A GOVERNMENT should advocate for all its people and the opposition should pounce when it fails to do so. But that’s not what happens here in the dysfunctional UK.
This is illustrated by Ken Loach’s latest film, The Old Oak, about a working-class community near Durham ravaged by Thatcher’s ruthless mine closures and how it copes with an influx of Syrian refugees, themselves victims of a proxy war between the great powers. Leaving aside the foreign policy aspects, the film explores what happens when a government fails to care for its people.
When the mines were closed, the UK Government made no effort to put anything in their place. Unemployment, hopelessness, addiction, illness and early death became the norm. Scotland experienced this on a massive scale and is still dealing with the human fallout.
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One of the characters remarks: “We’ve become a dumping ground, you don’t see them being housed in Chelsea, do you?” The initial hostility towards the refugees is not because the villagers were bad people. Rather, it was the years of economic neglect by their own government that seeded their resentment and feelings of hopelessness.
At the end, the villagers and refugees come to a mutual understanding. The great loss each has experienced binds them together and they realise that to create something new requires a collective effort.
The UK is broken because it embraced an ideology, neoliberalism, that values profits over people. Neither the Tories nor Labour show signs of abandoning a system that has immiserated millions and made the UK the deeply unhappy place it is today.
And that’s a pretty compelling reason why Scotland must leave.
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
SO glad my local Co-op stocks five copies of The National. Being retired long since, I’m not an early riser and I’m grateful to the folks who hide the “newspaper that supports an independent Scotland’ under the the likes of The Times, so I can always find one after a quick shuffle during my midday shop.
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Monday’s edition was even more entertaining than normal. Kirsty Strickland’s opening sentence “Would the last lad to leave GB News please turn out the lights?” said it all. Ruth Watson’s column on how Scottish-grown hemp products can help improve our health and that of the planet was enlightening. Alan Riach trailed Gerda Stevenson’s new book of canny, thoughtful poems with his usual incisive eye and David C Weinczok’s story of how sheep came to dominate our Glens and Bens was a mischievous, cautionary tale. I’ve always regarded sheep as the maggots on the face of the Scottish landscape.
D Bathgate
Capielaw
I ALWAYS enjoy reading Alan Riach’s articles, but I was struck by his feature about Gerda Stevenson. With the first poem about her daughter choosing a pair of red gloves in Poland, I felt that he had missed the point that the girl had Down Syndrome, but the Polish glove maker didn’t allow that to affect her determination to charge her the full price.
READ MORE: Four poems show remarkable range of Scottish poet Gerda Stevenson
My own daughter is learning disabled and lives in her own house with 24-hour care from a care team that has often consisted of some Polish people. They are very happy working with my daughter and helping her to live an active life, especially as in Poland such people are hidden away and not seen out and about, so I was particularly touched by the poem, but missing out the fact that the daughter had Downs took some of the meaning away.
Eleanor Ferguson
via email
WITH more than 20 different homeless charities in Glasgow alone, the time has come for a more joined-up approach to save government money given to charities being further diluted, and spread more thinly than it needs to be.
Unless they work more closely together, the cost of each charity individually employing a team of staff detracts from funding that could be better directed.
Homelessness, like poverty, leading to the need for food banks, should not even still be an issue today.
Until we address it head-on and push charities to merge, as well as tackle the root causes, we the public are wrongly being forced to choose which of the charities to donate to.
Clearly it’s not just about ongoing funding, but helping change the mindset of the most persistent rough sleepers, many who have mental health issues, alcoholism or addiction problems, while some even refuse help.
As someone who volunteered at a homeless soup kitchen, I found that often one of the biggest issues was social isolation and loneliness. Unless more is done to prevent homelessness, we can have as many charities as we like with no real aims to finally end homelessness for good.
Jill Ferguson
Glasgow
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