A People's History of Scotland (39 page)

The march set off with police filming participants, and reached the security fence inside which world leaders had gathered. A group simply pushed past the fence and entered the secure zone, eventually being charged at by riot police. Overhead, a Chinook helicopter brought in further riot police. The protest was effective, getting within sight and earshot of Gleneagles Hotel, but non-violent on the part of the protesters, with just two arrests being made.

The people of Auchterarder were supportive too, despite being fed horror stories about demonstrators wrecking the village. People had put up posters in different languages saying ‘Welcome to Auchterarder'. They waved at protesters from their windows and some participated in the march.

Ian Rankin's penultimate Inspector Rebus crime thriller,
The Naming of the Dead
(named after the Stop the War protest), is set during the protests and is dedicated ‘to everyone who was in Edinburgh on 2 July 2005'.

For a Nuclear-Free Scotland

The United Kingdom is one of nine states that officially admit to possessing nuclear weapons. The Trident missiles currently based at the UK's sole nuclear base, Faslane, are capable of killing 225 million civilians. They cost British taxpayers £2 billion a year.

Currently, all the major Westminster parties are agreed on spending £100 billion on a new generation of weapons of mass destruction to replace Trident. Like Trident and its predecessor Polaris, these will effectively be leased from the US and could be used only with Washington's permission. In April 2013, as campaigning for the independence referendum was under way, thousands marched through Glasgow demanding nuclear missiles be removed from Scotland and the billions scheduled to be spent replacing Trident be allocated to welfare.

One of the march organisers, Brian Larkin, co-ordinator of the Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre, said Trident should be scrapped and the money put into ‘human needs' instead. ‘We want the
resources that go into Trident to fund disability benefits, create jobs, scrap the bedroom tax, fund the NHS, fund education and fund welfare.'
¹⁶
Yet as Brian Quail, an executive member of Scottish CND, points out: ‘… now [in 2013] we see all the opposition parties in Scotland united in supporting this British WMD, Trident. There is a perverse logic to this situation. Labour, like the Tories and LibDems, is a Unionist party. This means that they are a nationalist party – i.e. British nationalist. Trident is the ultimate symbol of Britishness. This is our national fetish, the sacrosanct totem of our great power status. And it has ever been so.'
¹⁷

The peace campaigner Isobel Lindsay explains: ‘All of the UK's nuclear weapons capacity is based at Faslane/Coulport. If a Scottish government insists that no nuclear warheads be allowed in Scottish waters or land (as New Zealand did), we could disarm Trident very quickly. We would have to agree to store the warheads (disabled) at Coulport for a short period until another storage facility could be built (or hopefully a decommissioning process). If nuclear-armed Trident submarines are not allowed to use Scottish waters or land, there is no other site for them in England or Wales that has the physical requirements and the infrastructure.'
¹⁸

In 2012, though the SNP conference voted with the party leadership to reverse the party's longstanding commitment to quit NATO, that does not remove the fact that Scotland has no interest in this war-making alliance. This goal does not require a revolution: it is very easy and very possible to achieve. Further, we could withdraw from NATO, which is an aggressive alliance pursuing US interests and a neo-liberal programme, and insist that Scottish troops will not take part in any more imperialist wars.

Being Working Class in Today's World

In the course of the new century the numbers of people taking part in protests and social movements has grown, globally as well as in Scotland. This contrasts with the lack of strike action by workers and the relative decline of the trade unions. Among New Labour it
became fashionable to talk of the working class as a declining and spent force and to regard trade unions, in similar ways to the Tories, as dinosaurs (although that did not stop them taking union money).

There is no question that since the 1980s there has been a restructuring of the workforce in Scotland, as in other developed economies, but does that equate to the disappearance of the working class? The numbers of people employed in call centres today is comparable to those once employed in shipbuilding or engineering. The jobs are very different but call centre workers still face exploitation in the real sense of the word, as outlined in a Trades Union Congress report, ‘Calls for Change', published in April 2001. It highlighted the following complaints: extreme monitoring of work, staff timed over how often they go to the toilet and how long they spend there, staff having to ask permission to go to the toilet and being hauled in front of bosses to explain why they go so often, inadequate or no breaks, stress and other health problems.
¹⁹

A major study into working conditions and attitudes at Scottish call centres published in 2007 makes fascinating reading. Monitoring was so claustrophobic at the Holstravel call centre that team leaders would systematically listen in to agents' internal as well as external calls. On one occasion, a worker called a friend in another team to let her know that she had a job interview the following day and was going ‘to pull a sickie'. The next day, the team leader, having heard this conversation, phoned the agent's home several times demanding to speak with her.

At Holstravel, ‘Mission Control', a centrally located circular pen of computers, monitored performance among other tasks and detected irregular patterns of call activity, which would lead to phone calls to team leaders, alerting them to a worker's deviation from their allotted workload.
²⁰

One woman who worked as a travel consultant at Holstravel explained that workloads were subject to regular speed-ups while rewards for meeting increased targets were being cut: ‘At first when we started, like in October, November and December, they were offering you really good money … Now they [the targets] are unrealistic … For your call conversion reaching, your stretch target they
offer you eighty quid. For the same time last year for people in my team, they were offering six hundred quid.'
²¹

