Pride in Glasgow on Saturday

Click here for full screen slideshow

Also, here's a collage from frogspot - in italian - which includes the classy "Vulva la Revolucion!" placards which I saw and admired but failed to get a picture of on the demo - or perhaps as frogspot says: Molto notevoli le femministe con i cartelli Vulva la Revolucion (più che altro perché mi sono brevemente innamorato di una di loro, tranne poi perderla di vista immediatamente dopo):

Geoffrey Perkins - Lateral shunt

Geoffrey Perkins - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Geoffrey Perkins (22 February 1957 - 29 August 2008) was a comedy producer, writer, and performer, who had been a central figure in British comedy broadcasting. He was educated at Harrow County School for Boys. He died in a road traffic accident in Marylebone, London on 29 August 2008.

He worked for several years in BBC Radio Light Entertainment, producing such shows as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Along with Angus Deayton, he wrote and performed in Radio Active, which transferred to television as KYTV. He later produced The Uncyclopaedia of Rock for Capital Radio, which won the Monaco Radio Award. He created the game Mornington Crescent for the radio show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue."

:'-(

Poverty and health: WHO tells us what we know already. Now, do something!

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West | GP explains life expectancy gap:
Dr Robert Jamieson
Bridgeton Health Centre

"'In Abercromby Street, where my practice is, the average male life expectancy is about 53 years old,' he said.

'There is a high incidence of mental illness like depression, which leads to a number of organic problems.

One of the postal sectors here has the lowest income in the UK. That means people have less money to spend on basics like food, clothes and travel to work

'It's not surprising that we see more cases of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, asthma and bronchitis than areas like Lenzie.'

Dr Jamieson said the reasons behind the deep-rooted health problems in Calton were numerous and complex but poverty played a major part.

'One of the postal sectors here has the lowest income in the UK,' he said.

'That means people have less money to spend on basics like food, clothes and travel to work.

'This is made worse by other social problems like poor housing and community safety.

'The area also has serious problems with gang and knife culture, and of course drug and alcohol abuse, which are colossal contributors to early death.'"

have i fixed the network

i surely don't know

Around Scotland - Tuesday 26 August 2008

(Tuesday 26 August 2008)

MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on north of the border

Salmond's Freudian slip

IF FREUDIAN slips really do let the cat out of the bag, the size and shape of Alex Salmond's Thatcherite feline has been plain to see through the hessian for a long time before its inadvertent release last week.
Speaking to Total Politics magazine about Scottish attitudes to Margaret Thatcher's policies, Salmond said: "We didn't mind the economic side so much. But we didn't like the social side at all."

Just to recap. Thatcher's social and economic policies were two sides of the same coin.

The social policy said that there was no such thing as society, only individuals and the devil could take the hindmost.

The economic policy created mass unemployment as a deliberate act to weaken the strength of organised labour and privatised what we all owned, at a cost that we can count now. Oh, and we didn't like any of that in Scotland. Not one little bit.

Salmond's contradictory attempt to separate the bits of Thatcherism that he likes from the bits that he doesn't just confirms his contradictory long-term strategy for an independent Scotland.

That would be to emulate Ireland's low-tax economy while promising to defend and extend popular public services like the NHS. But you just can't have the public services that Scottish people want - and English, Irish, Welsh and pretty well all people want too - on the basis of the low-tax Irish model.

Meanwhile, as a result of Salmond's boob and his frantic spinning to recover, Labour members of various parliaments have been grinning from ear to ear like Cheshire cats.

They needn't grin so soon.

Their own current and previous leaders in Downing Street welcomed Thatcher in mawkish displays of admiration. Worse still, they have pandered to big business and US warmongering in ways that Thatcher probably only dreamed of.

As a result of these policies - war, Trident, the public-sector pay freeze and tax cuts for the rich - the Labour Party is deeply unpopular and the same Blairite and Brownite MPs and MSPs could well be a disappearing species, much like the Cheshire Cat.

There is not much for them to grin about if they still continue to be out-lefted by a self-confessed fan of Thatcher's economics in Holyrood and bossed around by another in London.

When will they learn? When there are none of them left?

Striking success

LAST Wednesday's day of action by Scottish public-sector unions was a fantastic success.

