Scotland

Women’s Aid workers strike in Glasgow

Members of Unite the Union employed – or formerly employed – by Glasgow East Women’s Aid (GEWA) begin a campaign of rolling strike action and protests on Friday 1 December. The dispute began when Unite members in GEWA lodged a collective grievance about bullying in the workplace. Management’s response was to suspend all thirteen signatories to the grievance. Which kind of proved their point. The mass suspensions deprived service-users and would-be service-users of support from GEWA. GEWA’s offices have been closed for over eight weeks. Vulnerable service-users have been directed to an...

College strike against cuts

After a pause for a re-ballot of the membership, the EIS-FELA strike at the City of Glasgow College recommenced on 14 Nov. EIS-FELA is the Further Education section of the Scottish teachers union, the EIS. The disputes date back to October 2022, when management issued a briefing claiming that the college faced financial difficulties and that “cost-cutting measures” would be needed. Without consultation with EIS-FELA, despite it being the recognised union for teaching staff, cuts to courses were imposed. In February of this year staff who had opted for voluntary redundancy were given notice of...

Rutherglen by-election: Vote Labour!

The Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election will be taking place on 5 October. Although the seat is held by the SNP, it is a by-election which only Labour can lose. The seat, and its pre-boundary-change predecessors, was a safe Labour seat from the 1960s onwards. Then, in the post-referendum Labour collapse of 2015, it went SNP. Won back by Labour in 2017, it went SNP again in 2019. The by-election has been triggered by a constituents’ recall petition, after the 2019 victor (Margaret Ferrier) was suspended from Parliament for 30 days. A court had found her guilty of culpable and reckless...

Ukrainian unions back Scottish strike

Barring a last-minute settlement, GMB members employed at the Department of Defence Equipment and Support depot in Beith (near Glasgow) will strike again Friday 4 and Monday 7 August. The munitions depot supplies weapons to British nuclear submarines based in Faslane, and Storm Shadow and Brimstone missiles to Ukrainian forces fighting the Russian invasion. The dispute centres on the existence of a two-tier workforce in the depot. Managers and craft workers are paid bonuses, but non-craft workers are not. To make matters even worse, their current hourly rate of pay is just 23p more than the...

Orkney's model fight

Whether Orkney’s plan to join Norway should be backed by supporters of Scottish independence, especially those who consider themselves to be of the left, is a no-brainer

Hope and despair at Holyrood

The last decade in Scottish politics saw every issue from “dog shit on the streets to international trade viewed through the prism of the constitutional debate” writes former Labour MSP Neil Findlay in his poignant new book. Hope and Despair is set against the backdrop of the cesspit of the SNP’s tight grip on the Scottish state, during which Findlay kept “class” politics firmly on the agenda for his 10 years at Holyrood. A successful campaign to secure automatic legal pardons for miners convicted during the 1984-85 strike, to which the SNP had to be dragged kicking and screaming after years...

More headaches for SNP

Former SNP leader and former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was finally arrested on 11 June.

Rutherglen Labour stitch-up may backfire

Michael Shanks, who resigned from the Labour Party in 2019, was selected on 9 May to be the Labour Westminster candidate for the Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency.

Glasgow CCA expels Saramago

The five-week-long dispute between the Industrial Workers of the World trade union and the Saramago café (located on the premises of Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts) is over. The dispute began when Saramago sacked six IWW members, in two tranches, for a brief work stoppage over working conditions, as part of the union’s organising campaign. Since then there have been daily protests in front of the CCA (targeting Saramago, not the CCA). Last Friday (21 April) the CCA issued a statement announcing that it was “discontinuing its relationship with business tenant Saramago” and that Saramago...

SNP is not just unlucky victim of Tory conspiracy

It’s been another excellent week for bad news about the SNP. It began with the release of a recording of a meeting of the SNP’s NEC in March 2021 in which the then party leader Nicola Sturgeon claimed that the SNP had “never been in a stronger financial position” and warned NEC members to be “very careful about suggestions that there is something wrong with the party’s finances.” Two days after the leak the then SNP party treasurer and member of Holyrood’s Public Audit Committee Colin Beattie was arrested and questioned by the police as part of its criminal investigation into the SNP’s...

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