SSP Trade Union Organiser Richie Venton in yesterday’s National discussing Falkirk, the trade union movement, and socialist solutions to far right division.
I WAS proud to be with a team of Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) members on Saturday’s Falkirk Unity March, joining a thousand others, including the Falkirk For All group, trade unionists, anti-racists, faith groups and peace campaigners.
It was an impressive display of colourful banners and placards, with singing, dancing and chanting in a spirit of unity against racism.
En route, a minute’s silence was respectfully observed in solidarity with all victims of sexual assault – whether by an asylum seeker, or more numerously by locally born men.
It’s important to remember that while an asylum seeker in Falkirk was rightly jailed for the heinous crime of rape, perpetrated in 2023, that same year there were 82 reports of rape or attempted rape in the town.
The SSP gained a warm reception as we agitated for a 5% wealth tax on all millionaires, and democratic public ownership of the core economy – including energy, construction, transport, banking and big, landed estates – to unleash the funds to invest in communities. For unity against poverty, inequality and racism; for decent jobs, incomes and services, through socialist change.
After the town centre rally, we went to the Cladhan Hotel for a counter-protest as an angry, ugly, smaller crowd screamed racist abuse and threats of violence towards asylum seekers and those of us demonstrating for unity in the community.
Our peaceful gathering faced more than just verbal abuse, vile though it was, and Nazi salutes. Some on the other side of the police lines hurled smoke bombs, bottles, golf balls and rocks at us – leaving one older man with a nasty gash to the head.
Those orchestrating these hate-filled anti-migrant demos ritually issue press statements denying association with the far right or acts of violence.
But their main organiser, Connor Graham – who has convictions for violence – was openly collaborating with the fascist Patriotic Alternative’s Richard McFarlane and Homeland Party’s Simon Crane. Some of these people – the hardcore thugs – are beyond redemption, at least in the short term, but the wider circles of people taken in by their lies and scapegoating of asylum seekers need to be convinced of real alternatives to the poor housing, decimated services and other privations the far right feed on.
AS the SSP have persistently argued, asylum seekers, migrants or people of colour in general are not to blame for poverty, housing shortages, shoddy services or the slaughter of jobs at Grangemouth and Alexander Dennis.
It’s patently obvious 90 asylum seekers are not to blame for 11,000 people languishing on Falkirk’s housing waiting lists. Multinational, billionaire owners of Grangemouth and Alexander Dennis have decimated jobs – not migrants.
The NHS faces its worst crisis since being founded but would collapse without the contribution of nurses and doctors born outside the UK.
Billionaires, bankers and their hired politicians – including billionaire-funded, multi-millionaire extremist, Nigel Farage – are the real culprits.
That’s where not only socialists but the broader, bigger, potentially powerful, 600,000-strong Scottish trade union movement comes in.
While the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) had a delegation, banner and speaker at this demo, it did not conduct the kind of systematic campaign round workplaces and communities required to cut the feet from under the racist demagogues.
Going forward, the STUC needs to help build on the instinct for unity of most decent people in Falkirk – and everywhere – by holding meetings of stewards and union activists, equipping them with information and arguments, organising squads to hold workplace meetings and campaign round the doors.
Not just myth-busting and making obvious points against racist scapegoating but calling for workers’ unity in struggles for decent jobs, incomes and public services. Unless that is done, far-right demagogues will tap into the fury of some of the most downtrodden, deprived people.
The band of hardcore racist demagogues touring Scotland, with a disproportionate number of men convicted of domestic abuse and sexual violence among them, will continue to weaponise the issue of women’s safety, falsely claiming to protect them – having never lifted a finger to resist cuts to Women’s Aid and refuges from domestic violence, or cuts to health, social services and rocketing household bills which impact women especially hard.
Meanwhile, millionaire politicians fly in and out of towns suffering multiple deprivations on their private jets, laughing all the way to the bank at the divisions they’ve whipped up.
We’ve said it before, but it’s increasingly obvious: Farage’s Reform UK are no friend of the working class. The party is funded by billionaires and led by a multi-millionaire.
Farage is Thatcher 2.0 with a stinking coating of racism, designed to divide and conquer working-class people on behalf of the billionaires he wants to slash taxes on and enrich by dismantling the NHS.
Socialists and organised trade unionists need to urgently convince people to blame the billionaires, not black people; to tax the millionaires, not vote for them.
The SSP will relentlessly campaign for concrete socialist measures that could transform the lives of the people being preyed upon by racist demagogues and politicians.
We demand a People’s Budget in Scotland, to counter the failures of Labour’s Budget to tackle the real “black holes” in the NHS, local government, universities and colleges.
The Scottish Government should answer justified rage at Labour’s betrayals with a £15-an-hour minimum Living Wage for the 605,000 public sector workers, plus those doing public sector contract work.
They could vastly improve local services by scrapping the regressive Council Tax, replacing it with the SSP’s Scottish Service Tax, which would double tax funding to £5.3 billion, while charging 75% of people less.
They should declare a 5% wealth tax on all millionaires, a Scottish budget with not a single penny in cuts and an emergency national plan to retrofit every home – free of charge – with insulation, draught-proofing, new eco-boilers and fast broadband.
Alongside construction of 100,000 eco-friendly council houses for affordable rent, to tackle the 250,000 languishing on Scotland’s social housing waiting lists, this would offer a vision of vast improvements to life, 60,000 new jobs and apprenticeships, plus jobs in colleges to train and upskill them.
Instead of us being lectured that our heating bills must rocket to pay for modernisation of the grid, the Scottish Government should declare for public ownership of all forms of energy, to eliminate profiteering, slash household bills, with a worker-led, rapid transition to green, affordable energy, which research shows could create 70,000 jobs. The SNP Government is unlikely to be so bold in its vision for independence!
In the run-up to the Holyrood elections, the SSP are determined to advocate these life-enhancing socialist measures, not only taxing the obscene wealth of the few, but tackling the root cause of their profiteering with democratic public ownership, in an independent socialist Scotland.
As Malcolm X said: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” We would add, you can’t combat racism without confronting capitalism with a hard-hitting case for socialism.