NATIONALISE TO SAVE ALEXANDER DENNIS BUSES

Hot on the heels of the devastating closure of Scotland’s one remaining oil refinery at Grangemouth, another bout of industrial vandalism has been announced by another private capitalist employer - Alexander Dennis, in neighbouring Falkirk and Larbert.

Closure of this key industrial asset, which builds buses, will wipe out 400 jobs directly, but with a multiplier of between 3:1 and 4:1 jobs in the supply line, the area faces at least 1,400 job losses.  

It threatens to turn the area into an industrial graveyard, with all the social blights that follow such a loss of skilled jobs.

The implications of this go much further still. 

As UNITE the union’s Scottish secretary, Derek Thomson, put it, “We are absolutely sick to our stomachs. Workers building the greener buses of the future now have their livelihoods at risk. Scotland is on the brink of having zero green manufacturing capacity. How on earth will we be able to achieve any of our climate targets if we don’t retain the workers, knowledge and skills needed to deliver this future?”

Profits Before People or Planet

Alexander Dennis was bought over by Canadian multinational New Flyer Industries (NFI) in 2019. Now they’ve announced plans to ‘rationalise’ their operations by abandoning the Scottish factories and shoving everything into Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

NFI can’t plead poverty as an excuse for closure: they recently announced a leap in revenue and profits in 2024. Total revenue for 2024 rose by 17% to $3.12billion (£2.3billion), with profits of $350million (£250million).  

Public ownership – not pious platitudes  

Instead of hand-wringing and pious platitudes about being ‘very concerned for the families affected’ and  ‘leaving no stone unturned’ - in what sounds very like recycled press releases every time a capitalist employer decides to wipe out livelihoods - the Scottish government should seize the assets of this vitally important operation, nationalise it, and make it a public

enterprise that helps build a publicly owned, electric-powered, public transport network.  

No ’Just Transition’ possible without public ownership  

Scottish government ministers have already pleaded that procurement laws prevent them from ensuring local content – basically using local labour to meet orders. Given that public transport is a devolved issue, they should ‘stand up for Scotland’ – the real Scotland of the working-class majority, that is – by either amending these procurement laws or defying them, to save these jobs and prevent the disappearance of yet another opportunity for a genuinely ‘Just Transition’.  

Otherwise, their serialised use of that term, accompanied by zero action to achieve it - as we’ve recently witnessed at Grangemouth - just embitters workers who see no justice, let alone any real transition to clean, green production.  

Rather than bow to being held to ransom, with demands for subsides – if indeed NFI bosses even bother with that option – the knowledge, skills and dedication of the workforce should be harnessed to produce fleets of electric buses, alongside Scottish government funding to councils for full public ownership of bus services.  

Invest in green transport manufacture

Instead of forking out even more annual subsidies to the likes of First Bus, McGill’s, Xplore and Stagecoach than the £480million subsidies given to them from public funds last year, the Scottish government should invest in the development of a Scottish green manufacturing site.  

And lessons need to be learnt by trade unionists from the Grangemouth experience. Public campaigning is vital, to win allies in the wider working-class communities, but ultimately the appropriate forms of collective action should be deployed to force the Scottish government to step in, take over the factories, and help pave the way to a green re-industrialisation that expands jobs, rather than sheds jobs.  

Open calls for public ownership should be the cutting edge of union-led campaigning to save all these jobs, linked to demands for a worker-led transition to green transportation.  

BiFab, Grangemouth, Alexander Dennis – we need workers’ control

The blunt, plain lesson of Grangemouth, and the previous demise of the BiFab yards in Fife, is that without public ownership under democratic workers’ control - to ensure workers with the knowledge are central to planning a rapid transition to green production – then all the talk of ‘Net Zero’ and a ‘Just Transition’ is just hot air, virtue signalling, incapable of combatting the obliteration of jobs and the desecration of the planet we live on.  

Capitalist profiteers are interested in one thing, and one thing only: the bottom line, the maximisation of profit, and to hell with the human and environmental costs.

Good jobs and clean air: free public transport!

In the ultimate, grossly insulting irony, the very same Alexander Dennis company website advertises careers with their firm under the headline “Are you ready to lead the transition to zero-emission mobility with us?”.  

Their website goes on to say, “We support bus companies, cities and governments globally in reducing pollution and improving air quality with cleaner buses and coaches.”!

Really? Except when their profit margins are inadequate, by their own greedy standards!  

This capitalist multinational recognises the potential for making money out of the burning necessary of clean, green transport systems – but pulls out of Scotland, from factories there since 1895, if they can’t make big enough bucks.

Democratic public ownership and a genuine green re-industrialisation of Scotland, including a vastly expanded public transport system - which the SSP has for 25 years advocated should be free for all citizens to travel on - is the only route to job security, job creation, and cleaner air to breathe.  

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BIG WIND, BIG SELLOUT, BIG PROFIT

It must be the biggest sell-out in modern history; certainly, in Scotland. 

About 40 years ago, Scotland's burgeoning Oil and Gas production was handed over to an ugly clutch of planet-trashing multinationals in an orgy of privatisation by Maggie Thatcher's Tories, which meant the vast wealth flowing from the North Sea never benefited the people of Scotland, or indeed those of the UK. Fabulous profits were siphoned off and sent abroad, with maximum tax-dodging thrown in.  

Now, the Scottish government has followed fundamentally the same path in the ScotWind development of Scotland's lucrative offshore wind energy production, squandering an estimated £5.5billion to the annual income of Scotland. 

Wind Privatised 

Over 7,000 square kilometres of Scotland's seabed have been auctioned off, at £700million, for the construction of the biggest offshore windfarm project in Scottish history – 17 different sites, estimated to be capable of generating 25 Giga Watts of electricity, where one GW is enough to power 750,000 houses!  

