Latest news with #BearsdenBolsheviks


The Herald Scotland
22-07-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Peggie tribunal shows a strain of delinquency in our public bodies
The Sandie Peggie tribunal, currently playing out in Dundee has seen a procession of highly-paid but wantonly incompetent civic automatons embarrass themselves and the Scottish education system. Each day, we can feast on a fresh flurry of statements that point to a strain of callous delinquency at the heart of our public bodies. There are hundreds more of these dismal Tamany Hall bureaucrats operating at every level of civic governance in Scotland. The fix is a simple one: pay them salaries well beyond their experience and ability so that they are yours forever to bend and manipulate into any shape you want. Read More: The traditional struggles of the UK Left for better jobs; affordable housing; equality in health and education have been replaced by genderism, climatism, Ukrainism and good old-fashioned Jew-baiting. Working-class families and communities now fear losing their jobs and their liberty for not being conversant in the clouds of psycho-babble that pass for policy-making in Scottish and UK politics. This though, isn't the scariest part. The chill sets in when you look around and find that your neighbourhood Tories seem more likely to support working-class people when they fall foul of the Bearsden Bolsheviks. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking unclean thoughts about backing the Tories or supporting the Union in the manner of a Trappist monk who inadvertently catches porn on his social media feed and can't unsee it. Tories are more likely to agree with you when you ask why the liberal elites of Scotland and the UK loathe women and working-class communities so much. In this scenario the Tories are the like the devil in 1 Peter 5:8: 'Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.' In these dark moments of the soul, when you are vulnerable to some of the temptations of the Right, it's good to be reminded of just why you and generations of your family harbour a righteous loathing of the Tories and all their vile stratagems. The announcement yesterday that a Public Inquiry is to be held into the sinister events at the Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire in June, 1984 was one of those moments when you remembered why you loathe Toryism and all that it represents: all its empty promises. John Swinney may be the most cowardly and craven political leader Scotland has ever produced and the clown-show cabinet he heads at Holyrood often makes you cringe in embarrassment. But nothing they will ever do can match the vicious ferocity the Tories and Margaret Thatcher unleashed against working-class men and their families fighting for their livelihoods and the futures of their communities during the Miners' Strike in 1984/85. Forty years after the Metropolitan Police – then still contaminated by London gangland corruption – beat unarmed striking miners to a pulp, this is a long overdue first step in remedying an appalling miscarriage of justice against working people. The aftermath of this brutality by the British state against its own people was even worse than the blood-letting. Thousands of striking miners were arraigned to appear before hastily-convened kangaroo courts and handed punitive sentences on charges trumped up by corrupt police officers. It pointed to another lamentable truth: the judiciary had also been nobbled in Mrs Thatcher's psychotic desire to crush the trade union movement, using every lever of the state at her disposal. That though, was still not enough to slake the Tories bloodlust against working people who had dared to rise up against them. Miners and their families were black-balled from meaningful employment for decades afterwards, effectively putting their communities beyond social repair. A cadre of MI5 agents was able to infiltrate the National Union of Mineworkers and feed false stories to an all-too-willing media, including the Daily Mirror under the stewardship of the thief, Robert Maxwell. When, years later, the paper's 'award-winning' stories about NUM corruption were shown to be lies, they were forced to hand back the awards. But the damage had been done. Britain's mining industry was still profitable, but Mrs Thatcher simply wanted them gone, to the extent that billions were found – mainly from the hidden receipts of the new North Sea oil Klondyke - to pay huge settlements to long-serving miners. From this, another lie took root: that many miners became rich. But how much does a few hundred grand last when neither you, nor any of your descendants would never work again? It also overlooked another truth: that for many decades these men and their fathers and grandfathers had risked their lives every day to make Britain an industrial power-house. My own dad, a trade unionist to the end of his life, was in awe of the miners. 'Whatever they're paid, it'll never be enough for what they do for this country,' he once told me. He also told me something else: that it was these men and their working-class comrades whose ultimate sacrifice in two world wars contributed most to Britain's victory. And that when they were dying in their millions the British royal family and its aristocratic boot-lickers were preparing to make deals with the Nazis. Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. He is Features Writer of the Year and writes regularly about the working-class people and communities of Scotland.


