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EXIT the BRITISH ROAD SCOTLAND 18/ 9 Make Tories History People Not Profit Scrap Trident Choose Your Government Armed police: cops with Rejecting UKIP: guns could routinely be on pics from the demo the streets in the Highlands in Edinburgh • see page 11 • see page 2 £1 • issue 438 • 16th –29th May 2014 facebook.com/scottishsocialistvoice EXIT THE BRITISH ROAD SCOTLAND 18/ 9 Make Tories history People not profit Scrap Trident Choose your government WESTMINSTER More fat cat rule Austerity & cuts Bombs not jobs Rejected Tories rule AS THE Tories take the lead over Labour in the UK and showing growing Yes support are suppressed and both promise more austerity, nuclear missiles and savage evidence mounts that the scares and smears of Project attacks on the poor, the prospects offered by staying in Fear are failing. the United Kingdom looks less and less attractive. From the Oxford Union to the trade unions, the Scottish No wonder the No camp faces mounting panic. Socialist Party is driving home the message that Uncharismatic Better Together boss Alistair Darling independence opens the way to a more just, democratic faces the push, Scottish Office polls – paid for by us – Scotland, putting people before profit. facebook.com/ScottishSocialistVoice @ssv_voice OPPOSING UKIP INDY LEFT SAYS NO: the pro-independence Scottish left descended on Edinburgh Corn Exchange on the evening of Friday 9 May to declare Scotland a UKIP-free zone and tell Nigel Farage and his nazi Scottish Defence League and Britain First minders that their politics of hate and lies will never be welcome in our country PHOTOS: Craig Maclean (top left, bottom right) and Scott Macdonald 2 • Scottish Socialist Voice • issue 438 EDITORIAL by Ken Ferguson TWO YEARS into their relentlessly negative campaign – codenamed, in best Biggles style, as Operation Fear – early signs Growing smell of fear of a change of tone if not message are emerging from the bowels of Better Together. Indeed those self same bowels are becoming increasingly uneasy as the gap signals appearance between Yes and No narrows and the contrast grows between the genuinely mass nature of the Scotland-wide Yes campaign of No camp ‘soft cop’ and the cunningly concealed No campaign ground-level activity. So rare is the existence of any non-PR driven No activity that the ever willingly gullible Scottish press leapt on the supposedly rank and file unionist ‘No Borders’ campaign only to see it exposed by citizen’s journalism as a London-based, rich person’s, Tory-driven PR front. Nothing can more clearly illustrate the willingness of the Scottish media – including the licence fee-funded BBC – to happily gobble up spoon-fed unionist propaganda with apparently minimal journalistic fact checking. Yet despite the almost blanket support – with the honourable exception of the Sunday Herald – for No from the print and electronic media, there is a growing realisation that ‘negative, negative, negative’ just isn’t THE GOOD, THE BAD: but the ugly truth is that remaining in the UK is a massive risk for Scots delivering for them. Additionally, of course, there is the reality Better Together while they and their Lib Dem unremittingly negative No message and a that a growing number of Labour activists soulmates continue to assault the poor. rather clumsy attempt to pretend that Labour – realise that being in the same organisation as Even in the closed world of Scottish Labour, in opposition in London and Edinburgh – is the loathed Tories and their austerity- the penny is beginning to drop that scares and still dominant in Scotland. mongering Lib Dem pals, Better Together, is smears – even when delivered by so called It was probably a coincidence that now and will remain a disaster for them. Labour “big beasts” such as Brown, former Alexander’s supposed olive branch came hard Hence the appearance of the so-called war minister Reid or NATO groupie Robertson on the heels of a Church of Scotland offer to ‘United with Labour’ No breakaway, – aren’t doing the job. host a “service of reconciliation” after the fronted by grumpy failed Prime Minister Into this melee then enter Scottish Labour’s referendum, as if the two camps had Gordon Brown, reflecting particularly the key thinker Douglas Alexander apparently exchanged gunfire rather than arguments, but revulsion with the Tories amongst No offering a pipe of peace to Yes campaigners, for Labour it is a calculated move. inclined trade unionists. urging them, if they lose, to work with him to deliver more devolved power to Edinburgh. Nightmare scenario Spite and confusion The reality of course is somewhat The nightmare scenario – apart from a Yes The fact that Brown and No chieftain different. When the Scottish Parliament held vote – for