This sell-off was conducted by Crown Estates Scotland (CES), whose chair and board are appointed by the Scottish government. And it must be the biggest fire sale ever! 

The options to construct massive, super-profitable windfarms were auctioned off at one-third the original estimated value set by the government offshoot, CES. All bar one of the successful bids came in at the capped price set by CES, meaning it was grossly undervalued, seen as “cheap at twice the price” by the collection of fossil fuel capitalists and overseas multinationals who have been handed power over Scotland's main source of renewable energy production.  

Not a single one of the successful bidders is based in Scotland; they are from Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Nigeria and England.

Over 20% of the total has been grabbed at fire sale prices by two of the globe's biggest polluters, BP and Shell. 

Shell and its partner Scottish Power - which contrary to its name is owned by Spanish giant, Iberdrola - have seized the seabed space to construct two of the world's first large-scale floating offshore windfarms: MarramWind (the biggest of all 17 projects auctioned off) and CampionWind, which between them will have the capacity to generate 5 Giga Watts, enough to power over 6 million homes.

BP and its German partner EnBW have bought the rights to build the Morven offshore windfarm, with the capacity to produce 3 GW - which could power over 3 million homes. 

BP: 'Literally a Cash Machine'

Let us not forget these rampant profiteers have plundered the planet for fabulous profit, as dominant members of the fossil capitalist club. 

Shell has just announced a quadrupling of their profits in 2021, to £14billion - the sae day that the Tories used Ofgem to lift the price cap on household energy bills by about £16.7billion!

BP's chief executive officer, Brendan Looney (sic), notoriously and shamelessly declared his company to be "literally a cash machine" - as their profits soared at the cost of widespread, desperate fuel poverty. Mr Looney is no fool in making this description of the Big Polluter: BP raked in profits of £900 a second!

Having set the planet on fire through their decades of greenhouse gas emissions, these planet-trashers have now been issued a licence to make money out of green energy - by a Scottish coalition government that fought furiously to bask in a green light during the recent COP26 Conference in Glasgow. 

Scottish Green Party Greenwash Fossil Capitalism 

This grotesque sell-out of Scotland's natural resources has been hailed by ‘Scotland's National Party’ – allegedly the party of Scottish independence - as one of the most significant moments in our history, to quote Nicola Sturgeon. 

She was backed up in this bizarre claim by the allegedly radical voice of the Scottish Green Party, Ross Greer MSP, who echoed SNP excuses that this privatisation was necessary because the government doesn’t have the capital investment capacity to develop these vast green energy projects. 

Ross Greer added, for good measure, the outrageous boast “Still a long way to go but we are winning", because the Big Oil lobbyists, Oil and Gas UK, have just changed their name to Offshore Energies UK. This is fossil capitalism being greenwashed, with the Scottish Green Party gleefully spraying the green aerosol, as Big Oil now also becomes Big Wind in an orgy of Big Profit.

Scotland Loses £5.5bn Annually 

Although the £700m paid to the Scottish government for the auction of the seabed bases will be added to by annual rents of between £50m and £90m, economists have calculated this could have been an annual income to the Scottish government of at least £5.5billion, had it been carried out through a state-owned Scottish energy company. 

Their estimates of the value of wind energy generation – based on the experience of the world's biggest offshore windfarm company, Denmark’s Orsted - not only means the multinationals can recover the costs of (vast) infrastructure investment within a year, and make pure, undiluted profit the other 24 years of a 25-year licence, but recover the cost of their initial fees for the seabed licences in just two days of production! 

Pure Profiteering after the First Year

Back in 2017, the SNP government promised to create a public sector National Energy Company by 2021. As we persistently warned, this was always going to be a glorified shop, a purely retail energy company, not involved whatsoever in the actual production of energy. But even that feeble plan was abandoned in September 2021 by the SNP and their new partners in government, the Scottish Greens. 

Now, in the absence of a state-owned energy industry, the same coalition has handed power over to the likes of Shell, a capitalist giant not only notorious for trashing the planet for profit, but for helping to overthrow elected governments that dared nationalise ‘their' industry, such as Mossadegh’s in 1950s Iran, and for spearheading the 1995 execution of Ken Saro Wiwa when he led opposition to Shell’s desecration of the land and people of Nigeria. 

No Scottish Jobs Guaranteed  

And contrary to the hosannas sung by the Scottish government, there is no guarantee that this will lead to any substantial job creation in Scotland. 

The auction process itself quite explicitly excluded any regulations about the supply chain. Many of the winners in the auction are big investors in overseas turbine manufacturing, so that lessens the likelihood of job creation in Scotland compared with reliance on cheaper labour abroad to maximise private profit. 

Twelve years ago, the SNP government promised 28,000 jobs by 2020 in the offshore wind industry alone. The latest available figures show a measly 1,400 actual jobs – twenty times fewer than promised. With that track record, based on adherence to the capitalist market and reliance on inward investment by marauding multinationals rather than a coherent industrial strategy rooted in democratic public ownership of all forms of energy production and distribution, job prospects look bleak. 

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Build Socialist Change not Climate Change 

This betrayal of the interests of the Scottish working class and of environmental campaigners by an SNP-Scottish Green Party coalition that refuses to break with the power of big business serves to reinforce all the arguments we expanded in our book, Socialist Change not Climate Change.  

Unless we build a mass movement of workers and young people with a vision of democratic public ownership of all energy forms, and initiate an alternative plan of green production primarily devised and led by workers in the industry, we face a future dominated by Big Oil, and now Big Wind, with the slaughter of jobs and pollution of our planet, all in the name of Big Profit. 

