillors to admit the true financial position of the Council was never as bad as they had claimed – original estimates of a £64-million deficit have been scaled back to ‘just’ £37-million - and that the administration’s hoarding of a £5.4-million underspend was to cover redundancy payments for staff whose jobs will disappear as a result of service cuts imposed in the budget. Rightly, Cllr Gurney argued such a massive underspend should be used to fund services, thereby reducing the need for cuts. In fact, with the administration arguing that this year’s funding gap was £7-million, and with departments each producing 20-percent efficiency savings, and there being a £5.4-million underspend, was there a need for cuts?

Ronnie McNicol’s attempt to save Council tenants from being hammered with an above-inflation 5.5-percent rent rise went the same way, voted down without a blush by councillors who live in private homes, meeting mortgage payments that have actually reduced because of the UK’s very low interest rates.

SNP moves to stop cuts to the Education budget were also rejected, which means there will be fewer books and staff in our schools: some of the posts that will go include non-teaching staff in special needs schools. Also, keep an eye on possible future Education cuts. Believe it or not, officials have actually floated the idea of pupils only attending school on four days per week – how much would that move cost working parents who would have to find childcare on the extra day-off – and maybe even raising to six years the age at which children would start primary school.

the3towns has recently reported the about turn carried out by the Executive in relation to the future of the Community Wardens Service. After paying private consultants £16,000 to carry out an investigation of the service and to come up with proposals on how to use the resource most effectively, officials presented a paper to the Labour Executive which set out how the current number of Wardens and bases should be retained, with the exception of in Pennyburn, where crime and anti-social behaviour levels no longer merited a presence. It was also recommended that Wardens coverage could be expanded into areas where the consultants’ investigation had discovered ‘hot spots’ of trouble, such as the south of Ardrossan and Saltcoats, and the Hayocks area of Stevenston.

Just four weeks after that report went before the Executive, officers were back with another one – this time keeping Pennyburn, reducing the overall number of Wardens across North Ayrshire, scrapping the plan to move into the south of Ardrossan and Saltcoats, and closing bases in Ardrossan and Stevenston.

At the budget meeting, the SNP’s Matt Brown and Ardrossan & Arran councillor John Hunter proposed scrapping the cost-cutting measures affecting the Wardens Service, thereby allowing Ardrossan and Stevenston to secure expanded coverage and retain their bases. Labour councillors voted-down the amendment. Particularly strange was Stevenston man, Cllr Alan Munro, voting for the option that means the Wardens base in Stevenston will close.

One highly contentious issue didn’t even make it to budget day. Thanks to opposition councillors on the Scrutiny Committee there will be an investigation into how the Labour councillors that run North Ayrshire managed to embark on a course of action that could see many community halls closed or handed-over to outside organisations. Again, the3towns has previously revealed how the Council, actually just the Labour part of it, paid private consultants £122,000 to carry out a review and provide recommendations on the future provision of leisure and recreational services in North Ayrshire. It is this report – still not seen by opposition councillors – which apparently has recommended the Council should withdraw from running community halls that actually belong to the people of North Ayrshire.

New revelations show that Council chief executive Elma Murray met with representatives from the North Ayrshire Federation of Community Associations (NAFCA) in November 2009 with regard to that organisation possibly taking-on the running of some local halls. Bearing in mind the majority of elected councillors have not even seen the consultants’ report, and have not had an opportunity to vote or take a decision on the matter, it does seem a tad premature for the Council’s most senior official to have had a meeting with any organisation in relation to them possibly taking-on responsibility for the operation and maintenance of public facilities.

Because the Scrutiny Committee, with a majority of opposition councillors, decided to look into Labour’s actions on the future of community halls and libraries, the Executive was forced to withdraw from the budget its financial projections on the matter. However, if Labour councillors have their way, this is simply a stay of execution and they will, at the earliest opportunity, reinstate their plans to close or hand-over to outside bodies the running of local public halls.

What clearly emerged from last Wednesday’s marathon budget meeting was the difference in the calibre of opposition and Labour councillors. Council leader David O’Neill is an intelligent man, and he almost certainly wants to do his best for North Ayrshire. Unfortunately for him – and us – his record in power shows his best is far from good enough.

Throughout the meeting opposition councillors brought forward reasoned amendments and articulately argued their case. Each proposal would have benefitted the people of North Ayrshire, but was voted-down by the Labour Group and their ever-loyal trio of so-called Independents – Margie Currie, Liz McLardy and Jean Highgate.

Few Labour councillors even contributed to the debate, all decisions on their part being left to Cllr O’Neill. Any drive and initiative shown during the meeting came from the opposition, with the Three Towns particularly well represented in attempting to hold the administration to account for its actions. Independents Ronnie McNicol and John Hunter, and the SNP’s Tony Gurney and Willie Gibson stood out as councillors who actually care about the people and communities they represent.

It’s such a pity that, for another year at least, our Council remains in the hands of incompetent Labour councillors. The budget they passed last Wednesday, with the support of the three Labour-Loyal Independents, will do even more damage to the fabric of North Ayrshire.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 29 2011.

If we want things to change...

There is one business in Saltcoats that is thriving during the current economic crisis. Its door is almost never closed as a steady stream of customers troop in and out. Take a look for yourself the next time you’re in the town centre.

Actually, it’s possible you don’t need to have a look. You may very well be one of its many customers. I’m talking, of course, about the big building on the corner of Dockhead Street and Green Street, the Jobcentre.

Last week we were told that official figures showed unemployment in Scotland had fallen. Really? I don’t think so. Official statistics may record fewer claimants of Jobseekers Allowance, but the reality for an increasing number of local people is very different. The figures don’t include the thousands shoved off the buroo into myriad schemes and courses. There are no jobs at the end of the training scheme or course, so the people resume signing-on and are once again accepted as unemployed, but by then another tranche has started the same courses, thereby keeping unemployment figures artificially low.

