IT is hard to believe The National could run an article on the English Co-op without one mention of the older Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society (Co-op celebrates 175th Anniversary, December 23).
The Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society (SCWS) was officially founded in 1868 to serve the Scottish co-operative movement as a wholesaler. Actually, SCWS Kilwinning, Kilmarnock, Uplawmoor and Motherwell Societies were formed much earlier, earlier than the textbook Rochdale Pioneers.
The SCWS was taken over and asset-stripped by the English Co-op in 1973/4 amidst corruption scandals from both sides of the Border.
The SCWS included farms and factories, beef and dairy produce, furniture, white goods, TVs, radios, boot, shoe and clothing manufacturing. The Glasgow factories and HQ moved from Dundas to Shieldhall and included boot and shoe, clothing, jam, butter, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
Banking and insurance were large parts of the society. The main HQ building in Morrison Street, Kingston, which was a prototype tender for Glasgow City Chambers, can be seen on the east side of the Kingston Bridge afore the Rutherglen exit. It is now private flats.
The SCWS was famous for insurance, funeral services and purvey halls which most working-class Scots used growing up in the cycle of births, deaths and marriages etc. Even Jeanie MacColl had her bonnie wee tartan shawl made at the Scottish Cooperative and was married in the cooperative halls.
The demise of the SCWS coincided with the demise of the STUC and Scottish trade unions in the same year. The teaching unions remain solely due to the separate education system in Scotland. A full list of the many Scottish unions, such as Scottish Horse and Motormen, Scottish Transport and General, plumbers, painters, glaziers etc can be found in Professor Marwick’s Labour in Scottish History.
Top union officials were given second top jobs in London HQs in London, as well as peerages and knichtiehoods. Not only is the STUC an empty political
shell, but the very HQ building in Woodside Road, Glasgow is being sold off to private developers.
The Labour party in Scotland is also a political shell and pale shadow of its former self. Dick Leonard, no horny-handed son of the soil, came straight from private school and university into the “movement”. He is as ignorant of the Scottish movement’s history as he is of Scottish politics, and is almost daily being corrected and publicly humiliated on the differences between devolved Scottish Parliamentary and reserved Westminster issues.
Whoever is writing his Holyrood scripts seem to be setting him up for a laugh. Describing himself as a “Red Clydesider” was the ultimate. The only thing red aboot Labour today is their necks, and they didnae get thae red noses oan the cheap neither. Unlike the nice, highly politicised Yorkshire folk in the English Scots for Independence group, he seems to know nothing about nothing.
So, what are all these wee BritNat Labour-supporting left groups in Scotland going to do noo that “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” has left the building? Plenty of scope here for Hamish MacPherson’s joab of recovering Scotland’s hidden and suppressed and oppressed labour history.
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
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