Despite a downpour of legendary proportions, around 150,000 workers were on strike across Scotland. The local government unions UNISON, Unite and GMB were joined by PCS civil servants in withdrawing their labour for 24 hours.


Schools, councils and government buildings were shut down across Scotland. Dozens of demonstrations and hundreds of picket lines were well supported from early morning, with over 500 rallying in Glasgow's George Square at lunchtime.

The strike was solid. If the employers were testing the mettle of the workers, they found them resolute.
The strands of the pay policy rope on which some of the lowest paid workers dangle are closely twined together. Some were put in place by the Scottish councils body CoSLA, some by the Scottish government at Holyrood and some by Mr Brown, who went to Westminster on our behalf several years ago.

Wednesday's strike certainly loosened some of the CoSLA strings. The council bosses now appear to concede that a three-year, below-inflation deal is problematic under the circumstances and have offered talks.
If the talks don't produce an acceptable settlement, look out for selective strike action in the local government dispute and possibly another 24-hour all-out stoppage. I think that it could well take some more action to break the other bonds.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Parliament is back next Monday and I hope that it will be ready to play its part in winning fair pay for public-sector workers.

Labour MSP Elaine Smith has lodged two motions, Fair play, fair pay which supports the local government workers' claim and the self-explanatory Pay up for PCS members. It's worth lobbying your MSP to get them to back both.

And there's more

LOOK out for more Civil Service industrial action, as the friction over pay wears down the Scottish government's fibre.

For many people, PCS Scottish secretary Eddie Reilly made the speech of the day at Wednesday's rally in Glasgow. Straight to the point in a machine-gun-burst of short sharp words, the First Minister was his prime target.

"Once again, we have a 95 per cent turnout for our members' second strike this summer. While Salmond and Swinney call on CoSLA to return to the negotiating table to resolve the local government pay dispute, they are ignoring the plight of their own low-paid workers. Alex Salmond may think 2.5 per cent is a reasonable offer. I hear he doesn't want to meet with us. Well, I've got a message for Mr Salmond. We're coming to see you."

Meanwhile, over the weekend, PCS members in the Marine and Coastguard Agency were on a further two-day strike in their long-running campaign for fair pay.

The summer isn't over yet.

Thumbs down for 2012 GB team

I'M neither a nationalist nor an enormous fan of the beautiful game, but there's no way that I'd be up for a Great Britain football team competing in the London Olympics, as Gordon Brown has advocated.
The Scottish Football Association feels the same way as, I'd imagine, do the Welsh and Irish.

I was taken with the suggestion made by football pundit and former Celtic player Murdo Macleod on the radio the other day. Why not have a home international qualifying competition? The winner can carry the Union Jack to London in 2012.

This sounds like a diplomatic solution worth investigating.

Maybe we should send Macleod to the United Nations and get some progress on other intractable issues. Oh, and Labour is still short of a candidate for Glenrothes.


THE Scottish Labour leadership contest is continuing at hustings around Scotland. For anyone keen on a flutter, the website PoliticalBetting.com has an interesting analysis here http://tinyurl.com/pbet218 suggesting that Cathy Jamieson could the best bet.

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Here comes World War III

Georgia Was Tricked But By Russia Or Us (from Sunday Herald):

"Imagine the French have just shelled the Channel Islands. What's our next move?

A daft analogy? Not as daft, I suspect, as the claim that the US, with military advisers on site in Georgia busily equipping and training its army, tried and failed to dissuade Saakashvili from launching a war. Does America have so little influence over a tiny client state that depends entirely on American goodwill? Or did Saakashvili somehow get the wrong idea from someone somewhere about the nature and scale of likely US support and US responses? Nothing else makes any sense."

Ian Bell with another spot on piece.

Apart from the sheer terror of the thought of the Rocket Man provoking WWIII, and the rest of the horrors unveiled by this analysis, one thing that disturbs me is the idea that Miliband is waving him on.

Where I would like to be tomorrow...

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Around Scotland - Tuesday 19 August 2008

Published in the Morning Star

(Tuesday 19 August 2008)

MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on north of the border.

The choice for leader

THE Scottish Labour leadership contest is now taking pace at hustings meetings around Scotland. Richard Leonard's wise article in the Star last Thursday should be read by all the candidates.

"Even the most militant members of the denial tendency must now understand the cold realism that Labour is deep in the doldrums," he wrote. I agree.