Off the record, staff at Saltcoats Jobcentre will tell you how they have never been busier. They’ll also tell you how they have to go through the motions of asking claimants what they have done to look for work, when they, themselves, know there are very few employment opportunities out there.

Even many of the staff in the Jobcentre are working with the prospect of unemployment hanging over their heads. Because of the surge in numbers of people being thrown out of work, the civil service has had to recruit staff to handle new claims. Those new staff members, however, are working on temporary contracts. They have no job security. In fact, if they were successful and secured employment for their ‘clients’, then their own jobs would become surplus to requirements and they would be the ones signing-on.

Before the spivs and speculators of the banking industry gambled and lost with our money, creating the worst economic situation since the depression of the 1930s, North Ayrshire already had Scotland’s highest unemployment. For much of the past twenty-years, if you were semi-skilled or unskilled in North Ayrshire, chances are you were unemployed or worked outwith the local area. Many people moved to find employment and never came back. Now, though, Saltcoats Jobcentre is also having to deal with claimants who have lost skilled or managerial positions. Much of the North Ayrshire population worked in Glasgow or even London – Ryanair’s first flight to Stanstead from Prestwick on a Monday morning used to be fully-booked well in advance, but has now been cancelled. Those previously prosperous areas are also haemorrhaging jobs, meaning many people are back home and signing-on at their local Jobcentre, a situation that will see a real and substantial increase to the unemployment level in North Ayrshire – irrespective of what the fiddled official figures tell us.

That is the position we have right now, before the area’s largest employer, North Ayrshire Council, embarks on a restructuring of its workforce that could see hundreds more people thrown onto the dole. Given that situation, it certainly seemed just a tad hypocritical of Council leader David O’Neill to be jetting down to London for a meeting with David Cameron, at which the Labour councillor pleaded with the Tory prime minister to help North Ayrshire deal with its high unemployment. Cllr O’Neill’s lack of effort to tackle the local area’s unemployment and poverty during the thirteen long years his own party was in power at Westminster compounded his hypocrisy.

It has also not helped North Ayrshire, and in particular the Three Towns, that the publicly-funded company tasked with regenerating the area adopted a position of not replacing lost local jobs but, instead, building expensive private housing and designating Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston as dormitory towns for Glasgow. The idea being that people working in Glasgow could buy into the lifestyle of working in the city and living on the coast. It may have worked for Boston in the USA, where the idea was first tried, but it has failed for the Three Towns.

Any regeneration of North Ayrshire must have job creation at its core. The fact North Ayrshire Council and Irvine Bay Regeneration Company could embark on a programme that reduced tackling unemployment to a secondary consideration, confirms how seriously out of touch those organisations are with the reality of local people.

The creation of a yachting marina at Ardrossan means the harbour can never again be the vibrant commercial port that was the heart of the town and which created employment for hundreds of people at its peak. Out-of-town retail parks – comprising the same shops you will find in the same type of facility anywhere in the UK – have all-but killed town centres like Saltcoats. Stevenston, more accurately Ardeer, will never replace the jobs lost when ICI pulled out of the area – it’s much cheaper to manufacture explosives and associated materials in extremely low-wage economies, such as Vietnam, Cambodia and China. So, does that mean a future offering nothing more than unemployment and poverty for the Three Towns?

If left to the politicians, civil servants and quango-members who allowed all of the above to happen, then the answer to that question is, probably yes – but there is an alternative.

The common denominator to the demise of each of the Three Towns, is the interests of local people were placed behind those of big business and the pursuit of profit. Ardrossan Harbour became a yachting marina because Peel Holdings, owners of Clydeport, decided to ‘rationalise’ its west coast port facilities. The company decided it would generate more profit by directing commercial cargoes to Greenock and to ‘cash-in’ on leisure sailing by designating Ardrossan as a marina. The interests of Ardrossan dock workers and the people of the town were not considered.

Towns like Saltcoats have been devastated by the creation of retail parks and the designation of larger towns as regional shopping centres. Companies, many of them owned by overseas retail giants – which bank outside of the UK – recognised they could make more money by centralising their outlets and having customers travel to them, rather than putting shops in town centres. Again, decisions taken in the interests of profit ahead of people. Councillors who allowed the creation of such out-of-town retail parks, and those in North Ayrshire who have designated Irvine as the region’s main shopping centre, to the detriment of Saltcoats, have a lot to answer for.

Finally, Ardeer’s loss – and that of the wider North Ayrshire community - is the most glaring example of profit before people. ICI, in particular its subsidiary, Nobel’s Explosives Company, pulled out of its local factory, not because it was unprofitable, but because it could make even more money by manufacturing its products in countries where wages were lower and health & safety less intrusive.

So what is the alternative? It’s simple, people before profit. Creating a society where the interests and needs of the people are the genesis of government legislation. Specialising in specific areas of manufacturing, which serve the national interest and create sustainable, well-paid employment. Embarking on a national house-building programme, creating work for trades-people and craft apprentices – and providing affordable homes for the thousands of people who currently sit for years on Council and Housing Association waiting lists.

Virtually every area of society could be turned into an employment opportunity, if only we elected politicians who, instead of prostrating themselves at the feet of big business, commercial interests and Tory prime ministers, put the interests of the people first.

The job losses in North Ayrshire, the poverty and the lack of opportunity are not the result of our bad luck. Nor, as I have said at numerous public meetings over the years, are they down to evil spells by bad pixies. They have been caused by decisions taken by politicians, and we elected them.