As a working-class eco-socialist party, the SSP will fight alongside the unions for jobs, and redouble our efforts for a clean, green, independent socialist Scotland. 

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IMAGINE HOW TO FIGHT THE SLAUGHTER OF JOBS & WAGES!

“We’re All In This Together” declares the signage in one famous supermarket.

Far from it! The household name displaying those posters, Marks and Spencer’s, have just announced another tranche of job losses, tossing 7,000 workers onto the growing scrapheap of mass unemployment. 

Workers are being made to pay a heavy price for the Coronavirus. 

The government and capitalist employers are making us pay with job losses, pay cuts, slashed conditions, intensified exploitation, the massacre of sick benefits and, yes, loss of lives. 

Years of failure to invest - and consciously planned poverty pay – contributes to the slaughter of the innocents during this pandemic.

Care Home Carnage 

Decades of austerity left the NHS prone to being overrun when COVID-19 hit these shores, so both the Tory government and the SNP Scottish government prioritised clearance of bed spaces in our hospitals over securing the safety of elderly patients thrown into residential care homes.

Freedom of Information investigations have revealed at least 1,200 elderly patients in Scotland were transferred from hospital wards into care homes without being tested for COVID-19. And that is a gross underestimate, because five of Scotland’s health boards, including the two largest, refused to answer.  

Worse still, the same investigations revealed many others thrown in amongst the most vulnerable elderly population at the height of a pandemic had been tested positive in the hospital.

As professor Allyson Pollock commented “This was like throwing a lighted match into a tinderbox.”

This austerity-rooted regime helped trigger the care home carnage that accounts for half of all COVID-19 deaths.

Workplace Infection and Death 

As we repeatedly warned and denounced in recent months, whilst the governments told us to stay at home they also told us to get to work. They were driven by their preoccupation with upholding the profit margins of the profiteering rich.

The Health and Safety Executive this week reported 600 people in Scotland have caught the virus in their place of work, nearly two-thirds of them in care homes.

As the STUC points out, that figure is only the tip of a vastly larger iceberg. Especially given the notoriety of sectors that employ many of the lowest paid for not reporting accidents at work let alone infection with the killer virus. 

Now a new virus is sweeping the country, demolishing jobs, wages and family livelihoods.

Whilst their capitalist competitors in Germany have extended the wage subsidy furlough scheme for a period of 2 years, to mitigate redundancies, the short-sighted get-rich-quick brigade in charge of capitalist Britain are cutting off the life support machine of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, triggering mass redundancies. 

Those of us who remember Maggie Thatcher’s Dark Ages in the 1980s are suffering deja-vu; TV news back then always ended with a massive list of redundancies and closures, in part designed to browbeat workers into thinking job losses were an unstoppable force of nature.

In recent weeks, thousands of job losses have been announced daily: Boots, John Lewis, M&S, Debenhams, hospitality, airlines and even the public sector.

Fire and Rehire 

This relentless slaughter of jobs is not always purely based on companies suffering the economic impact of the pandemic.

It’s often something previously planned, but now implemented with maniacal zeal by company bosses under cover of Coronavirus, in a race to the bottom, making workers pay the price for sustained profiteering.

British Airways’ “fire and rehire” tactic is the best known of these assaults on workers with the excuse of COVID-19. An extremely profitable company grabbed public funds to furlough staff, but still fired all 42,000 and then bullied and blackmailed 30,000 of them into accepting wage cuts of 50-60% - or else join the 12,000 chucked out the door. 

Centrica Cowboys 

Centrica is not far behind BA in these criminal methods.

As one of their workers explained to me, 

“At the moment we get six months full pay for sick absence. Centrica want to abolish that entirely unless we opt into a taxable private health scheme. If we do that, 13 weeks will be on full pay and the next 9 months on two-thirds of pay. Otherwise if we refuse to opt into private health we're meant to survive on nothing but £95 a week Statutory Sick Pay. And it's even worse for those of us with less than 2-years service; just 10 weeks full pay if we go into private health, the rest on £95 SSP.

For the industrial staff, Centrica plan to increase contracts from a 37 hour week to 40, with no uplift in pay. So they want 3 hours a week free labour. Office staff are expected to gift them half-an-hour a week free of wages, with worsened opening hours. 

And the overtime rate is to be slashed from time and a half to single time, with a cap of 25 hours a year.

Centrica call centres seem to be the new Victorian mills.”

Pockets of Resistance  

Thankfully, pockets of resistance by workers to the slaughter of their jobs and theft of their wages is beginning to erupt, but urgently requires coordination and leadership from the wider trade union movement.

GMB union members in Centrica have voted by a whopping 95% for strike action, in a 68% turnout.

British Airways workers - cabin crew, baggage and loading staff alike - are poised to vote on taking strike action. 

Healthcare workers have got together and staged a series of marvellous rallies demanding pay justice and pay equality, many of them pushing for a 15% pay rise, after being slapped in the face by the government when they were excluded from the all-too-miserly public sector pay rise - after having put their lives on the line, face-to-face with COVID-19. 

Many other workers are furious at attacks on conditions, including sick pay entitlements, which is particularly outrageous and dangerous when COVID-19 has hit chicken factories, meat plants, textile factories and other workplaces.

For example, one multi-billioned retail giant has gone from stopping wages to workers with COVID-19 to slashing company sick benefit entirely after 3 days’ absence per year. 

Precisely those workers with underlying health problems, and therefore most vulnerable to the ongoing Coronavirus, are the same people most likely to be disqualified from anything more than £95 Statutory Sick Pay, because ill health has forced them off work for periods. 

Stark Choices 

Workers face harsh, stark choices, thrown into high relief by the Coronavirus and its economic consequences.

