Finding a sense of place: community, art and the UK riots.
What is it that makes a community? We talk a lot about communities in political discourse but to what do we actually refer when we use the term? After the riots across England recently we heard a lot of commentators from the left and the right talk about how the rioters had turned on their [...]
Alienation: Jimmy Reid
Today, on the first anniversary of his death, we are pleased to re-print the address made by the great Scottish trade unionist and journalist Jimmy Reid on his election as Rector of Glasgow University. Jimmy’s work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders should serve as an inspiration for the kind of creative industrial action we need [...]
What are current political conditions, and how could a Commons approach flourish in them?
In Robin McAlpine’s superb analysis (After the election . . . where next for Scottish Politics?) the Scottish Parliamentary Holyrood May 2011 election was about a long term process in which: a broadly left-of-centre consensus has interacted with a more specific left-focussed strand of the electorate, and this has generated continuing change in Scottish politics [...]
Organising Against Austerity: Economic Power, Unions and Communities
In the UK today we no longer have mass industrial trade unions; with the possible exception of the transport unions it is hard to have an effect that can’t simply be ignored and waited out by government and employers. How can UCU (the Universities and Colleges Union), my own, for example put pressure on the [...]
On charity, solidarity & NGOs
Part of our ongoing series on ‘how the left has lost‘. The last 25 years has seen a transformation of the architecture of the left which has been matched only by the speed of our decline. In the summer of 1985 (the summer I was born), 2 things happened. The National Union of Miners finally [...]
Lack of Care in Edinburgh’s Tendering
UPDATE: See my latest personal blogpost for an update on this – the Direct Payment rate of £15.04 has been scrapped too, in favour of further dialogue and discussion with service users and providers – MC In my role as the sole Green Councillor on the City of Edinburgh Council’s Finance and Resources Committee, I’ve [...]