MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on north of the border.
Unions lead the way
YOUR correspondent was in the same room as Wendy Alexander and Alex Salmond at the Scottish TUC Congress in Inverness last week, where both were guest speaker. Not at the same time, of course.
They each wanted me to shift ground - out of the dressing room that was serving as my temporary press office.
Both were very polite considering some of the things that I have and will continue to say about them. Being an accommodating guy, I took my laptop and went elsewhere for a bit to file stories.
It would be a pretty hard trick to get Salmond and Alexander in the same room, at the same time, and both of them shifting ground over constitutional matters. But that is exactly the historic task the STUC set itself in the motion unanimously passed which calls for a new Scottish constitutional convention.
Older Scottish readers will be familiar with the history. The STUC was the leading force in the constitutional convention which pulled together the parties and civic organisations and built a consensus which resulted in the Scottish Parliament.
Nowadays, everyone recognises the key role played by the STUC, itself the democratic parliament of Scotland's workers.
But we are again at an impasse. There is an powerful demand for Scotland to have more democratic powers. But there is a minority SNP administration which cannot deliver its independence referendum and a Labour opposition which lacks the authority to push beyond the limits set by the prime minister in London.
Hence the two competing, official initiatives, which are ostensibly designed to move Scottish democracy forward.
The SNP government has its National Conversation, including the independence option, which Labour and the other parties cannot abide.
Meanwhile, Labour has won Scottish parliamentary approval with an opposition majority to convene a Lib-Lab-Tory commission which specifically does not include the option of independence.
In practice, neither side will relate to the other.
The STUC is once more playing its historic role of yoking the stubborn, competing donkeys of democracy together and leading them out of the barren impasse of mutual fear, hostility and stupidity.
PCS Scottish secretary and STUC general council member Eddie Reilly was right to remind the first minister of the SNP mistake in removing itself from the constitutional convention in the 1990s and warned him to "spend more time listening rather than preaching."
He was right also to warn Labour's Scottish leader of the mistake that she is making in removing options from the debate and not recognising the Scottish people's right to self-determination.
"If you don't have confidence to win the argument, then you have no right to be in the debating chamber.
"There is no settled will of the Scottish people," Reilly said, in a remarkable speech that was all the more impressive given that he is still recovering from a stroke suffered late last year.
There is a settled will of the STUC, though. And that is to work through a new constitutional convention to get Alex Salmond and Wendy Alexander, and all the parties and the civic organisations representing the Scottish people in the same room to listen and to argue, give ground and agree on a way forward.
Simple aim of Ineos strikers
AS USUAL, the media frenzy is about petrol queues and shortages, which obscures the real cause of the Ineos strike by the Unite union at Grangemouth.
Also obscured for most media and politicians, but hopefully becoming clearer, is exactly how committed the workers are to winning their just and simple demand for the private equity company to get its hands off their pensions.
The fact that there hasn't been a strike at the plant for decades doesn't necessarily imply that the workers are not organised or prepared to take action. Indeed, it could be seen as a sign of strength.
Their pensions and conditions were not just handed out by the oil companies. They were hard won by Unite and, previously, the T&G through campaigning and solidarity.
One thing that many ill-informed commentators will be unaware of is just how hazardous an environment a massive refinery like the Grangemouth complex is.
Offshore employees are not the only oil workers who face danger and death in their workplace.
The Ineos strikers and their families and community know what it is like to face tragedy together and I am sure that that will bind them more strongly in the current action.
This day of remembrance
MONDAY is Workers Memorial Day. Events are taking place across Scotland to remember those killed at work and to fight for justice, compensation, support and proper health and safety conditions for the living.
The Piper Alpha disaster in 1988 which claimed the lives of 167 offshore workers was one of the triggers that resulted in this international day of mourning and solidarity becoming widely observed in Scotland.
Last week, the OILC union, which was set up as an ad hoc workers' committee in the aftermath of Piper Alpha, officially transferred engagements of more than 2,000 offshore members to RMT.
Despite improvements in the safety regimes offshore that were won through the flawed but important Cullen report and, more importantly still, through the hard-fought battles of the OILC, companies in the oil industry still see the health and safety of labour as of secondary importance to profit.
I wish my old comrades in the OILC all the best and salute their two decades of campaigning conducted with resourcefulness and resilience in the face of the unbelievably powerful hostile forces of big oil.
I hope that they will find their new arrangement helps to strengthen their position.
I am sure that they will. RMT is a union with its own experience of danger and death at work and a proud history of fighting for safety and justice.
Coyle talks about Tibet
IF YOU didn't already know your Dalai Lama from your Panchen Lama and especially if the media gave you the impression these guys were heroes of a democratic national liberation struggle, Kenny Coyle's recent series of articles in the Star about China and Tibet were useful.
These are online at the paper's excellent website, whose modest subscription is good value, or a pamphlet is available by ringing (020) 8510-0815.
In Glasgow on Monday night, you can hear Kenny Coyle speaking on The Truth About Tibet. The meeting is at 7.30pm in the Unity Office, 72 Waterloo Street, Glasgow G2 7DA. All are welcome.
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