The road being travelled not just by the Tories but also the Scottish government involves mass redundancies as the subsidies to big business dry up, and the massacre of pay and sick pay. Which not only further endangers lives by dragging people into work despite being infected, but also blows to smithereens the previous nonsense talked by governments and some economists about a rapid V-shaped recovery.

With household savings at an all-time low, household debts at an all-time high, and wages being crushed down even further as a share of national wealth - in order to enhance the share that goes in profit - the consumer-led boom, which capitalist Britain and Scotland has been far too reliant on, has now turned into its opposite.

Far from being “all in this together”, the Corona crisis has highlighted the gaping chasm between the classes in this system of running society. 

Britain’s 45 billionaires increased their personal wealth by 20% in the months of March and April alone.

In neat, grotesque contrast, the average NHS worker has suffered at 20% pay cut since 2010.

Two-thirds of all care home staff are thinking of leaving their low-paid, insecure and dangerous jobs, in a new survey by the GMB.

Fighting Socialist Alternatives 

So what’s the alternative to this tsunami of job losses, pay cuts and life-threatening attacks on sick pay?

Scotland’s trade union movement embraces nearly 650,000 workers - and could recruit as many more if they demonstrated an iron determination to fight for immediate improvements in working conditions and organised action that would remove the fear factor that dominates the minds of many workers.

At the height of the pandemic the STUC and its affiliated unions called for an immediate £2-an-hour wage increase for all key workers.

That should not wither on the vine and become just an empty rhetorical flourish.

Turned into serious campaigning and collective action, it could be one part of unified demands for better wages across the board, underpinned by an absolute minimum, legally enforced wage of £12-an-hour for all at 16.

Such improved wages will transform the lives of hundreds of thousands and radically improve workers’ spending power, which in turn would make jobs far more secure in sectors such as retail, hospitality, tourism and entertainment. 

Minimum 16-Hour Week 

At the 2019 STUC annual conference, I proposed my union USDAW’s policy motion for abolition of all zero hours contracts and other forms of insecure, casualised labour, to be replaced by a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it. 

That pioneering policy was passed at the STUC without a single vote against. It now needs to be turned into a major plank of the trade union movement's alternative to low wages, rampant job insecurity, and the vicious spiral of job losses they both contribute to.

We live in a society where capitalist ownership of the core economy leads to monstrous levels of work-related stress, as the profiteers strive for greater output by fewer workers on lesser wages.

An epidemic of mental ill health has already been stored up and is now added to by the lockdown - and indeed new forms of physical and mental illness created by working from home.

Capitalism is a system which by its very nature puts profit before people; the health of bosses’ wallets before the health and wellbeing of the working class who produce society's wealth. 

100% Wages for Sick Workers 

An increasingly critical issue for the massed ranks of the trade union movement to struggle for is sick pay equivalent to 100% average wages, instead of the pathetic £95-a-week Statutory Sick Pay and the rapid obliteration of company sick benefit schemes currently being witnessed.

That one measure could have prevented countless COVID-19 deaths by removing the financial pressure to go to work despite carrying the virus, thereby infecting others.

The Tories have severed the lifeline of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme despite the fact the deadly disease is still here and still as lethal.

They've thrown the sop of £1,000 grant for every worker not made redundant.

Plenty of big businesses will pocket that publicly funded grant to the benefit of their profit-and-loss accounts.

Means Tests for the Rich! 

The trade union movement should demand means tests for businesses, instead of the humiliating means tests to which the poorest people are subjected.

Let’s examine the secret accounts of every business. Where a small enterprise, doing useful work in safe conditions, genuinely cannot afford a minimum wage of £12-an-hour and retention of all staff, they should be granted state funds or loans to save jobs and pay decent wages.

No such largesse can be justified for big businesses, whose profits are measured in £millions or £billions. 

If they announce job losses or closures and they are involved in socially useful production or services, the unions should mobilise action for measures like a 4-day week on 5 days’ pay - and the takeover of their assets and operations by the government or local authorities, in order to sustain jobs and their workers’ contribution to the economy for the benefit of society.

4-Day Week on 5 Days' Pay 

Even the capitalist government of Germany is contemplating a 4-day week, after the giant 2.3 million-strong IG Metall union called for a 30-hour week to save jobs. 

We face a crossroads. What kind of economy, what kind of work and what kind of society do we want for the 21st century?

Vast areas of human life require work to be done, yet the system we live under means the optimists around the Bank of England predict 2.5 million unemployed by Christmas, whilst the economic pessimists warn of about 4 million, including one in every three young people.

Such waste of talent, energy and skills, and the attendant misery and poverty of mass unemployment, is a searing condemnation of a capitalist economy founded on the profit motive.

School leavers should be guaranteed either an apprenticeship on at least a £12 minimum wage, free further education with a living student grant, or a decent, meaningful, unionized job.

Society is screaming out for adequate numbers of highly trained workers in areas as varied as the NHS; social care; mental health services; education; council services; environmental improvements; house building and retrofitting; vastly expanded public transport; production and distribution of clean green energy and all the equipment that goes with it. 

150,000 Green Jobs 

The potential for a vast green jobs plan was illustrated in the recent STUC report showing where 150,000 new, green jobs could be created in Scotland.

But instead of fulfilling the verbal flourishes of “Scotland becoming the Saudi Arabia of renewables”, as declared in the past by Alex Salmond, the SNP government has utterly failed to challenge the system whereby growth in wind farms and other green energy projects has almost entirely bypassed any job creation in Scotland itself.

Instead, they preside over the obscene absurdity of wind farm construction and decommissioning of North Sea oil and gas installations being carried out abroad, as far afield as cheap labour Bangladesh and Indonesia, while fabrication yards and other facilities a few miles inshore lie idle. For example the BiFab yards in Fife and Lewis. 