If we want things to change, and change for the better, then we have to elect better politicians – those who are not in it for the money, those who actually care about local communities, those who put our interests first.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 22 2011.

Future of community halls

the3towns reports this week on a decision taken by North Ayrshire Council’s Scrutiny Committee in relation to the future provision of community facilities.

Previously, this newspaper has revealed how the cash-strapped local authority paid £122,000 to private consultants Grant Thornton for the provision of a report on this subject, and that the final document – not yet seen by most councillors – contained an appendix listing which local halls and libraries could be closed, and suggesting outside bodies that might take-over the running of certain facilities.

The Scrutiny Committee decision means senior Council officials, and the Labour administration’s Communities portfolio holder, Cllr Peter McNamara, will now have to explain how decisions about closures and potential future facility-operators appear to have been taken before the majority of councillors even had the opportunity to see the consultants’ report, never mind enter into discussions with constituents and users of community facilities.

The principle idea to emerge from the Grant Thornton review of community facilities is that North Ayrshire Council should withdraw from operating a number of local halls, such as the Whitlees Centre in Ardrossan, the Argyle Centre and Town Hall in Saltcoats, and Stevenston’s Ardeer Centre and Hayocks Hall. One suggestion is that these facilities, and others across North Ayrshire, could be handed over to a trust, which would take-on responsibility for their operation, including meeting all associated costs, such as building-maintenance, insurance and staff. The North Ayrshire Federation of Community Associations (NAFCA) is listed as being a body suited to forming such a trust, and has already made an initial presentation to councillors, in which it outlined its proposals.

The NAFCA presentation would seem to be jumping the gun, given that most councillors have not had an opportunity to fully comprehend and discuss the findings of the Grant Thornton report. It also raises a number of questions: firstly, why is an outside body touting to run public facilities before the elected Council has even taken a decision on their future?

Secondly, how could an outside body put together a prospectus for running public halls, even just on the principle, without some degree of information that could only be provided by the current operator, North Ayrshire Council? If the Council has, indeed, made such information available to NAFCA; when did it do so, who authorised it and, if any other outside body expressed an interest in running local facilities, would NAC also give them access to what is currently inside info? For any ‘bid’ to be at all competent, it would have to include projected running costs and how these would be met. Presently, only North Ayrshire Council knows how much it costs to maintain the fabric of each building and pay the salaries of staff.

There is no evidence to suggest collusion between officials of North Ayrshire Council and NAFCA, or that the voluntary body has received preferential treatment in any way, but until answers are provided to the above questions, the suspicion hangs in the air like a bad smell.

There are other issues of concern regarding public facilities being operated by a body other than the local authority. First amongst those is the issue of funding. Most individual public halls are relatively well used by local people, but not to the extent that the make a profit. If an organisation the size of North Ayrshire Council can’t afford to run them, as is being suggested, then how can a much-smaller voluntary body hope to manage?

One idea is that NAC would direct NAFCA, or any other operator, to sources of funding. But, if that money is out there, why isn’t the Council accessing it right now and using it to keep our public halls in democratically-elected public ownership?

Then, if ownership of public halls passed out of Council control, there is the issue of who would take decisions in relation to prioritising available funding. Here is a scenario: public facilities in a number of North Ayrshire towns are operated by a trust, comprising members (trustees) from the different locations. At some point down the line, the trust finds income is not sufficient to allow continued operation of every facility. A decision has to be taken to ‘rationalise’ operations and reduce outgoings. So, which public hall is closed to save money – the most expensive, the least used or the one with fewest representatives on the trust? At the moment, we elect the councillors who take such decisions in relation to our publicly-owned facilities. If those councillors take decisions we don’t like, we can vote them out at the next election. What sanction would the public have over trustees who close local halls?

The Labour administration of North Ayrshire Council has taken some dreadful decisions in recent years – signing up to a £380-million contract to build and maintain just four (poor quality) schools, depositing £15-million in banks outwith the control of UK financial laws and regulations, removing Wardens from local sheltered housing units, and forking-out £5-million of our money on hiring private consultants to do work that, in most cases, existing Council staff could have done. This latest idea, divesting itself of community facilities, is just the latest example.

The Labour Executive seems to have lost sight of why public halls were created in the first place. The buildings are there so that each town has facilities in which local groups and members of the community can gather for social or public meetings. Without such halls, some towns would have no suitable venue for parties, weddings, dance classes, toddlers groups, public meetings and a whole range of other activities that are essential to the social vibrancy and cohesion of local areas. These halls were never meant to make money: it is right and proper that rents should be low, so that all community groups, however small or limited in finance, can afford to use them. The point of them being owned by the public, through the democratically-elected Council, and operated in the interests of the public, is that costs could be subsidised from the general income of the local authority. In other words, we all pay for the facilities through the money we contribute to local government, both in terms of Council Tax and general taxation - income tax and so on - a part of which is returned to councils.

These local halls are ours, they belong to all of us. We paid for them to be built, we pay for their maintenance and we have every right to expect that those tasked with operating them on our behalf – North Ayrshire’s elected councillors – will not place them outwith the control of those who answer directly to us through the ballot box.

If the Labour administration of North Ayrshire Council is saying it will no longer operate our facilities on our behalf, then its members should stop taking the money – in salary, allowances and expenses – that we pay them to do that job. This issue goes to the very core of why we elect councils, and the only proper course of action available to elected councillors who abrogate their responsibility to the public, is resignation.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 15 2011.

Unemployment and poverty in North Ayrshire

As reported by the3towns, North Ayrshire Council leader David O’Neill and chief executive Elma Murray have had a meeting with prime minister David Cameron. The purpose of the get-together in London was to highlight how bad things are for a lot of people in the local area.