A female customer adviser at the Moneyflow centre complained: ‘… when I started it was more customer service orientated so you had to give good service to your customer, take time. But now you feel you have just got to get the customer off the phone. So again you are working harder, you are taking more calls, you feel you can't go for a break because you feel eyes are on you to be there on the phone taking calls.'
²²
She complained she was often asked to work overtime, meaning working as many as twelve hours a day, sometimes being informed of this by a note left on her desk. She complained, too, that while management wanted workers to be 100 percent flexible, they were not themselves so flexible in return.
²³

A female software engineer at Beta City Telecommunications had a similar complaint: ‘I know if I do two long twelve hour days in a row then my brain is mince for the rest of the week because I'm just exhausted. I don't like that. It's not on. It's not healthy.'
²⁴

More than half (59 percent) of call centre employees, and more than a quarter (29 percent) of those in software, stated that they attached some degree of importance to the right to independent representation, and instrumental collectivist approaches to union membership are evident in the following quotations. One female customer service advisor at Entcomm call centre said, ‘I'd never have advocated unions in the past … I have actually made inquiries about the communications union because I was a bit concerned about my contract … they are kind of shoving it out the door now and changing bits of it, and we are scared to sign things away … I would take a union line now and I can't believe I'm saying this, because I was never like that.'
²⁵

A male software engineer at Beta explained he'd like the union to be more active: ‘There is still a place for union representation. The union were taking a very active role in [a voluntary redundancy exercise]. They've not done so much since then but, at the time, it was good to know that they were behind you and that they were there if you needed them, and it was one of the first things I did when I joined Beta was join the union … [T]hey do take a minimal role in our pay but I think they should take a more active role.'

There are, of course, real differences between working in a call centre and in a shipyard or engineering factory. The nature of the latter ensured there was a collective identity, if not across the whole yard or plant, at least among particular sections, most obviously skilled workers. They had real power and could stop production almost instantly.

Call centre and software engineering companies go to great lengths to prevent that, and to create a corporate identity. But these workers are making profits for their company and its clients. They too can hit their employer where it hurts, in the pocket, and they come from communities where class remains a strong identity and where there is a living tradition of resistance. Those shipyards and engineering plants were not always bastions of trade union organisation. They had to be organised, issues like sectarianism had to be overcome, and this generally took place through the common experience of struggle.

Sarah Collins is a young trade unionist, active in Unison in Ayrshire and currently an elected member of the STUC youth committee. She is well aware of the realities of organising at work in a neo-liberal age:

Just over 25 per cent of the British workforce is in a trade union in the UK today. Proportionately, that's 20 per cent less than 30 years ago. At the last count, only five per cent of workers aged 16 to 20 were members of a trade union in Scotland, growing to just 11 per cent for 16–24 years olds. When asked how much they know about trade unions, 42 per cent of the young people responded that they knew nothing at all whilst a further 44 per cent said that they didn't know very much. Despite this, research demonstrates that 63 per cent of employees under 30 believe strong trade unions are needed to protect the working conditions and wages of employees and only nine per cent of young people have unfavourable attitudes towards trade unions.
²⁶

Yet she also points out: ‘Between 2000 and 2005 over three million people took part in protests against the government. Over a third of these protesters were between twelve and twenty-five, yet this group formed only 17 per cent of the UK population in 2005. This is far higher in terms of figures and percentages than the late 1960s and early 1970s.'
²⁷

These are figures for the UK as a whole but they translate to Scotland.

Her prescription for the unions is: target politicised young people; break with the Labour Party; work with young people who identify themselves on the left and even the far left; demand from the Scottish government rights for young people facing precarious work (temporary and part-time employment).

The mantra of Labour politicians and many trade union leaders in the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum is to stress the tradition and benefits of class unity across the UK (despite the fact that the former have been abusing any notion of class resistance for two and a half decades). But there are now some fundamental differences between Scotland and England, and that divergence cannot simply be wished away.

Scots are more likely to identify themselves as working class and to support policies that aim to re-distribute wealth from top to bottom. In many ways, that is not different from working people in the north of England, who also do not vote for Tory governments. But there is a difference, as Michael Keating, professor of politics at Aberdeen University, explains:

It seems that in the course of the 1980s and 1990s,
Scottish
national identity was rebuilt around themes of resistance to
neo-liberalism
, including a substantial section of the middle classes. To some degree,
Scottish
identity fills the role in sustaining social solidarity previously played (if only partly) by class. This resource is not available in the northern regions of England, where social democratic values are denied a territorial outlet.
²⁸

Two-thirds of Scots regard themselves as working class, and the Scottish Election Survey in 2007 found that those who identified as working class saw themselves as more Scottish than the middle class did, reinforcing the politics of class and nation.
²⁹
Scottish politics is dominated by a contest between the SNP and Labour. While both support neo-liberal social and economic policies, they operate in a very different context to that in Westminster.

As I write this, the main parties seem transfixed by the apparent
rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party, and following a UKIP by-election victory and a good vote in local elections, have responded by claiming they too are tough on immigration and support a referendum on EU membership. In England, the UKIP leader Nigel Farrage is a constant presence in the media, where he is lauded as the voice of the common people. Yet on a visit to Edinburgh in May 2013 he was reduced to looking like a bumbling upper-class toff who clearly knew little or nothing about Scottish politics and the views of the majority of Scots.

In Scotland there is currently no pressure from the right, but there is the shadow of the left. Indeed the SNP has proved more astute at seeming to espouse ‘Old Labour' values, because in 2007 it took the radical left vote in large part after the implosion of the SSP. The party is aware that the Greens are a presence on its left, and that if the radical left got its act together they could win back a large part of those votes.