Rubbing salt into the wounds of a country facing mass unemployment, the new Viking onshore wind farm on Shetland, the biggest of its kind in the UK, is now to be built and operated by the Danish Vestas company.

At least 400 initial construction jobs are therefore in the hands of an overseas profiteer, rather than being part of a Scottish public sector energy corporation which could provide tens of thousands of well-paid jobs, and apprenticeships for young people, giving them purpose, dignity and a secure future.

Why should the Scottish government leave the fate of Scottish workers in the hands of Vestas, the same company which in 2009 declared mass redundancies at its factory in Newport, Isle of Wight, leading to a factory occupation by the workforce, which the SSP built solidarity for in Scotland, as those workers rightly demanded nationalisation to save jobs? And they were spurned in their demands by the same Labour government of Gordon Brown which previously spoke eloquently of creating 400,000 green jobs. 

Green Socialist Recovery Plan 

Instead of a new 2020 Dark Ages that could make Thatcher's atrocities look mild and more resemble the 1930s, the collective potential power of the trade union movement and socialists needs to be mobilised in pursuit of a Green Socialist Recovery Plan.

Based on public ownership of key sectors like construction, public transport, energy, major industrial enterprises and the banking system, Scotland could lead the way by immediately creating at least 150,000 new green, well-paid jobs with full collective union rights, and workers’ control over health and safety and other day-to-day decisions.

Imagine what such a planned socialist recovery programme could mean for the construction of 100,000 social sector houses, built to the highest environmental standards, with varieties of stock guaranteeing gardens or other outdoor spaces for all who want it.

Imagine how household energy bills, which have rocketed during the lockdown, could be slashed through retrofitting and insulating existing housing stock, and removing the profit margin in a publicly owned energy sector.

Imagine the scale of green re-industrialisation Scotland’s shipyards and factories (including under-threat Dennis buses) could enjoy in the production of vast new fleets of ferries, buses and trains for a vastly expanded and integrated public transport network - free at the point of use, thereby combating poverty, social isolation and pollution.

Imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers could be liberated from the health-threatening drudgery of 12-hour shifts and more, by employment of new staff in areas of greatest need on a maximum 4-day week. 

Imagine – and Organise 

Workers and their unions need to imagine this and much more, but turn these entirely realistic visions of our collective future into reality by fighting for it.

Truly the choice we face is that posed by Rosa Luxemburg a century ago: socialism or barbarism. 

CLIMATE CHANGE: A WORKERS' ISSUE

As school students and other young people spearhead global strikes and direct action against the planet-threatening climate crisis, they have appealed to workers to join them in 'a global general strike'. 

This appeal is an extremely important and welcome step forward; a glimmering of recognition by young people too young to have experienced work or trade unionism that the organised workers' movement is critical to winning meaningful action against global warming. And an important riposte to the utterly false and dangerous idea that it's older people who are to blame for the climate crisis.

As we've said before, the climate crisis is not a generational issue, it's a class issue.  

Older or middle-aged workers haven't polluted the planet. Profit-crazed capitalists have. 

For over 200 years they've plundered the planet and exploited its people for carbon, to fuel their accumulation of private profit. 
Recent reports confirm that it's the likes of BP and Shell - financed by the big banks - who are the biggest polluters. 
Another reveals the biggest 100 companies on earth account for 71% of carbon emissions. 

Trade Union Issue

As the recent TUC Congress unanimously agreed, climate is a trade union issue. The radical changes needed to tackle the impending disaster - with scientists giving us a mere 12 years to stop irreversible damage to the planet - require the active, urgent, collective action of workers. 


As the SSP has consistently argued, and TUC Congress reiterated, we need a Just Transition to fossil-free energy, not a punishing programme of job decimation and deprivation of working class communities, as some of the fringes of the environmental movement advocate. And public ownership of all forms of energy and other key sectors of the economy - including transport, housing, shipyards, and banking - is at the very heart of the solution to pollution. 

Public Ownership of Energy 

Policies adopted - unanimously - at the recent TUC Congress recognise this truth. Alongside Motions demanding that 'workers must be at the heart of delivering' a Just Transition, and a green transport system, Congress demanded public ownership of energy and the big banks. As Bakers Union general secretary, Ronnie Draper, said in proposing it:


"Public renewable power is less expensive than private, which not only faces higher interest rates and other costs, but also relies on various subsidies and long-term “power purchase agreements” in order to guarantee profits for investors.
Public ownership not only eliminates those unnecessary costs and provides cheaper power for users, but also allows us to address domestic skills deficits. Under public ownership and a planned approach, we can make use of the skills we have in the present, while we develop the new skills we need for a vibrant, thriving sector in the future."

SSP Members Active on Issue

SSP members in the unions have combined with others to maximise involvement of workers in the Youth Climate Strike week of action. For instance, both as an elected Usdaw national Executive Council member for Scotland, and SSP representative, I've collaborated with union activists in Unison, GMB, PCS, Unite and EIS to establish a Campaign Against Climate Change group in Glasgow. 

Though in its infancy, this group is working to involve workers alongside young people. We recognise that the first task is to engage with workers, explaining the issues, offering alternatives that would enhance workers' lives, rather than pose a threat to jobs and living standards. 
For example, we've discussed the win-win policy of free installation of solar energy in homes, and I advocated the council unions lobby Glasgow city council to take over the bus service being surrendered by First Group, as a baby step towards a full municipal bus service, which in turn should become part of a free public transport service to help combat car pollution. 

Alongside that we have been building for attendance at the demos and rallies on 20 September, for instance during workers' lunchtimes, or using flexitime, or days off, or where possible by clocking off to attend. Unison stewards have negotiated non-victimisation agreements with councils for members who participate.