North Ayrshire has the highest unemployment in Scotland and many communities with significant levels of deprivation. The Council, itself, is the largest employer, but has announced as many as 1,000 staff could be made redundant in the near future, making a bad situation even worse.

Of course, having high unemployment and poverty levels does not make North Ayrshire unique, far from it. Our story of deprivation and lack of opportunity is also told in many other parts of Scotland. However, there is a difference about how North Ayrshire came to be in such a situation.

Other areas have suffered the blow of losing major employers, which devastated local communities but also brought immediate government support to cushion the blow. Usually a Task Force was set-up, with the remit – and, crucially, the funding – to provide re-training of workers and identify other potential employers. North Ayrshire’s experience has been different. We did not lose major employers in the one-off closures that happened elsewhere. For North Ayrshire it has been death by a thousand a cuts, and no-one in power seemed to notice.

A few years ago, during a Parliamentary debate on unemployment, I made the point that had government and other agencies actually paid attention to how bad things were in North Ayrshire, the Red Cross would be dropping food parcels to us. That was not to belittle in any way the suffering of people in countries where the Red Cross actually had intervened, it was simply to focus the attention of MSPs on the plight of the unemployed and poor in an area of Scotland that was badly suffering but had not received additional support.

Because North Ayrshire suffered a lot of relatively small job losses over a period of time, rather than a big-bang, one-off major closure, our predicament did not appear on government radar. Practical and financial assistance had been directed to areas where there had been a large factory closure, but North Ayrshire, with an accumulated problem that was actually worse, was left to struggle.

Another factor that led to unemployment being so bad in North Ayrshire involved a secret agreement between successive Westminster governments and the company that, for many years, was the area’s largest employer, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).

The Three Towns, in particular, benefitted from the employment provided by ICI, whether in the Ardeer dynamite factory, the Organics Division or the Nylon Plant. Thousands of local people earned their living from ‘the factory’, and ICI paid above average wages. Of course, there were downsides, such as the dangerous nature of much of the work involved with manufacturing explosives, but ICI was ultimately responsible for the relatively high standard of living enjoyed by many families in the local area, and to providing the wages that were spent in local shops, creating other employment in North Ayrshire towns.

The agreement entered into by ICI and UK Governments, both Tory and Labour, was never publicly acknowledged, but came to light during an investigation carried out by an Ardrossan man while preparing a PhD paper on ‘Inward Investment in North Ayrshire’. Previously secret government papers revealed that any major company expressing a preference for establishing a presence in North Ayrshire, particularly in the area of the Three Towns, was re-directed to neighbouring districts, such as Lanarkshire, Inverclyde or Glasgow. The reason for this government action was a commitment made by ICI that it would take anyone in North Ayrshire who wanted a job. ICI wanted first-call on the available workforce in North Ayrshire and, for many years, honoured its side of the bargain by providing work at ‘the factory’.

However, when ICI wound down its North Ayrshire operations, the consequence of the secret agreement with government meant there were no other major employers. The piecemeal nature of ICI’s withdrawal also resulted in bit-by-bit increases in unemployment, rather than the one-off closure that would have attracted government assistance.

Being so dependent on one major employer, and government’s acceptance of ICI’s first-call on available labour, significantly contributed to the unemployment and poverty now being experienced so widely and to devastating effect in North Ayrshire.

It would, though, be unfair to pin all the blame on ICI or long-gone Westminster politicians. Other smaller companies have also closed local facilities, some chasing the capitalist dream of ever bigger profits by relocating to countries where workers can be exploited to an even greater extent than here.

Then, there is the contribution of local politicians. North Ayrshire’s unemployment level has been amongst the highest in Scotland for a generation, so why did it take until now for the leader of the local Council to demand something be done? Obviously, one reason was that for much of the period in which North Ayrshire’s unemployment has grown, the Labour Party was in power at both Westminster and in Edinburgh. Labour councillor David O’Neill could surely have had a word with his Labour colleagues about our spiralling problems, but that would have meant admitting Labour had failed local communities. Official figures now prove that under the last Labour Government - both Blair and Brown - the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Yet for those thirteen years, while more and more local people got poorer and poorer, David O’Neill and his Labour colleagues on North Ayrshire Council told us the Government was doing a good job and made no case for the local area receiving additional help in addressing unemployment and poverty.

To be fair, though, there is a degree of consistency in the incompetence exhibited by North Ayrshire’s Labour councillors. Back in the early 1990s, when Thatcher’s destruction of jobs and communities was at its peak, what action was taken by the Labour administration of the then Cunninghame District Council – they scrapped the local authority’s Economic Development Committee, which had as its remit overseeing inward investment and job creation in North Ayrshire. Why did they take such action? Not because there was a better way of looking after the economic development of the local area, but because there had been a fall-out between two sections within the Labour Group and, by scrapping the Economic Development Committee, the ruling group was able to punish the Labour convener and vice-convener of the Committee. No Committee, no Special Responsibility Payment for the two councillors.

the3towns’ exposure of expenses claims tabled by some of today’s North Ayrshire Labour councillors shows little has changed in the intervening years. Self-interest still seems to be the prime motivation, with the well-being of the people of North Ayrshire coming a very poor second.

Local communities deserve and need better than Labour councillors who sit back and accept soaring levels of unemployment and poverty while their own party is in power, and then plead for help from a Tory prime minister in London.

International analysis shows an independent Scotland, with full control of our nation’s resources, would be one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a standard of living the envy of most others. It’s time to get off our knees and take control of our own future. The alternative is to condemn our children and grandchildren to a country and communities for ever blighted by unemployment, poverty and self-serving politicians.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 8 2011. 

George Galloway and Respect

George Galloway would certainly bring something to Scottish politics if, as has been heavily trailed in the media, he decided to stand in May’s Scottish Parliament Election.

