Scottish Labour

[ClopySow]

I've voted snp for the last while, but would align my political views with a traditional labour government, not new Labour. I can get on board with Jeremy Corbyn, but can't get past Kezia Dugdale. Are Scottish Labour more Corbyn or milliband?

thanks for posting that rombri. the only bit i disagree with is that the middle scotland No voters were doing it for self preservation. i voted No as all I could see from the finances was that Scotland would be poorer overall and when times are hard it's the people at the bottom who suffer most. No-one was honest about that during the campaign. I feel that people were duped into voting Yes for something that tbh the SNP already had a lot of the power to change and weren't. The cynic in me feels that sometimes it suited them for people to feel poor and hard done by. personally i think if they'd used their powers and actually tried to create a fairer society, people would have had more confidence and they may have gotten their Yes vote. I really hope someone can do something to prevent yet another generation of Scots poor growing up in conditions as described. There is a lot I recognise and have had experience of written in this piece. I lost my own brother and father to alcohol.

I phoned the cooncul to try and find who was standing but they didn't know so they said they will try and find out and will call me back.

Yes, re the letter, my father was an alcoholic, the household money was drunk away and it was abusive. I am not in touch with any of my family any more. Too much damage. Not the destitution described here, but other kinds of damage.

But how is alcoholism going to be solved by taxing people more? Maybe providing better addiction recovery service? Maybe decent jobs? But in the end, there is also something about taking responsibility - neglect is neglect. My dad had a choice - he spent the money on alcohol, not his family. It can't always be someone else's fault. Scottish hard drinking culture is long standing and not externally imposed. Drug culture may be different but alcohol is still the biggest problem.

Whether you like her policies or not, NS has to operate within the global reality of neo-liberalism. Socialist utopia is not going to happen, nor would it solve intergenerational addiction.

The reality is - as someone said above - more taxation is needed just to pay for basic services. And quite frankly, you can't tax people if there are no jobs, so the question is, more importantly, what are the job creation policies?

That apart, my constituency candidates were on the council website - there are the four main parties represented.

If Govs would deal with disruptive behavior in school so that one or two children cannot ruin the education of the other 28 kids in the class it would be worth spending the, admittedly, high costs.

You are then giving all kids a better start and improved options/ job choices. They then might be less likely to drink or be involved in drugs, in turn this would reduce the chances of them becoming bad parents etc etc etc

But no one does this.
Bit like improving the skills of prisoners to reduce recidivism (?sp) in the end that would save money.
But no one does this either.

Over-invested here, but I woke up thinking about the letter.

The author seems to make the argument that, despite two generations of addiction before him, he is clean for a year and now has a baby - he claims, hopefully correctly and not prematurely - that the cycle of family dysfunction can be broken.

I hope so too (for me as well). But he doesn't wish to see his parents and grandparents but the conditions they lived in as to blame, then what does that say about his own situation? The really interesting question is why he is clean and his mum and grandparents, tragically, were not. Surely this implies that something in the current climate works, rather than fails?

Who is providing addiction services? Doing the research? Getting out and seeing what works and what helps? What are the SNP doing here or have done? Landmark 2008 (?) strategy was the Road to Recovery - pre SNP majority, yes, and I don't know enough about policy and practice and reality on the ground now to say - not through living in a bubble but making my own life work.

In short, there is a story here and it is more complex than the government are not doing enough and it is all because of pandering to 'Middle Scotland'.

Och fuck it, I am awake now. Coffee?

This is a programme from Radio 4 about the link between traumatic childhood
incidents and adult health probs such as diabetes, obesity etc. So things influence the risk of eg alcoholism other than the failings of the individual.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b070dksr

The doctor interviewed discovered that merely getting patients to fill in a brief questionnaire as to whether they had suffered things during childhood decreased the number of GP visits.

After reading about the land reform thing and thinking about the whole tax rate thing, i think i'm probably voting labour and green. I can't believe i said that.

I think the letter focused on alcoholism but his main point is about poverty, I think. Poverty exploded in his life through booze, but it could have been any number of things that plague people struggling to get by: obesity, poor health, teen pregnancies, low education achievement, unemployment etc etc

" I was drawn to the SNP following the collapse of the left and I've been voting for you since 2006 because something radical needs to be done about poverty in this country."

And while I agree we live in neo-liberal times, and there has to be a level of pragmatism about that, I also know poverty destroys us all. If people are desperate enough, they are more willing to be 'reckless' with their politics because they have less to lose - that affects us all.

What I find disingenuous about the SNP is the claim they are 'progressive'. And the way they pander to this vanity that Scots are 'different' to rUK, more Nordic than the rest.

If this is the case then I'd like to see policies that reflect this, and I'd like to see Scots actually vote for those policies.

What worries me is people buy into the SNP patter because it flatters their ideal of who they think they are - right-on PC leftie types. And this vanity is untested by policies that demand they walk the walk as voters. It's all smoke and mirrors to me. I think if people are genuinely concerned about poverty issues then they need to recognise it comes with a price, and they should step up to pay it.

I suspect that given time the SNP narrative will unravel as it is forced to define itself more visibly. I hope it will become more obvious that they are Tartan Tories but with a nationalist agenda. But their majority will given them a chance to reshape government to entrench their power - which is what nationalist governments tend to do.

As a disclaimer: I grew up under a nationalist government that started out exactly like the SNP then fell apart over decades. And the country I came from was characterised by gross inequality. Poverty creates the conditions for extreme governments, which can be destabilising.