Answering Workers' Fears 

Likewise, at the September meeting of the Usdaw Executive Council, I got the issue put on our agenda, introduced it, spelling out the key issues from a worker's perspective, and advocated concrete steps by our union - all of which were agreed, unanimously.  That includes appealing to all reps to take part in rallies if possible, encourage members whose shifts allow to join the events, and to stage workplace events where feasible - above all, starting discussions on climate change and alternatives in meetings of members.  

Crucially, we need to overcome the legitimate fears of many workers that what's on offer is the slaughter of jobs and a 'hair-shirt'  existence. That emerged in our very healthy discussion at the Usdaw EC, which our explanation of massive job creation through a Green New Deal, and trade union control of a Just Transition, convinced the entire meeting. And that's in the union primarily organising retail workers; how much more critical it is to have a package of policies to engage, convince and mobilise workers in the fossil-fuel sector, such as North Sea installations.

Class and Climate 

That's precisely where a class-based socialist alternative comes into its own. The public ownership demanded by the TUC would open up the opportunity to redeploy existing workers, reskilling where necessary, as well as a whole new green industrial strategy that could create at least 1.5 million skilled, well-paid, unionized jobs. 


The concrete example of the heroic resistance to closure being staged by the 123 Harland and Wolff shipyard workers in Belfast proves the point.  They are battling for renationalisation to include green energy production, which they've already done as their primary source of work in recent years, to help build equipment for offshore energy. 


Alongside the campaign to end the globalised capitalist lunacy of equipment for the giant £2bn NnG offshore windfarm a few miles from the Fife BiFab yards being built in cheap-labour Indonesia, and then transported 7,000 miles in diesel-belching vessels, this shows how democratic public ownership of all production and distribution of energy supplies could vastly boost jobs and wages, combat fuel poverty, and help clean up our corner of the planet for generations to come. 

System Change - to Socialism 

We urgently need system change to combat climate change. 

Change to a system of democratic public ownership, where the skills of workers are deployed to produce and distribute clean, green energy; build and retrofit homes to the highest environmental standards; offer an integrated, free public transport network that combats both poverty, social isolation and pollution; and uses the vast funds of a state bank to help finance a Green New Deal. 


The power of organised workers - alongside the energy and vision of young people - needs to be mobilised for such a clean, green, and nuclear-free, socialist Scotland. 
The SSP commits to combine with others for that future. 

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP TO PROTECT PEOPLE AND PLANET

Those who deny the urgency of action against climate change are as rare and as ridiculous as members of the Flat Earth Society. A plethora of reports pour out, and millions witness climate-based human disasters across the globe, both confirming the need for emergency action against global warming and associated chaos.

But the central question is how to make a radical, rapid transition to a clean, green economy that benefits the working-class majority, rather than measures that punish us with mass job losses, punitive carbon taxes and increased inequality. All the evidence, including in Scotland, proves that ownership is at the heart of what is dubbed a ‘Just Transition’.

For at least 200 years, western capitalism has relied heavily on carbon to build its wealth and power, plundering people and planet alike. The carbon emissions have helped create the crisis where the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned we only have 12 years to take emergency action to keep global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, or else it will be too late; irreversible. 
The same study concluded pollution from carbon emissions must be eradicated by 2050, not 2075 as suggested by previous world summits.

Oxfam has identified that climate-based disasters have increased four-fold in the short ten years from 1995-2015. 
The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030, climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths each year, due to malnutrition, malaria, heat stress, and diarrhoea - mostly in the global south.

Droughts, landslides, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, creeping desertification, extinction of species...all these and others are common symptoms of the system we need to confront. But at whose cost?

Class and Climate Chaos

Every disaster, itself the product of the reckless, ruthless profiteering system that is capitalism, also serves to remind us of the class divide inherent to that same system. When wildfires erupted in California last November, millionaires hired private firefighters to shield their sumptuous homes, whilst working class communities were burnt to the ground.

Equally, if we rely on the capitalist rich to ‘green’ the economy, every hopelessly inadequate measure they take will be at the expense of the working class: regressive ‘green’ taxes, reduced services, slaughter of jobs, etc.

In the words of author and pioneering environmental activist, Naomi Klein, “neo-liberal climate action passes on the costs to working people, offer them no better jobs or services and lets the big polluters off the hook. People see it as class war, because it is.”

Scotland is prone to boast of being a world leader in reducing carbon emissions, by 49% since 1990. But there are two other sides to that encouraging fact. 
One of the reasons is the closure of mines, steelworks and other deindustrialisation, which has left the devastation of mass poverty, alienation, rising crime and drug dependency in whole communities. Hardly a ‘just transition’!

The other sobering fact is that much of Scotland's carbon emissions have simply been shipped abroad, dumped on other peoples, as part of capitalist globalisation. Taking total carbon emissions generated at home and abroad in the production and transportation of goods and services for consumption in Scotland, the reduction is a far more modest 8.6% from 1998-2014. 
It's not just jobs that have been offshored, but pollution too. 

The Market Won’t Provide

Capitalist ownership gives no comfort nor guarantees of a stable future for workers in the existing high-carbon sector, let alone the population of Scotland as a whole. 
The cut-throat competition between privately-owned North Sea companies has meant worsened terms and conditions, lengthened shift patterns for offshore workers, use of cheap labour overseas workers, and 160,000 job losses in 2014-17. 
The one-man dictatorship of capital, in the form of INEOS owner Jim Ratcliffe, owns 4% of Scotland's GDP. He used this to bully and blackmail the workforce and Scottish government with threats of total closure at Grangemouth, wiping out effective union recognition for several years, and squeezing millions of public funds in subsidies from Alex Salmond's government, in Ratcliffe’s pursuit of fracking.