There is no doubt the former Labour MP is an excellent debater, an articulate orator and a passionate campaigner. No-one who saw it will ever forget how he wiped the floor with the pompous and arrogant US Senators on the Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations, which had called Galloway to answer allegations he had personally profited from the United Nations’ Oil for Food Programme, a scheme that saw the regime of Saddam Hussein allowed to sell a certain amount of Iraq’s oil in return for food during the lengthy imposition of sanctions by the West.

Galloway’s intelligence and skill, coupled with Senators’ ignorance of the matter under investigation, allowed the hearing to be turned from scrutiny of one man’s actions, into an attack on American foreign policy. Senators chose to give George Galloway a platform, picked his favourite subject as the topic for discussion and entered the meeting badly briefed. It was no surprise then that Galloway took full advantage and left the Senate hearing a hero.

George Galloway is certainly a political big-hitter. He is known across the UK and is the London-based media’s favourite ‘lefty’. Guaranteed to provide an articulate comment on just about any subject, Galloway revels in crossing swords with right-wing politicians and even-further to the right Daily Mail columnists. So he would be an asset to Scottish politics and the nation’s Parliament. Well, some might think so, but I wouldn’t agree.

Certainly, as an individual politician, Galloway’s presence and contributions would raise the calibre of MSP and debate in parliament, but the intervention of his party, Respect, would not be beneficial. Also of importance is George Galloway’s recent pronouncement that he is still “a Labour man”.

Until now, Respect has only campaigned in England, recognising Scotland has distinct issues that are well covered from a left perspective by the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity. However, things have changed: Galloway lost his seat in the Westminster UK Parliament, and Respect’s favoured Scottish party, Solidarity, is likely to struggle without its charismatic leader, Tommy Sheridan.

There are five years until the next UK Election, and just five months until we go to the polls for the Holyrood contest. Therefore, the plan seems to be for Galloway to reclaim a place in the political limelight by standing as a Respect candidate on the Glasgow list. Proclaiming himself to be still “a Labour man” is a tactical ploy aimed at securing Labour votes in the second ‘List’ or Regional ballot. The line to traditional Labour voters in Glasgow would be: vote for your Labour candidate in the first (constituency) ballot, and for ‘Labour man’ George in the second.

It really does seem to be all about George, rather than what is best for the people of Glasgow. Scotland’s largest city has some of the highest levels of poverty in Western Europe, despite having been governed by Labour at UK, Scotland and Council level for much of the past generation. Labour has failed Glasgow, yet the strategy of Galloway and Respect appears to be for people to re-elect the party and to allow George to return to elected politics by piggy-backing on its vote.

Another unwelcome factor to Respect’s intervention in Scottish politics is the party’s pro-British Union stance. Unlike the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity – both of which support an independent Scotland - Respect is an English party seeking to establish a presence in Scotland. Just like other pro-British Union parties – Tory, Liberal Democrat, Labour – Respect would bring to Scotland an imperialist ideology, a perspective that sees Scotland not as a nation capable of governing itself, but as a region of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Respect and George Galloway believe Scotland is best governed by and from London, with only limited powers devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

Galloway is one of those British unionist politicians of Scottish birth who champion the cause of self-determination and independence for people and nations around the globe, but not for their own country. Respect’s position would see Scotland continue to be shackled within the British Union, with our nation’s economic, social and employment policies decreed by the government of millionaires in London. Strangely for someone so opposed to the illegal invasion of Iraq by Britain and America, and to the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, George Galloway and Respect would lock us into continued membership of the British Union, which would see young Scots remain at the disposal of the UK military.

Then, ironically enough, there is the disrespect shown by Respect to the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). At its Annual Conference last November, the English party passed a resolution allowing it to organise and stand candidates in Scotland on the basis that, “ Respect has not organized in or contested elections in Scotland in the past because of the hegemony of other parties to the left of Labour...This hegemony no longer exists.” If we accept the definition of ‘hegemony’ as being ‘leadership’, then Respect’s resolution is fundamentally flawed.

Despite the horrendous negativity of media coverage associated with legal proceedings surrounding the libel, then perjury trials involving Tommy Sheridan, who left the Scottish Socialist Party to set up Solidarity, the SSP has worked week-in, week-out to lead the socialist fight against Westminster’s savage cuts and to oppose the pointless continued occupation of Afghanistan. The SSP remains Scotland’s pre-eminent socialist party and, rightly, is looking to rebuild the strong socialist movement that saw almost 130,000 people vote for the party in the Regional ballot at the 2003 Scottish Parliament Election, returning 6 MSPs. Respect’s intervention has the potential to hinder rather than help that work.

George Galloway may stand as a candidate in May, and he might be elected to Scotland’s Parliament. Unfortunately, the reality is that such a situation will have more to do with promoting George Galloway than addressing the needs, hopes and aspirations of the Scottish people.

(c) the3towns.com

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2010

Using the lessons learned in 2010
Christmas 2010
Charles, Camilla and the anti-cuts protesters
That World Cup bid
The public’s right to know
North Ayrshire’s £5m spend on consultants
Why Murdoch’s Sky bid must be stopped
The lies of Bush and Blair
North Ayrshire Council
Direct action
Governed by the Millionaires’ Club
There are so many more like Gamu
Why Labour are wrong to slag-off Ireland
Political choices
Resist the cuts
The Independence Referendum
National news
Our drugs problem
Regeneration failure
Hamish Henderson
Expensive Labour councillors
Fairness and democracy in politics
al Magrahi - the facts
Why Scots don’t support England
The SNP and independence
Three Towns regeneration
The economic situation
What politicians really believe
The World Cup
The oppressed have become the oppressors
The Scheme
No openness and accountability in North Ayrshire
What the election result means
The Election
Events
Manipulating the election result
Creating divided communities
Good and bad councillors
Scotland deserves better
Judging the actions of MPs
The chance to have our say
Fears Council is being disingenuous
We need leaders who will put first the interests of Scots
Labour’s betrayal of the working class
That Sturgeon letter
Reasons for Council budget cuts
The people should have their say on defection
Vote for what we want
The law needs changed
Elections
Bias against the SNP
Where is the justice?