"If Labour learns only one lesson from the last 12 months, it must be that, when it sets its ideological compass by the Tories or the SNP, it ends in calamity." Spot on.

Leonard refrained from stating a view on which of the nominated candidates would be best, but he said that Labour's turnaround "cannot stand or fall on the election of one candidate or another." I agree with that too. Whoever wins, Labour needs to change.

I think, though, that we have to have our eyes wide open about the various runners and riders.

Among the candidates for leader, the big problem is that they were all part of the team in government responsible for where Labour is now, in opposition and in grave difficulty.
Iain Gray is effectively the Brown Labour establishment candidate. Andy Kerr is the former Jack McConnell sidekick and continuing private finance initiative enthusiast. Cathy Jamieson has been deputy leader for eight years.

In her current stint as acting leader, Jamieson has managed to give the SNP leadership a hard time in the Scottish Parliament, something that her predecessor Wendy Alexander signally failed to do.

Gray and Kerr both appear to share the denial and "one more heave" mentality. The only one of the three who has clearly stated that Labour will fail if it is offering just "more of the same" is Jamieson.

Deputy leadership candidate Johann Lamont has been a junior minister in the same team responsible for the current predicament.

Of the five candidates for both positions, only Bill Butler has consistently been against the war in Iraq and against the Trident replacement. He is the only one who clearly describes himself as a democratic socialist.

He's also got a track record of practical achievement.

In the last Scottish Parliament, Butler promoted a private member's Bill, supported by health unions but not initially by the Labour leadership, to establish democratic representation on health boards for the first time.

His assiduous campaign resulted in the principle now being widely agreed upon across parties, including Labour, and likely to become reality.

There you have it. Around Scotland goes for Jamieson and Butler - a gender-balanced ticket which offers Jamieson the chance to prove that her successful jousts with the SNP in the Holyrood chamber as acting leader are no flash in the pan and combines that with a deputy in Butler who has credible and proven democratic socialist credentials.

The Sun and Star get the facts wrong

"TYPICAL," I thought on Wednesday when The Sun in Scotland ran an article on the Labour leadership wrongly stating that Iain Gray had won the backing of UNISON.
Actually, someone else pointed the piece out to me, as I don't buy The Sun, of course. Sadly, several hundred thousand of my compatriots do, making the Murdoch rag the biggest-selling daily in Scotland.

The false report would have at least some effect on making people imagine union support lies where it does not.

Surely, the Morning Star would be impervious to such misinformation.

"Aaargh!" I thought on Friday when I saw a news story in this very organ describing in fulsome terms Iain Gray's support from Unite and then discovered that, in the same article, UNISON support had been mysteriously transferred from Iain Gray in the Sun (wrong) to Andy Kerr in the Morning Star (wrong again).

For the record, the UNISON Scotland Labour Link committee decided unanimously after a hustings with all five candidates to support Cathy Jamieson and Bill Butler.

Quite right too.

A whole lot of pipers piping

THE martial music of the Scottish bagpipes helped to lead the bloody British empire to the ends of the earth.

Now, each August, pipers and drummers from all over the world return to Glasgow to demonstrate the highest level of the piping arts at the week long Piping Live festival in Glasgow and the World Pipe Band Championships which have just finished.

Some are military bands, but many others are not, the competition is friendly and the purpose is peaceful. Well, peaceful apart from the ear-splitting racket.

The Simon Fraser University Pipe Band from Vancouver won the world title in front of 40,000 people on Saturday.

Still, that was a mere fraction of the audience which saw and heard the Mains of Fintry, a wee grade-four pipe band from Dundee, leading the athletes out in the Beijing Olympic stadium in front of 90,000 spectators and a global TV audience of billions at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Stoppages in the news

LOCAL government unions Unite, UNISON and GMB are gearing up for the big one-day stoppage tomorrow over the below-inflation pay offer by council bosses.

The news that they will be joined in the Day of Action by PCS Scotland civil servants in their continuing protest over low pay was not unexpected but is a strong indication of how unpopular the government public-sector pay squeeze really is.

Meanwhile, it's not just the public sector where discontent is simmering. Following disputes at the Herald and Times over redundancies last year, journalists at the Daily Record and Sunday Mail in Glasgow are now balloting over industrial action in response to unsustainably low levels of staffing.