But capitalist ownership is no route to a just transition to a clean, green economy either. 
And the reliance of successive Scottish (and UK) governments on the market economy has led to an utter failure to carry out the necessary measures to combat climate chaos and simultaneously protect the jobs and living conditions of workers.

The STUC have published a devastating report exposing the gaping chasm between promises of massive job creation in the low carbon and renewable energy economy (LCRE) over the past 15 years – by successive Labour-LibDem and SNP governments – and the paltry reality of less than 2% of jobs being in this sector...which, in any case, includes nuclear power!

Promises in 2004 of 7,000 new jobs by 2020; 35,000 by 2020 (in 2004); 130,000 by 2020 (in 2010); 40,000 in renewables by 2020 (in 2011). The soaring visions of a green and pleasant land have crashed to earth with a shudder; taken together, all forms of renewable energy (onshore wind, offshore wind, hydropower, renewable heat, bioenergy and alternative fuels) only account for 7,600 direct jobs in Scotland (17,600 direct and indirect). 

Scotland’s Natural Potential

Mother Nature provided Scotland with 40% of Europe's onshore and offshore renewable energy potential. Not to even mention the copious hydro-power sources. Yet Scotland is a net importer of low carbon and renewable energy goods and services – to the tune of £229m trade deficit in 2017, including £165m in the case of onshore wind! Why?

Despite nature’s gifts, Scotland builds virtually nothing for this sector, even though Howdens of Glasgow manufactured the UK’s first ever wind turbine in the early 1980s; removal of government grants, and failure by British capitalism to bother investing, opened the way to Danish companies to carve out a profitable niche.

The lack of a publicly owned energy industry, with planned and integrated investment in research, production and development, has meant a complete lack of an industrial strategy for transition to clean energy production that could tap into nature’s advantages for the benefit of workers and the environment. 
Instead, piecemeal developments have been handed over to networks of overseas, profiteering capitalist firms – who often lack expertise, have dodgy track records in the sector, but are often heavily subsidised by their own governments in their pursuit of global markets.

Lunacy of Globalised Capitalism

At the Moray East Windfarm, off the Caithness coast, 100 turbines are being built by a consortium of firms from Portugal, France and Japan. The blades are being made by a Danish company, the wind turbine jackets by a Belgian company that subsequently handed the contract to Lamprell, of the United Arab Emirates.

Kincardine Offshore Wind Ltd is developing a floating wind farm south-east of Aberdeen; contrary to its name, KOWL is Spanish owned. In turn it's contracted Navantia, who build the Spanish Navy's warships, but made a whopping loss when they diversified into renewables.

Meantime, the BiFab yards in Methil and Burntisland are mothballed! So much for the Scottish government's pledges a decade ago of ‘a Saudi Arabia of renewables’.

Even the massive, lucrative decommissioning sector of the offshore industry is a victim of the same capitalist ‘logic’, the lunacy of globalised profiteering at the expense of workers’ jobs, workers’ conditions, and the climate.

Bountiful tax relief is being handed over to the oil and gas companies for decommissioning, while some of them have been exposed for paying below the legal minimum wage to overseas workers. 
North Sea rigs have been towed across the oceans to be decommissioned on the beaches of Bangladesh and India, without environmental protection or workers’ rights – sailing past several sites with the capacity to do the work up the east coast of Scotland. 

Just Transition Through Public Ownership

We need the trade union, socialist and environmental movement to demand democratic public ownership of the entire energy industry to seriously tackle climate change and ensure a just transition to clean, green energy production - with not only the protection, but vast expansion, of decent jobs and conditions.

A recent House of Commons report brutally declared that “green investment has collapsed”. The capitalist market will never save the planet that it has despoiled for profit.

The SNP government’s talk of a Publicly Owned Energy Company is a lame, timid half-step, miles short of the bold move required. It is designed to be merely another energy retailer in a crowded marketplace, competing with the capitalist sharks – but not in any way involved in the actual production of energy supplies. 
But public ownership of oil, gas, hydro, wind-power, all forms of renewables, is precisely what is needed. With unions representing energy workers and the wider working class - alongside scientists, local and national government, colleges and universities - having a full voice in planning the urgent transition to green energy without loss of jobs or skills, with retraining, investment in research and development, and expansion of education in the sciences of the sector. We already have world-leading academic expertise in offshore wind, wave, tidal and carbon capture techniques – all squandered by a system based on short-term profit maximisation.

Full public ownership of all forms of energy could then be integrated with an expanded public transport network that tackles pollution and poverty through investment in fare-free public transport. 
And with a nationalised construction industry, local councils and social sector housing, to retrofit and insulate homes; build 100,000 new homes for rent to the highest environmental standards; cut fuel prices and eliminate fuel poverty; and in the process, create at least 100,000 well-paid, skilled jobs and apprenticeships.

Public ownership is at the very heart of the solution to pollution, replacing the private plundering of our planet for profit by capitalism. 
Tackling the emergency of climate change requires urgent system change – to a socialist democracy where it’s not a false choice between jobs and the environment. 

STUC CONGRESS: PREPARE WORKERS TO WIN!

The 122nd annual Congress of the STUC assembles in Dundee as the noise surrounding Brexit drowns out the cries of workers for justice, security and equality.

With 39 affiliated trade unions, organising a total of 550,000 union members, the Scottish TUC has the potential to coordinate action around an entirely different vision of society, where the needs of millions in society replace the greed of a few thousand shareholders.

But to fulfil that potential requires a determination to take the vast array of progressive policies agreed by Congress delegates out to the workplaces and onto the streets, consciously engaging and mobilising workers in collective action.