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the3towns.com December 30 2010

Using the lessons learned in 2010

‘So that was Christmas, and what have we done – another year over, and a new one just begun’ – with apologies to John Lennon for slightly altering the lyric of his song.

With the changing of an old year for new, we often reflect on what has happened in the past twelve months and look forward to what lies ahead. For many, 2010 was a difficult time, with unemployment, debt and poverty all on the increase. We know, too, of the strains placed on marriages and relationships as jobs are lost, incomes plummet and savings dwindle. Meanwhile, top bankers and dealers in the City of London’s financial markets – the people who created Britain’s economic crisis – are looking forward to collecting year-end bonuses that run into billions-of-pounds.

I hate when politicians lie to the people they are supposed to serve. Telling us there is no alternative to severe austerity measures that throw people out of work, destroying lives and communities in the process, is a lie. Regular readers of this column will already know I have consistently argued that banks should be nationalised, personal savings and mortgages guaranteed and other outstanding debts written-off. The wealthy should be forced to pay their fair share in personal taxation, and companies like Vodafone and Top Shop should not be allowed to avoid paying taxes on profits generated in this country. If the richest members of UK society actually paid their taxes in full, the nation’s debt could be cleared in one year, and without the devastating cuts and austerity measures that are about to be unleashed.

Looking back on the past twelve months, we have learned that capitalism doesn’t work, bankers and financial speculators have no morality or conscience, the ordinary men and women of the country are expendable, pro-capitalist political parties (all of the British Unionist parties) will always put profit before people, Scotland within the British Union has virtually no say over our own economy, and Liberal Democrats are despicable.

So, having accumulated that knowledge from events of the past year, to what use should we put it in 2011? Well, for starters, let’s not make the same mistakes again.

The austerity measures of the Tory-Lib Dem Government are designed to ‘clear-up’ the mess created by irresponsible banks. Setting aside, for a moment, the fact that banks are getting away with creating an economic crisis – it is you and me who are paying the cost of that – the purpose of government action is to set the clock back at zero and allow the age of unfettered capitalism to begin again. If we allow that to happen, then the same mistakes will be made at some point down the line, another financial crisis will be caused and we, the people, will be forced to pay for it...again. That is the nature of capitalism. The system relies on the exploitation of the majority by the few, and exists to enrich a small elite group at the expense of everyone else.

The Tory-Lib Dem government’s austerity measures are not driven by necessity, they are purely ideological. Even if there had been no economic collapse, David Cameron’s Tory Government would still be implementing cuts to public spending, and would be creating the climate where private enterprise could maximise profits, partly by tendering for contracts to operate services previously provided by councils. Once again we are hearing the old Thatcherite mantra that private companies are more efficient than the public sector. In fact, the only way private companies can charge less than councils to run operations is to cut the level of service, employ fewer people and reduce wages and conditions for those who remain. All of which generates profit for the company bosses, but results in workers being paid poverty-level wages, which often have to be subsidised by State Benefits, and the public receiving a poorer standard of service.

In Scotland, we should also remember that the two parties imposing these ideological cuts on our economy and communities were soundly rejected at the polls last May - the Lib Dems finished third and the Tories fourth. The only reason those parties can force their policies on Scotland is because we remain part of the British Union.

The harsh reality of Scotland’s position as a mere region within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is another lesson we should learn from events in 2010. At last May’s General Election, Labour promised to protect Scotland from the Tories. They even rolled out that old campaigning lie: ‘You have to vote Labour to keep the Tories out’. Scotland voted Labour and got the Tories, albeit with support from the Lib Dems.

The reality is, while Scotland remains part of the British Union, every person in the country could vote Labour, but we will have a Tory Government imposed on us, if England votes Tory. Labour cannot stop the Tories, which is yet another lesson for us to take from the past twelve-months.

So let’s look ahead. In 2011 we will have austerity measures, mounting unemployment, rising poverty, increased social unrest...and a Scottish Parliament Election.

Recent opinion polls have placed Labour slightly ahead of the SNP in terms of next May’s election, which raises the question, ‘why?’ Given it has operated a minority government since 2007, the SNP has done relatively well in very difficult times. Labour, meanwhile, was in government in Scotland between 1999 and 2007, had a majority provided by a coalition with the Lib Dems, and delivered very little of significant benefit to the country. As stated above, it was also votes for Labour in Scotland that ushered-in the present Tory-Lib Dem UK Government.

When we consider the candidates for First Minister – either the SNP’s Alex Salmond or Labour’s Iain Gray – it is a no-contest. Quite simply, Gray could not lace Salmond’s boots.

Of course, they say a week is a long time in politics, so five months must translate as an eternity and much can change in that time. Ultimately, it is you and me who will decide the next Scottish Government. We will do that when we go to local polling places next May – and when we lift the pencil to put our cross in the box we should remember the lessons of 2010.

We need to elect politicians who will put Scotland first. Tory, Liberal Democrat and Labour are British parties with Scottish sub-sections. Their loyalty and priority is first and foremost to retaining the British Union, with all the negative implications for Scotland that stem from our membership, including having Tory Governments imposed on us.