The NUJ is concerned about the steady erosion of journalistic staff in newsrooms across the UK and Ireland as media companies take the short-sighted step of failing to replace staff who leave, in the hope that it will help deliver bigger profits.

Burns vs Paxman. No contest.

THE Scottish schools went back on Monday. As a final holiday excursion for the kids on Saturday after a week at the Haven fun camp in Ayr, we took them to Burns's Cottage at Alloway where the great poet was born in 1759.

I'd like to pretend to them that he's an ancestor but he isn't. Or a relation even, but I have no reason to suppose so.

I'm just glad that we are not called Paxman. At least my nine-year-old in a Scottish state school - a Gaelic-medium school at that - has already learned about both Robert Burns and William Shakespeare.

Jeremy Paxman's description of Burns as "king of sentimental doggerel" in the introduction of the 2008 new edition of Chambers Dictionary is as ignorant as it is a blatant piece of media hype for a commercial publication.

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Ah that familiar sound...

Michael Moore gives the Democratic party some hints on how they might lose the US elections again | World news | The Guardian:

"...listen for that sound - the sound of your supporters shuffling away in silence. Don't worry, though - they won't vote for McCain. They'll just stop showing up at the campaign headquarters over on Maple Street. They'll say they're too busy to go on another three-hour door-to-door literature drop. They'll still take a list of a hundred voters home to call and read the index card over the phone about 'why you should vote for Obama' - but there won't be much enthusiasm in their voice, and the voter on the other end of the line will hear that. After 15 or 20 calls, they'll give up - after all, there's dishes to do and a dog to walk. And on election day they'll go do their duty and vote, but they will not be up at 6am driving around the city picking up strangers who need a ride to the polls."

Ah that familiar sound... the sound of your supporters shuffling away in silence...

Vacuum at the top

Seumas Milne: Miliband means more of the same. Labour needs change | Comment is free | The Guardian:

"What neither Brown nor his rivals seem yet to have grasped is the scale of political change needed to deal with the new conditions triggered by global financial crisis, falling living standards and recession - and the bankruptcy of a deregulated market model all the rage during a boom that has now evaporated.

Last week, the conservative Wall Street Journal reported on the 'new wave of government regulation of business and the economy' and 'backlash against laissez-faire' sweeping the US in the wake of the credit crunch. But in Britain, a deeply embattled Brown is said to be still resisting the kind of popular radical measures against rampant corporate power, such as a windfall tax on the oil companies, that even some Blairites privately support."

Meet the rich - and weep... before taxing the bastards till the pips squeak

From the Grauniad of course...

"The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. But that doesn't seem to bother Britain's wealthiest earners. In an extract from their new book, Polly Toynbee and David Walker describe the jaw-dropping arrogance they encountered when they asked some of the fat cats to justify their lives of luxury"

Well we kind of knew this, but a) it is well worth revisiting your certainties from another veiwpoint even if only to confirm and b) bloody hell, why is Polly Toynbee such an anxious New Labour wimp when she know exactly what the enemies of democracy and social justice are like?

Around Scotland - Monday 4 August 2008

Published in the Morning Star

(Sunday 03 August 2008)

MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on in Scotland.

PRESSURE on the British and Scottish governments to fund fair pay settlements for public-sector workers was ratcheted up a couple of notches last week.

Thursday saw a successful strike by PCS in Scottish Government and Registers of Scotland offices. And then the three main local authority unions, GMB, Unite and UNISON, all announced strong support for concerted strike action in ballots held through July.

The one-day PCS stoppage was 95 per cent solid, with around 4,500 members taking part.

PCS Scottish secretary Eddie Reilly slammed First Minister Alex Salmond and Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney over their acceptance of Westminster pay limits.

"They have adopted the same pay policy as Westminster to hold back public-sector pay increases to 2 per cent with inflation now running at 4.6 per cent," Reilly said.

Scottish government ministers can't complain about raging inflation as they did in the Glasgow East by-election and then make derisory pay offers to their own low-paid workers.

Meanwhile, GMB, UNISON and Unite workers have voted strongly in favour of strike action against a three-year pay offer of 2.5 per cent a year.

UNISON delivered a 70 per cent vote for industrial action and GMB Scotland's council workers voted even more firmly, with 74 per cent in favour.

"The employers' offer was too low for too long," said GMB Scotland's senior organiser for local government Alex McLuckie.