This is not just a socialist pipedream. The theme of the STUC Congress is “Organising and Winning", with absolutely justified celebration of the recent victory by Glasgow's Equal Pay strikers.

This is a salutary example of how, after years of blockage by the Labour council and hesitancy by some of the unions, followed by foot-dragging by the SNP council, a campaign of conscious involvement of the women workers themselves unleashed an unstoppable force.
The magnificent 8,000-strong strike last October, and the heroic solidarity action by male cleansing workers, in bold defiance of anti-union legislation, forced the council into action, at a cost of £500million.

Equal Pay Strike & Teachers’ Victories

Other recent examples of the potential power of workers taking action, once a bit of leadership is given and members imbued with clear goals and events to mobilise around, include the EIS school teachers’ pay victory, and that of Home Care workers in Dundee city council.
Once the EIS had resolved to demand a 10 per cent pay rise, as part-compensation for a 24 per cent loss over 8 years, a systematic plan of school-based meetings empowered EIS members who had reached breaking point with pay cuts, work overload and stunted job prospects.
In turn, the mobilisation of up to 30,000 on their national demo both reflected the determination and added to it, laying the foundations for successive rejections of several ‘final’ offers from COSLA and the Scottish government, winning the concession of over 14 per cent over three years, on the eve of an actual strike ballot.

More recently, sustained campaigning by the joint unions, and then an overwhelming vote for strike action against the SNP-run Dundee city council, has forced them to abandon plans to impose either split shifts or pay cuts of £4,500 (through reduced hours) on home care staff. Another important victory for workers organising themselves for action.

The profoundly simple lessons of these and other struggles need to be applied by the STUC and its affiliates, if we are to avoid the vast variety of progressive policies being passed but then left to gather dust in union offices, or to merely use up digital space on union HQ computers.
That applies to issues immediately arising from Brexit, as well as a broad spectrum of issues in our workplaces, communities and entire society.

We Won't Pay for Brexit!

We are all too familiar with the cynical spin-doctor’s line about it being ‘a good day for bad news’. Brexit has been a good three years for bad news, with the cacophony of squabbles between different wings and factions of the capitalist class and their political parties distracting our attention whilst they slaughter workers’ rights, public services, benefits and jobs.

The STUC will debate Motions demanding defence of the rights and conditions of workers – including migrant workers – in the wake of Brexit. We need to loudly declare ‘We won’t pay for Brexit!’
Other Motions rightly demand that exit from the EU and its pro-privatisation regulations should be an opportunity to abolish contract tendering for the likes of Scotland’s ferries, and for permanent public ownership of our railways – as opposed to the Scottish government's continued preference for leasing the service out to the chaotic Abellio.

As capitalist profiteering – aided and abetted by the excuse of Brexit – leads to growing job losses and closures, we should support the calls for an industrial strategy that would create jobs and vastly enhance housing, transport, retail and energy.
It’s not good enough to rely on Scottish government Task Forces - usually designed to smooth the path of closures and redundancies, as seen at BiFab and Springburn Rail Depot.
All experience shows this requires democratic public ownership of the giants currently bestriding the economy; otherwise we will continue to witness private profit ruling and ruining people.

Public Ownership & Green Jobs

Likewise, public ownership of all energy sectors, including renewables - alongside transport, construction and the banks – is the prerequisite for job-creating measures that simultaneously tackle the life-threatening climate chaos.
A Just Transition to ‘green jobs' – including through a defence industry diversification plan – is at the heart of what’s required to save both people and planet. Pleading with the profiteers won’t work; nor will praying for peace between rival capitalist powers, who preside over a world wracked by wars and ethnic civil wars.

The STUC should enthusiastically support the Motions demanding an end to austerity, reversal of public sector pay cuts, and for the Scottish government and local councils to set No Cuts budgets, spearheading mobilisations of trade unionists and communities to win back some of the billions stolen by successive Westminster governments; butchery in turn passed on by Holyrood.
Serious struggles to win collective bargaining rights is equally important to reversing the theft of wages, rights and conditions across all sectors.

Sign the Online Petition HERE - TODAY!

£10 Now & Guaranteed Minimum 16-Hours Contracts

One of the pivotal policies that the entire trade union movement should unite in action around is being proposed at the STUC by my own union, Usdaw: an immediate minimum wage of £10-an-hour, regardless of age; guaranteed minimum 16-hour contracts for all workers who want them; and the legal right to contract hours based on actual hours worked – abolishing zero hours contracts.

In reality, the £10 minimum agreed by the TUC almost 5 years ago is rapidly falling behind a genuine living wage, with at least 14 per cent inflation since, which is why Usdaw (in our forthcoming annual conference document) calls for £10 as the immediate minimum, “rising with either inflation or average wages, whichever is greater”.
Alongside calls for more systematic action on equal pay for women workers, these fighting demands could and should be used to engage, motivate and mobilise workers into action.

Workers Need Socialism

Underlying the wide-ranging policies being debated at STUC is the urgent need for root and branch transformation of the entire system we live under.
Every specific demand for action points to the need for democratic public ownership and control of industries and services, if workers are not to remain enslaved by the pursuit of maximum profit by those in power. In one word, it demands socialism.
That won’t be gifted to us by the capitalist class, nor by parties married to the mis-named 'free enterprise' economy.
It won’t be achieved by resting on our laurels after agreeing transformative policies at STUC Congress.
It requires consciously-led mass action around achieving those policies, rooted in an understanding that we are engaged in a struggle between opposing classes.

We need to prepare workers at every level for what is at stake.
If we fail to prepare, we have to prepare to fail!
With a socialist vision of the future, and key fighting policies to mobilise around, pockets of struggle in recent times prove that we can organise to win. The alternative is too horrendous to contemplate, regardless of the details around Brexit.