A LONG, long time ago, Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones, sang: “You can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find/You get what you need”. Fast forward
THE National Minimum Wage became a quarter of a century old this month...
TWENTY-FIVE years ago today, on February 21, 1999, the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) was founded. It was the bright young hope of the radical left in Scotland with its key aims being socialism and independence.
FIRST Minister Humza Yousaf announced to widespread fanfare and much acclaim in September last year that the Scottish Government’s Programme for Government would include financial support to trial a four-day week in a number of government departments and public bodies.
TODAY marks the centenary of the first Labour government in Britain. It was led by many prominent Scots, such as Ramsay MacDonald, Arthur Henderson, Richard Haldane, Hugh Macmillan, Manny Shinwel, and John Wheatley. Some of them were part of the Red Clydeside radical political eruption after the First World War.
IT is more than 18 months since the undeniable return of unions to public life in the form of the big uptick in strikes that started in the summer of 2022.
LAST weekend, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) called its first special congress since 1982 in order to flesh out its existing position of non-compliance with – and defiance of – the Tories’ Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023.
‘TOO many protest singers/Not enough protest songs.” So sang Scots former Orange Juice frontperson, Edwyn Collins, on his 1994 hit single, A Girl Like You.
JOHN Maclean died 100 years ago today. He was, along with the likes of James Connolly and Jimmy Reid, one of the most important socialist sons of Scotland. Trained as a teacher but outside the school system, he became a very effective revolutionary Marxist educator, training many socialists and trade unionists. He was jailed for his opposition to the First World War.
MASSIVE Glasgow and London demonstrations in February 2003 against the invasion of Iraq are being replicated many times over by those against Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