Having said that, we should also consider lessons learned in relation to individual candidates. The SNP may put Scotland first, but its candidate in Cunninghame North has proved his primary concern is himself and raking-in as much money as he can. The party may be deserving of support, but Kenneth Gibson is not.

Finally, with all lessons learned, the Scottish Socialist Party has emerged from four difficult years of legal proceedings involving its former leader. The party has come through the experience and has emerged more committed than ever to take forward its positive message of an alternative Scotland - an independent socialist Scotland, putting people before profit, and offering jobs, homes and social investment as opposed to cuts, unemployment and poverty. The Scottish Parliament was a better place with Socialist MSPs, and can be again.

Over the past twelve-months we’ve seen the reality of Scotland trapped within capitalist Britain, and we’ve learned some harsh lessons. In 2011, we can begin the process of re-taking control our country and building a better life for our families and fellow citizens.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com December 23 2010

Christmas 2010

 Welcome to Pottersville.

Bedford Falls, with its social cohesion and security, has been replaced by the profit-driven, self-centred and uncaring creation of old man Potter. Of course, contemporary relevance means that, for ‘old man Potter’, we should read David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask Santa for a copy of the classic Frank Capra movie It’s A Wonderful Life.

Every Christmas the message of that film warms the heart. On the surface, it tells the story of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his own personal circumstances, but the true meaning of the film is about community, society and how we all get on better if we help each other.

I remember seeing It’s A Wonderful Life many years ago, and taking from it the lesson that we, as individuals, touch and interact with so many people as we make our way through life - and how, in return, we are touched and affected by the actions of others. It was only on watching it again, years later, that its main theme emerged to me, that of a society organised to benefit the people, rather than big business.

In the film, George Bailey, brilliantly played by James Stewart, remains at home in small-town Bedford Falls, running the ‘Savings and Loan’ company formed by his father. The business is a sort of building society, offering low-interest loans to the ordinary working people of the town, so they can buy decent homes and move out of the high-rent slums owned by Mr Potter, the man whose business interests also include ownership of the local bank.

George gives up his own dreams of becoming an engineer and travelling the world, a situation that frustrates him, but he builds a relatively good life for himself, his wife and their children. One day, though, his forgetful Uncle Billy misplaces $8,000 from the business. Actually, evil Mr Potter finds it and doesn’t let-on.

Sorry, I’m telling you the story of the film. If you’ve seen It’s A Wonderful Life, you’ll know this already - and if you haven’t, I’m spoiling it for you. The point is, George, driven by desperation, calls out that he wishes he’d never been born. We are then shown how life in Bedford Falls would have turned out if George Bailey really had never existed.

On personal and much more general levels, we see how the absence of one individual would have affected so many others. For example, if George hadn’t been born, no-one would have been there to save his brother, Harry, when he fell through ice on a frozen pond - and Harry would not have grown to serve and become a hero in World War II. Without George, no-one would have noticed when Mr Gower, the pharmacist who had just received news of his son’s death in the war, mistakenly put the wrong strength of tablets into a child’s prescription. Without George, and Bailey’s Savings and Loan, no-one would have been there to help ordinary, working men and women escape from the clutches of the money-driven monster Mr Potter.

Each of us, in our own way, is George Bailey. We might never have dived into frozen waters to save a family member, we might not have saved another child’s life, and we might not have provided the assistance to see a whole community prosper and live in decent homes, but every one of us has contributed to the lives of others, possibly without even knowing it. A helping hand, a word of advice, a shoulder to cry on - small things on our part, but invaluable to those who needed them at the time. And, of course, as we have lived our own lives, we will have sought, needed and received such help from others.

Shortly after It’s A Wonderful Life was released in 1946, its director, Frank Capra, was ‘denounced’ as a socialist. Make no mistake, the underlying theme of the movie is about socialism in practice. On a personal level we are shown how helping and caring for each other results in happier and more productive lives, while the triumph of the community-based Savings and Loan over the usury and greed of the capitalist Mr Potter illustrates perfectly how a society operated in the interests of the majority, rather than a small, wealthy elite, is both desirable and achievable.

It is one of life’s great mysteries that Americans in their millions love It’s A Wonderful Life, yet fundamentally reject the socialist message at its core. In that reality lies a classic example of the triumph of capitalist spin and indoctrination.

Meanwhile, in Britain, with the election of a Tory Government (and its Lib Dem lapdogs), we have returned to Pottersville, the horrible, profit-is-everything town that Bedford Falls would have become without the influence of George Bailey and others like him. To mix Hollywood classics, we have gone Back to the Future - like in the 1980s, greed is once again good, and ordinary people are expendable.

We are being governed by a cabinet of millionaires, who are set to impose spending cuts so savage that unemployment and poverty could reach levels not seen since the 1930s. In reality, it doesn’t have to be that way. We didn’t have to bail-out profligate private banks. Like with Bailey’s Savings and Loan, we could simply have protected personal savings and mortgages, but instead pro-capitalist New Labour and then the Tories took the Mr Potter route of putting profit before people.

This Christmas, one-in-four Scottish children will officially be living in poverty. If he visits them at all, Santa will not be able to take them all they want or need. John Dickie works for the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, so he knows what he is talking about when he refers to the Tory-Lib Dem Government’s cuts. He said, “This is short-sighted and profoundly unfair [and] will almost certainly increase, rather than reduce, child poverty. You can’t rip £18 billion out of the welfare budget, cutting support to families in and out of work, without hurting our poorest children. A genuinely fair spending review would not have relied so heavily on spending cuts. Closing the tax gap and cracking down on tax cheats would save more than enough to make it unnecessary to cut family benefits.” How do you explain that to a child who asks why Santa never brought their toys?

In these difficult times, we should remember there is an alternative way. We don’t have to go the route of Mr Potter, Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg.

