The enemy in Glasgow last year

As one of the few SSY members who made it to today’s anti-fascist demo in Stirling I’d like to write a bit about what went wrong and where we can go from now. As you may or may not know today was a bit of a setback for the movement against fascism in Scotland. To begin with a small group of us travelled through on the train from Glasgow, being followed and asked various stupid questions by the police (such as “are you going to Stirling?”). Once there some more joined us but the overall turnout was disappointingly small (under 50 people in total) and as a result the police were easily able to put us into a kettle outside Stirling train station as a dozen or so fascists later got off the train. We were held for around half an hour as the fascists walked off towards the town centre, apparently ending up in a park where the police had allowed them to rally. After the police let us go we headed up towards the town centre discussing what to do next. Before getting anywhere close to the park we received news (from spotters I think) that the fash had been joined by a fairly large group of football casuals, some of which were said to be armed with weapons and clearly looking for a fight. With this it was decided, perhaps sensibly given the numbers, that there was little we could do in Stirling and that the safest option was for us to head back to Glasgow. We could have stayed of course and hoped that the police would have protected us from them but do we really want to be in the situation in Scotland where we must rely on the state to prevent anti-fascists from being beaten up or worse?

I absolutely don’t mean to blame any individuals for the low turnout. I understand the announcement was very last minute, many of us only heard that the SDL would be demonstrating in Stirling and not Glasgow (as was originally planned) less than 24 hours before the event. And I’m sure those who didn’t attend will have also sorts of perfectly valid reasons for this. I think our success in Glasgow and Edinburgh had perhaps helped to create a false sense of complacency that contributed to the low turnout today. But the SDL can’t and mustn’t be written off as a threat. Today will I fear have emboldened them, it will have handed them a feeling of victory which, if we had had more of us and had been better organised, would have been denied to them. Personally I don’t think the SDL have that much reason to feel joyful after today. That they felt unable to show their faces in Glasgow and ended up in a park in Stirling instead is itself a sign they are still weak. But the danger is that they will now feel far more comfortable about travelling to smaller towns all over Scotland (preferably after keeping the location a secret as long as possible), relatively secure in the knowledge that not enough of us are going to turn up to show them meaningful resistance. With a lot more of us there today we could obviously have broken through the police kettle and cut the fash off before their football thug friends were able to join them.

So what’s the solution now? As someone who hasn’t really been involved in any organisation work up to now I can’t really answer that sufficiently. But we need to obviously keep on working on intelligence and perhaps on building up a secure mailing list who we can contact if there’s any details we don’t want made available on facebook. We should also, I feel, try not to leave anti-fascist work until only when the SDL have an event planned. To keep up the momentum I think it would perhaps now be good for us to have anti-fascist meetings and discussions more often in order to stay up to date with what’s going on. Ideally we could have a fairly large network of committed anti-fascists who can be contacted quickly through various means, not just facebook. If we’re only going to find out at the last minute then we can’t rely on local anti-fascist groups to emerge and coordinate any form of action in time. As things stand most will likely have to come from Glasgow and Edinburgh where SAFA has a reasonable presence.

I’m sure other people will also have some good ideas and suggestions about where to go now. We can all agree though that fascists on the streets, in a town of any size, is not something we want to see here in Scotland. You only have to look to England and the massive threat posed by the EDL to see what happens when fascists consistently feel comfortable spreading their poison in public. It’s not too late here in Scotland and we can still defeat the scum with a bit of effort. Let Stirling be the last time they’re allowed to show their faces on our streets.

EDIT: Some of the information in this article would now appear to be inaccurate so I stand corrected. There were around equal numbers of fascists and anti-fascists present in Stirling with some of the more sensationalistic information we received being manufactured to create confusion.

On 8 March, International Women’s Day comes around once more.

As the Scottish Socialist Voice explained in a previous IWD special (scroll down to centre pages):

For over 150 years, women and men across the world have demonstrated on International Women’s Day. On that day in 1857 in New York, hundreds of women workers in the textile industry went on strike, protesting casual labour, low wages and poor working conditions. The women were attacked and beaten by the police – their stand was one of the reasons 8 March was officially recognised as International Women’s Day in 1910. So why do we still mark the day now in the 21st century?

The multinational bank HSBC is a major sponsor of the ‘official’, or at least biggest, International Women’s Day celebrations in Britain now. Their website explains:
“Many companies have actively supported International Women’s Day… This is essential if they are to recruit and retain the best female talent, sell their products/services to them, and see more women investing in them.”
But for others, including the Scottish Socialist Women’s Network, the reasons we march on International Women’s Day are the same as why the New York textile workers marched – because we are still fighting low pay, exploitation and oppression.

Photo by Eva Merz

Socialists in Scotland will be marking the occasion with our annual International Women’s Day protest outside HMP Cornton Vale.

Cornton Vale is the only women’s prison in Scotland, and it is notoriously overcrowded – despite the fact that most of the inmates shouldn’t be there in the first place. Just one per cent of women in Cornton Vale are there because they have committed a violent offence. Previous reports have found that 90 per cent of women imprisoned in Scotland have committed crimes related to poverty  – through drug and alcohol abuse, non-payment of fines, or just struggling to cope with living below the breadline.

In 2006, it was found that 98% of the inmates were struggling with addiction; 80% had mental health problems and 75% were survivors of abuse.

Former Scottish Socialist Party MSP Rosie Kane was held in Cornton Vale in 2006 for non-payment of a fine. One of her fellow inmates was there for nothing more than throwing some candles and a James Blunt CD out of a window during an argument. You can read about Rosie’s experience in Cornton Vale here.

It costs £37,000 a year to keep one woman in Cornton Vale – that’s money that could be investing in helping women with drink and drug problems, helping poverty stricken women from having to turn to prostitution or theft to feed themselves, their families or their habits. That is money that could help women rebuilt their lives after abuse and trauma. Instead women are being locked up and mistreated over and over again.

Socialists and feminists protesting outside womens’ prisons is often misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued. We DON’T think women are inherently good and gentle and should therefore don’t belong in jail. The fact is that women receive disproportionately high sentences when compared to men who have committed similar crimes. As previously reported in Leftfield, shoplifters (mainly women) are more likely to be imprisoned than sex offenders (mainly men). Women taking a tiny bit of profit-making opportunity from private companies are considered more dangerous criminals than men who pose a serious risk to the safety of women and children. That’s FUCKED UP.

Stop the war on women!

Join us this Sunday, 7 March at 12 noon at Stirling Train Station, to march on Cornton Vale and PROTEST.

Please bring ribbons and flowers to decorate the fence.

If you are a driver, your help ferrying protesters from the train station to the prison would be much appreciated.