29-04-2025
John Swinney's far-right summit failed to talk about something key
The mission statement agreed oozes amorphous words about 'participation and openness', but nothing concrete or material by way of an action plan, despite its laudable stated aim of 'combating inequality and discrimination'.
To say, as the statement does, that 'we recognise many people feel distant from politics or failed by society' is the understatement of 2025!
For the mainstream politicians present to make that comment without so much as blushing shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness; they are the people in office at local, national or UK Government levels who've provoked the anger and alienation which multi-millionaire, far-right fraudsters like Nigel Farage tap into.
All political forces and parties ultimately reflect material class interests. In the vast majority of parties, it's the rule and furtherance of the fortunes of the millionaire and big business class that is represented in Parliament. This was at the root of the viciously anti-working class, privatising, jobs-slaughtering Maggie Thatcher regime, enforced – as in the battle with the miners – by police thuggery.
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Subsequently, 13 years of Tony Blair's 'New' Labour governments continued this assault, retaining all Thatcher's repressive anti-union laws, privatising schools, hospitals and other public service projects with their private finance initiative (PFI) schemes. Then we suffered decades of Tory rule, only to be confronted by Keir Starmer's Labour Government carrying on where the Tories left off.
Millions of people are heartily sick of overpaid politicians telling us to 'tighten our belts', that 'there is no alternative' to escalating and life-threatening attacks on wages, benefits, pensions, jobs and public services. As the colour of party rosettes change, but conditions only get worse, no wonder people feel 'distant from politics and failed by society'.
The point is, what to do about it.
The far-right taps into the well of disgust and disillusionment with the rule of not just the Tories, or even 'modern' Labour, but also the SNP, who do nothing substantial to challenge and defeat Labour's austerity with a fighting plan of resistance. But Reform UK are no friend of the working class, to put it mildly. They are backed by billionaires; four of their MPs are multi-millionaires; and behind their opportunist rhetoric lie policies that would devastate working-class people's lives.
They want to drastically reduce taxes on big business and the super-rich; slash spending on public services and jobs by £150 billion a year; voted against Labour's milk-and-water improvements to workers' rights; and aim to dismantle our NHS, replacing it with private health insurance schemes for profit.
Their main calling card is to divide and weaken working-class resistance to their arch-Thatcherite measures, by scapegoating immigrants; people seeking asylum from wars, starvation and climate catastrophes; and people of colour born in this country.
The far-right is the enemy of working-class people, regardless of colour, creed or country of origin.
(Image: PA)
But to stop their growth, we first need to recognise their success relies on the utter failure of misnamed 'centre' parties to match people's basic needs in life. Instead of an assembly dominated by politicians from the very parties which create the alienated, despairing conditions that fuel the far-right's growth, we need assemblies of the working-class majority to devise a People's Charter of concrete, material demands.
A People's Charter offering a vision of an entirely different Scotland, where the nation's fabulous natural, manufactured and human wealth is harnessed for the benefit of its people, not the enrichment of the profiteering capitalist and landlord minority.
Let me illustrate some examples of what the organised, 600,000-strong trade union movement, community and youth organisations, and genuine socialist forces like the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), could and should wage a struggle for, cutting the feet from under the far-right fakes in the process.
The average worker's wage is £11,500 less now than in 2008, prior to the bankers trashing the economy and 20 years of austerity to pay for the bankers' bailout. A guaranteed £15-an-hour minimum wage for all workers aged 16+, and pay rises to compensate for cuts, would unify and embolden hundreds of thousands into action.
True, minimum wage laws are reserved to Westminster, but the Scottish Government should declare a £15-an-hour minimum 'living wage' for all 550,000 public sector workers, plus those on public sector contracts, setting a benchmark for the private sector. Labour's PFI schemes in Scotland's schools and hospitals on average cost £5 in repayment fees from the public purse to consortia of bankers, venture capitalists and other speculators for every £1 invested.
A People's Charter should demand cancellation of all PFI contracts, which have cost Scottish people £14bn in fees since 2007, and this year alone costs £27m in repayments for Hairmyres hospital – depriving the local NHS of funds to instead hire 850 nurses.
Scotland officially suffers a housing emergency. The Scottish Government should be pounded into building 100,000 quality council houses at affordable rent, creating jobs and apprenticeships, giving hope and renewed purpose to a generation that feels particularly divorced from politicians, prey to the false doctrines of cynical wide boys like Farage – who owns two mansions, making him a property millionaire.
Why can't the Scottish Government grow a collective spine, combine with workers and communities in a mass campaign, and win back some of the billions stolen from Scotland in block grants by Westminster?
Even within the devolution straitjacket, the Scottish Government could abolish the unfair, regressive Council Tax and replace it with the SSP's fully costed Scottish Service Tax, based on incomes, on people's ability to pay.
That would literally double council funding from £2.7bn in Council Tax to £5.3bn from the progressive Scottish Service Tax, whereby 75% of people would pay less, but the rich cough up far, far more. That single measure would provide more than £2bn in a year for council house-building, renovation, and District Heating Schemes to cut fuel poverty.
There's plenty of wealth in Scotland, but it's in the hands of far too few. Even a modest 5% wealth tax on all millionaires would have generated £260bn last year for jobs and services.
That's one of the reasons the SSP candidate in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election, trade union activist Collette Bradley, is standing to become an MSP living on the average Scottish worker's wage, in keeping with the SSP's core principles. When the politicians at Swinney's summit speak of people feeling distant from politics, no wonder! How can an MSP on £74,507 basic salary possibly relate to the daily conditions of ordinary people they claim to represent?
When Farage not only takes his £94,000 MPs salary, but grabs a further £572,000 in six months, how can he claim to be 'anti-establishment', as he tries to seduce disgusted Labour voters?
We urgently need a serious campaign for socialist measures to combat poverty, inequality, alienation, and the false gospels of Thatcherite racists who want to protect the rule of the millionaire class by dividing the working class.