Scottish Labour is that they deliver a Alistair Darling are, let us say, not chums, its first modern session just 15 years ago, No vote then lose the 2015 Westminster poll. simply adds personal spite to the political Labour was the dominant party, the Tories The Tories would then step up and slash and confusion. reduced to a rump and the Lib Dems large burn in what they would see as a defeated The latest example of this reality to break enough to form a coalition with Labour. The Scotland leaving Labour to face the was the remarkable news that Better SNP looked defeated. consequences of having persuaded supporters Together’s Labour co-ordinator in east The first sign that this was changing was the to face a further five years of austerity with Edinburgh, Gary Wilson, had quit his post, election of an SNP minority government cuts which would hobble Holyrood without joined Labour for Independence and followed by the humbling of Labour in the further devolution. endorsed a Yes vote. SNP landslide in 2011 which comprehensively Hard cop Darling or soft cop Alexander, The reasons given by Mr Wilson for his trashed any illusions that Labour was the remaining inside the increasingly rightward decision majored on his lifelong rejection of leading force in Scottish politics. moving UK is a colossal risk for Scottish the Tory values of greed-and-grab, and a There can be no doubt that the Alexander voters and it is imperative that a mass Yes growing revulsion at sitting with them in intervention is both an attempt to soften the campaign ensures that it does not happen. issue 438 • Scottish Socialist Voice • 3 ENVIRONMENT WWeerree MMSSPPss rriigghhtt ttoo nnoott ttoo oouuttllaaww ffrraacckkiinngg?? by Roz Paterson into shale rock or otherwise in - Nonetheless, Iain Gray, for - This compares with 8 per accessible coal seams, in a mer Scottish Labour leader, cent accounted for by gas, and WHEN YOU imagine a fu - bid to find and extract gas and you know the one, er...well, 2.8 per cent by oil. Do we re - ture Scotland, do your fond methane. anyway..., he opined that we in ally want to reverse this daydreams largely feature the It is hazardous, and hit and Scotland are in “no position to healthy trend towards sustain - practice of pumping highly miss in the extreme. If you shut down another potential able energy? toxic chemicals through shale want a graphic example of energy source.” Instead of investing in frack - rock, thereby contaminating what fracking could mean for It’s funny he should say that ing, the latest swear-word in groundwater and soil, in the you, try looking up YouTube, because, in fact, Scotland is the environmental lexicon, hope of extracting some small where a number of people perhaps unique in that it IS in surely we should be investing reserves of fossil fuels that will demonstrate the presence of a position to shut down such a in offshore wind energy? The only hasten our journey to methane, leaked from fracked dubious energy source, and WWF says we should, and sure and certain climate catas - sites, in their tap water...by ig - provide a blueprint for the given that Scotland boasts trophe? No? You sure, now? niting it! post-hydrocarbon economy. 6,200 miles of coastline, Alas, MSPs recently de - Not only that, but once the much, much more than Eng - clined to outlaw fracking in stuff is actually out, and used, Energy surplus land, Wales or Ireland, we’re Scotland, just as the energy it only serves to accelerate Far from running on empty, very well places to do very well vultures circle, hoping to se - global warming which, as the Scotland is a net exporter of with it, why don’t we? cure the rights to blast open IPCC has pointed out, is well energy; some 26 per cent of Scotland is on the brink of the earth’s crust in pursuit of on the way to a 2 degree rise. the energy we generate is sent making a very bold and brave things to set fire to, for profit. A 2 degree rise is not good, elsewhere, because we are in decision. If we are capable of and will not mean Mediter - surplus. deciding for ourselves, if we Hazardous ranean summers and bumper Not only that, but govern - bid for independence, we may The Greens’ Alison John - crops of grapes, like some ment figures show that Scot - find we are capable of a whole ston, who led the anti-fracking pea-brains would insist. land is on course for the raft of bold and brave deci - charge, argued that we could Instead, we can look for - renewables sector to generate sions. Like saying no to frack - surely do better than “[scrape] ward to more flooding, more 100 per cent of Scotland’s en - ing, to fossil fuels, to a the bottom of the fossil fuels drought, more famine, more ergy by 2020. The figures for carbon-based economy that barrel”.
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