The Herald Scotland
02-06-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Virtue signalling from Bearsden Bolsheviks won't beat curse of racism
Calling everyone scum and horrible people might evoke cheers and feet-stamping from the Bearsden Bolsheviks, but it merely deflects our gaze from how complicit the political elites of Scotland and the UK have been in driving working-class people into the arms of Reform. 'All parties in Scotland and the UK have massively let down working class people,' Mr Kerr tells a full-house of 250. 'You see it every day when you walk the streets of this city and see the state it's in. You see it in my constituency where people can't get houses and in the state of the houses of the people who can.' The event was aimed at tackling the rise of right wing politics (Image: Gordon Terris)He cites the scourge of private landlordism 'who are taking the absolute piss out of our economy. And not only wrecking our economy but soaking up investment capital and wrecking lives in the process. That's the root. That economic need and neglect has always been fertile ground for the far right. 'But I'm not going to say that everyone who votes for Reform is a fascist. There's a vacuum which Reform fill.' He reminds us of how many working-class people recently voted for Reform in Clydebank and Easterhouse. 'We have a job to go into these communities and fill that gap which Reform are seeking to fill.' He dismantles First Minister John Swinney's fatuous £10k summit which recently brought together the troughers and frauds of the Scottish civic elite under the pretence of opposing extremism. 'That was manna from heaven for Reform,' Said Mr Kerr. 'It was entirely the wrong tactic. That looked like the Scottish establishment all sitting down together: it was a gift to Reform.' As the others vied with each other to express horror at the prospect of Reform rising, this Glasgow councillor was telling them what voters in Larkhall were telling me the previous day: they're sick of being gas-lit by a class of superannuated professionals telling them how to behave; how to speak; how to eat; how to raise their children and then cancelling them if they fail to comply. Even so, it's good to be here at the Boardwalk events venue in Brunswick Street in the heart of Glasgow's Merchant City. The previous day, I'd walked a while with Reform's candidate in the Hamilton, Stonehouse and Larkhall by-election. I'd needed to understand why many of Scotland's everyday working people feel drawn to Nigel Farage and a party which preys on their fears and their exasperation and channels them towards something ugly. Read more But I also needed to be confirmed in my own core beliefs that the scourge of racism erodes this country's health and averts our gaze from that which causes most damage to our society and those who profit from it. Among them the predations of unfettered capitalism; the low wages; the tax avoidance of our largest corporations; the health inequality and the instincts of a Labour Government to build a multi-billion-pound war economy intended to soften us to the inevitability of war with Russia. We needed to be reminded that Scotland's legal and political establishment, lobbied by the Scottish Police Federation, have spent years and a lot of money seeking to undermine the public inquiry into the death of Sheku Bayoh, who died in police custody in Kirkcaldy ten years ago. And how this has been accompanied by a campaign to defame him and destroy his family. Aamer Anwer, his family's lawyer, claimed they had 'treated his colour as a weapon'. We all needed to be reminded about the Park Inn Incident on June 26, 2020 in Glasgow. This was the mass stabbing by asylum-seeker Bahreddin Adam which left six people wounded. He was eventually killed by police, the first time they'd shot and killed anyone since 1969 in Scotland. Bahreddin Adam had made 72 calls to various social services before he snapped. This was in the midst of the Covid pandemic where asylum seekers were detained in hotels, isolated, neglected and treated like caged animals by a liberal political administration who talk big about racism but which pay a suite of private facilities companies millions to take these poor people off their hands. At conferences such as these there are always workshops and the trick is to separate the genuinely interesting ones from those organised by groups which seek to hitch their own questionable agendas to something virtuous: in this case the good fight against racism. On Saturday, I dropped into one featuring a documentary called 72 Calls: The Park Inn Incident, in which survivors of the attack spoke with compassion about Bahreddin Adam and the mental despair that they and he had endured while being moved around like livestock. It also exposed Britain's inhumane asylum system whose main purpose seems to be to dehumanise and degrade other human beings so much that it will send a message to other poor souls. The conference featured debates and workshops (Image: Gordon Terris) These people are expected to live on a daily allowance of £9 which hasn't risen in 25 years. Their often-remote locations seemed designed to deter connecting with local communities and the prospect of being ordered to move location at a few minutes' notice disrupts children's education. Far Right groups target communities where asylum hostels are known to exist to spread lies and disinformation about their luxury conditions. And when a Labour Prime Minister makes speeches about Britain being an "island of strangers" they're emboldened. This event is happening in the middle of a district which bears the names of the countries and communities that Britain ransacked and then sold into slavery. Our continuing wars of adventure throughout the last two centuries have literally caused the geopolitical upheaval that brings many of these people to our shores. I'd welcome them all and call it restorative justice. Someone has to pay for what we did to their countries. And if we're that generation then so be it. I heard, Sabir Zazai, Chief Executive of the Scottish Refugee Council, speak much more softly and authentically about how to combat racism than most of the sloganeers waving their fists for likes in the opening session. Mr Zazai cited the race riots in Southport and north England as what can happen when you dehumanise an entire race on their colour country of origin. 'Women wearing scarves are now feeling unsafe,' said Mr Zazai. 'They ask us the dreaded question: 'is it safe for us to go out' or 'will my accommodation be attacked'. This is new.' Read more Refugees and migrants ran small businesses and added to Scotland's arts and culture with their food and music, he reminded us. 'We need to fight back with love and compassion. Let's get to know each other better. Offering people sanctuary and protection can be unifying and uplifting for a community. Treat them as fellow human beings. Tell them that Scotland is as much their home as ours.' Earlier, Matt Kerr rebuked his own party leader for his Enoch Powell rhetoric. 'I'll tell you something,' he said. 'We need to refuse to be strangers by talking to the person next to you and holding their hand. You pick them up when they need it. That's life. That's the antidote to all of this. That's where it begins. You start in your community. You have the conversations with your family, with your friends and it'll be difficult but have courage and stand together.' It's just that, in the hands of a political and trade union class who have dehumanised working-class feminists and who are mocking once more the practice of Christianity, the anti-racism message rings hollow. The Stand up to Racism campaign has never been more important, but some of its loudest and entitled messengers are its worst ambassadors. Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist and is Scottish Feature Writer of the Year. This year is his 40th in newspapers. Among his paltry list of professional achievements is that he's never been approached by any political party or lobbying firm to be on their payroll.