If you get the chance, watch It’s A Wonderful Life, and have a happy Christmas.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com December 18 2010

Charles, Camilla and the anti-cuts protesters

Should we be shocked, even alarmed that the heir to the throne and his wife were targets of protestors in central London? I suppose that depends on your outlook in relation to the Royal Family and whether what actually happened constituted anything more than legitimate protest.

As someone who has previously called publicly for direct action against the savage austerity measures about to be unleashed against us by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government, it might not surprise you if I find myself on the side of the protestors. Of course the few individuals who directed their anger against an elderly couple in a vintage Rolls Royce went slightly too far, but this was no ordinary elderly couple. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall represent the epitome of the British class system, which cossets the wealthy elite and grinds the poor.

Think about it: people protesting against the unfairness of UK Government cuts targeted at some of the poorest people in society, were suddenly confronted by figureheads of conspicuous wealth, individuals for whom government cuts will have no impact. Driving along in an internally-illuminated vintage Rolls Royce, sparkling with jewels (Camilla more than Charles) and wearing full evening dress, there could not have been a more poignant example of the massive divide in British society. Under New Labour, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Now, with the Tories seizing the opportunity presented by the collapse of capitalism, and the Lib Dems meekly going along for the ride - a ride in ministerial cars - the chasm between ‘the haves’ and ‘the have-nots’ is set to reach proportions not seen since the early part of the Twentieth Century. In such a situation, of course the Royals were going to become the target of protestors.

As far as I am aware, the Royals were not injured in their brush with protestors. They may have been shaken by the incident, but it didn’t affect them to such a degree that they couldn’t go ahead with their night at the theatre.

Certainly, the royal couple were confronted by some angry people who pelted their car with paint, but don’t expect Charles to have been down the local garage the next morning, worrying about how to pay for the damage. Like everything else in his life, that will have been taken care of by someone else, and paid for by you and me. Similarly, protestors may have chanted “off with their heads”, but even old dyed-in-the-wool republicans, like me, don’t actually advocate summery execution for those who just love to reign over us. No-one was seriously contemplating regicide, or whatever the word is for seeing-off the next in line to the throne.

There is a story that Camilla was ‘poked with a stick’ during the incident. If she was, it has to be asked how a stick could have been poked through a window fitted with bullet-proof glass. Now, that is not to justify poking someone, anyone, with a stick, it simply raises the issue of how it was possible for such a thing to happen, which is just one of the questions raised by the incident.

Something went badly wrong in the security measures deployed to protect Charles and Camilla. Their highly-trained police body guards could not have failed to know that hundreds of their colleagues had been busy all afternoon dealing with a large public protest. Why, then, did they allow the Royals to travel in such a conspicuous vehicle, and along a route that would take them directly into the area where protestors were known to be still congregated? Then, having taken the wrong decisions on vehicle and route, why were Charles and Camilla not advised that it might be a reasonable precaution to keep the windows on their Roller fully closed?

Speaking the day after the incident, a senior spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said armed officers travelling in a vehicle behind the Royal car had “acted with commendable restraint” when protestors had thrown paint and, apparently, kicked the Rolls Royce. Admirable restraint? Have we reached a stage in the development of society where police officers are praised for not shooting unarmed people taking part in a protest against the government? Are we really being told that, had those officers felt protestors were capable of doing more than vandalising the car in which Charles and Camilla were travelling, then they just might have opened fire?

I’m happy to commend police officers who don’t shoot unarmed protesters. Of course we should commend the police when they retain a sense of proportion. Just as we should condemn those responsible for allowing Charles, Camilla and their very public show of wealth and privilege to be flaunted in the face of people protesting against government cuts targeted against the poor.

The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall are not responsible for the government’s actions that will see lives and communities destroyed, but they are very much part of the millionaire elite who will comfortably ride-out the economic crisis, while the ordinary taxpayers of the country continue to fund their fabulous lifestyle. I would not condone any harm being inflicted on Charles and Camilla, but of course it was legitimate for protestors to vent anger at them.

I also believe the Treasury building in Whitehall was a legitimate target, as was the headquarters of the Tory Party at a previous protest. This government is attacking the ordinary citizens of the country, through measures that will see thousands deprived of work and the dignity that comes from being able to support and raise a family. It is right and proper that when people are attacked, they fight back.

The Tory-Lib Dem government - formed by the parties that finished third and fourth in Scotland at the last General Election - is not implementing necessary cuts to put our country’s economy back on an even keel. The attacks on the public sector and ordinary working people are driven purely by ideology. Britain’s debt could be wiped out if millionaires and billionaires paid their fair share in tax, but that isn’t even considered as an option. Instead, those who can least afford it are being forced to clear the debts accrued by the spivs and speculators of the City of London. Of course, millionaires, billionaires, spivs and speculators all bankroll the Tory Party, while ordinary working class people tend not to.

Protest against such unjust action by an elitist and remote government is legitimate, right and necessary. The so-called austerity measures have not yet begun to bite. When they do, protests should be bigger, stronger and targeted to maximise impact. Certainly in Scotland, the Tories and Liberal Democrats have no mandate to inflict their savage cuts. In Scotland, the people are the sovereign power, and the people have the right to reject policies imposed by politicians who did not, and could not win an election north of the border.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com December 11 2010

That World Cup bid

Has someone upset our southern neighbours? Something to do with the awarding of a World Cup? I’m sure I heard it mentioned on the news.

Of course, in reality, you couldn’t miss the fact England didn’t get the 2018 World Cup tournament, even after spending £15 million and roping-in David Beckham, Prince William and prime minister David Cameron. There was blanket coverage on our nightly ‘national’ news, with much wring