"We are pleased that our members agree with that view. Who could blame them? Look at the stats - inflation at 4.6 per cent, basic foodstuff like eggs up 39 per cent, butter up 31 per cent, bread up 14 per cent, milk up 14 per cent and now we hear of gas prices going up a further 35 per cent. It's no wonder our members rejected this deal."

The form of the industrial action will be agreed in discussion among the three unions. It is likely to comprise a day of all-out strike followed by selective action from key sections of staff.

And, as a follow-up to last week's strike day, PCS plans a work-to-rule and a ban on working overtime.

The strength of feeling and the will to take action among members of these public-sector unions is clear for all to see, including the governments in Westminster and Holyrood.

THE 70th birthday was celebrated last week of a true Scottish institution - the Beano.

Despite being produced by notorious anti-union employer DC Thomson in Dundee, the mainly working-class characters and comedy of the Beano have given much pleasure to the world.

That includes my idiosyncratic five-year-old, who insists on calling the naughty children of Bash St School the Bash Road Kids for some inexplicable reason.

Wee Scottish flags

APPARENTLY, ScotRail is planning to paint wee saltires on its trains. So what, you ask? Wee St Andrews crosses. Wee Scottish flags. On trains. Big deal.

But Lothian MSP, my Lord Foulkes (George as was), reckons that this is part of a devious plot to "brainwash" us all into accepting the SNP policy of independence for Scotland.

The ScotRail franchise is owned by FirstBus. In my view, weighing into Brian Souter, the homophobic millionaire proprietor of FirstBus, over his £500,000 personal donation to the SNP is fair enough.

But claiming that we'll be brainwashed by wee flags on trains? This nonsense betrays Labour's continuing rabbit-in-headlights panic in front of the SNP express.

Come oan, get aff, George, as the clippies on the publicly owned corporation buses used to say.

If Labour was offering a different direction for the railways, such as a concrete proposal to bring them back into public ownership, I'm sure that the core voters like those so needlessly lost at Glasgow East would come back on board. For now, I think that they're just laughing at Labour's ridiculous lord as they ride on by.

Glasgow to Barcelona

A CROWD of wellwishers gathered at the Clydeside statue of Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria), Glasgow's monument to the republican heroes of the Spanish civil war on Wednesday morning, where a bagpiper gave a rousing send-off to 14 cyclists, including Catalan and Spanish riders, as they headed off to Barcelona.

The ride, which has been organised by current members of the Clarion Cycling Club, is a 70th anniversary commemoration of a heroic journey undertaken by club comrades Ted Ward and Geoff Jackson in 1938 to raise money for the victims of the Spanish civil war.

As they headed south, the modern Clarion cyclists were due to stop in Rotherham yesterday, which must have provided a boost to anti-fascist campaigners there in their fight against the BNP. A luta continua.

The political peloton is due in Leicester on Monday and travels via Coventry and Bristol to Southampton and Portsmouth, then by ferry to Bilbao and on via Guernika and the Ebro to arrive in Barcelona on August 19.

You can find out more about the cycle run online at http://1938glasgow2barcelona2008.wordpress.com and about the International Brigade Memorial Trust at www.international-brigades.org.uk

A GRIMMER anniversary will be commemorated in Glasgow this Wednesday August 6, that of the first atom bomb, which was dropped by the US air force on Hiroshima in 1945.

Glasgow West CND has planned a simple ceremony on Byres Road at Ashton Road to begin at 8pm. All are welcome to remember the 200,000 killed in that attack and 190,000 killed three days later at Nagasaki. And to say: "Never again."

www.banthebomb.org

US Iraq firm outrage

NOT for the first time, I am indebted to Elaine Smith MSP for opening my eyes by forwarding me an email.

This latest was about an online petition which has been launched by the Stop the War Coalition. It calls on the Scottish government to cancel immediately a contract that it has awarded for conducting the Scottish Census in 2011.

The £18.5 million contract is with the UK subsidiary of CACI, a US information and security company which has been implicated in allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Quite apart from the fact that I would prefer my census not to be privatised at all but done by properly unionised and fairly paid civil servants, thanks, I share Elaine and Stop the War's disgust that public money is being handed to an arm of such a company.

You can find the petition and more information at www.petitiononline.com/GSTWCACI/petition.html

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