The Scottish Socialist Party marked International Women’s Day by campaigning on the streets for measures to transform the lives of working-class women, as part of the struggle for radical socialist change.
Several of the SSP’s female candidates for the 8 Hollywood regional lists joined other members across the country.
Collette Bradley, chair of her Scotland-wide trade union for support staff in Further Education, who tops the SSP’s list in Central Scotland and Lothians West, said:
“The SSP is demanding wage increases to compensate for the rising cost-of-living, where people cannot afford food, household energy bills and public transport costs, due to disgraceful profiteering by the big supermarkets, energy companies and privatised transport firms.
“We were out on the streets demanding a £15-an-hour minimum wage for everyone, regardless of age, to underpin a massive transfer of wealth from profits to pay.
“We included the call for equal pay for women. It’s shameful that we need to demand this, 56 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed.
“If elected to Holyrood, I and other socialist MSPs will propose a Scottish budget which rejects all cuts from Westminster, and funds local authorities to implement equal pay without delay and without detriment to male workers.
“We want levelling up, not levelling down of workers’ pay
“We’re determined to fight for measures to put Scotland’s massive wealth into the pay and public services which working-class women especially rely on.”
Veronica Edgely, the SSP’s lead candidate in the West of Scotland region and a member of UNITE the union, who works in customer services, told us:
“The SSP believes every community should be a safe community. Women have the right to go about their lives free from violence, harassment and fear.
“That means practical steps like free and expanded public transport so everyone can travel safely at night; safer public spaces with proper lighting and planning; and a Scotland-wide strategy to tackle domestic abuse, alongside increased funding for refuges, helplines and support services.
“The SSP will fight for funding for all that and more, by taxing the millionaires and extremely rich.”
The SSP’s Election Campaign Organiser, Richie Venton, added:
“We are immensely proud to have such a collection of determined working-class women as SSP candidates, carrying on the real traditions of International Women’s Day, as initiated by the women’s conference of the international socialist movement in 1910.
“Principled fighters who will remain on a skilled worker’s wage if elected, to rise with other women and the whole working class, rather than rise out of the working class by pocketing the grotesquely inflated £75,000 salary grabbed by MSPs from all other parties.”