If this is the case then I'd like to see policies that reflect this, and I'd like to see Scots actually vote for those policies.

This ^ The SNP membership are (I think) mostly quite a lot further left than the leadership. I think there is a bit if frustration, even anger, that SNP have been so feeble on things like land ownership, fracking, and council tax, when with the support they currently have they could have made really radical changes.

If the SNP don't shift their position they are going to lose a lot if support to the Greens. I can remember when or by who, but there was a survey that showed that the majority of SNP members/voters (I can't remember) were actually most aligned with the Greens in their views.

I've actually been very impressed with our local Green councillor. We had a green belt housing application that had been rejected and the landowner kept appealing. SEPA etc also did not agree with it from a flooding point of view. The landowners are quite aggressive. Anyway, he seemed to be the biggest support for the community campaign and also took himself out of the voting process to keep it fair. It was rejected but the only votes for it were SNP. It was nice to see an elected representative supporting his community - that shouldn't be as rare a thing as it often seems to be.

I was thinking about the point made about something might be working since the letter writer had broken the cycle. I went through my teenage years in Thatcher's Britain. Started work in 83 during times of the worst unemployment figures. Bought my first flat in 85 during the highest interest rates. I am one of 7. We are all homeowners and taxpayers including my brother who died, so actually should I be voting for the Tories given my absolute abhorrence for them and the belief that Thatcher was the devil incarnate? Seemingly it worked for my family

OneMagnum, no - it doesn't follow that you should vote Tory because home ownership and employment worked out for you against the odds. But it is worth questioning what exactly made things work for you at this pointm Education? Location? Employment opportunities where you were? Etc. Because understanding what worked at an individual, local and national level is surely a productive way of approaching an issue.

In other words, unless you believe you were just lucky, what factors contributed to you doing okay, well even. These may have been Tory policy related; they may have been despite Tory policy or completely unrelated.

My point was really that, for the author of the letter, something is working for him which did not work for previous generations of his family. What is it? Because, unless it is all free will, something in the current circumstances has given him the tools to find a way out of the poverty and addiction he grew up in. What is it?

It doesn't follow that he needs to vote SNP. But that something in the current climate works for him in a way it did not for previous generations of his family - or others now. What is it? That was my point.

Sorry that was repetitive - on phone!

If I had to put it down to anything it would probably be my parents example I guess. Mainly my Mums given my dad's alcohol and gambling problems. However even with that, he still worked all his life as did my mum. He'd sometimes go on a complete bender and spend all his wages (paid in cash in those days) and then my mum would chuck him out and we'd live of air for a week, sometimes we'd chop up trees from the garden or furniture to burn for heat and hot water. In retrospect I can't blame him as he'd had a hard childhood, his parents committed suicide when he was a small boy so his already impoverished life became worse when his grandparents were left with 3 young children to bring up in the middle of the war - they were often starving or beaten and put into care which wasn't a pleasant place either in those days. I think despite that we were brought up with a very high set of morals and work ethic. One of my my mum's work acquaintances commented to her once about how lucky she was not to have any children in prison or trouble. i think she got the look. My mums upbringing was more stable though still very poor. She remembers have a notion to get an office job as she was doing well at school only to be told one morning to tell school she was leaving as she had a job in the sewing factory. Her elder sister worked there too even though it was bad for her asthma (of which she died). She once spent some of her wages on a pair of stockings before she gave the wage packet to my Grandmother and was beaten badly for it.

Anyway, I guess both my parents were bright but poorly educated and despite being shy, my dad had a fair bit of charm (and a horrendous stutter). i think we all (despite being shy) tend to come across quite well in interview and when we have a job we work hard. As a young family they were given a new flat in a new post war council estate which I think was probably a bit of a turning point for the family, prior to that they's lived in a tiny mouse infested flat above a bakers. There is a latent addictive personality in all of us. My Dbro just couldn't resist it and ruined his life and killed himself through it. I rarely drink at all as do the rest of the family - i think it's fear tbh. My Dnephew has a gambling addition. Another nephew has channelled his into working in stocks and shares :)

Thinking about it, i think it was probably more the post war consensus that turned our family on the upward trend even though there have been casualties along the way :(

Things are talked about these days. Giving Loki a chance to see other choices.

When I was young alcoholism was a shameful thing to be ignored, nothing ever said or explained. No internet, no nothing really 40 - 50 years ago. Few books which I wouldn't have dared be seen reading anyway.

Just surmising as to how he has fixed himself.

Just saying i have been out so not had a chance to reply but will come back and read properly later

I think the point of the letter isn't to make a case for individual case-by-case interventions for families affected by addiction (important though that is) but more than that, to tackle the root causes, and the conditions that too often give rise to addition. We know that inequality is bad for everyone, and it needs to be tackled at both ends - rich and poor.

After endless soul-searching and engaging with all the information available I voted no in the indyref, because I thought the best way to fight for a more equal Scotland was to do it with our fellow travellers south of the border (though had I anticipated that huge Tory victory in the GE I might have reconsidered!). But from where we are now, I want to vote for redistributive policies because that's the way towards equality. And as far as I can tell:

SNP - definitely not. Pure cowardice to abandon plans for a higher rate of income tax.
Labour - heading in the right direction, but not far enough. They're vague on plans for how the rebate from the extra penny on tax would work for the lowest income earners and they're saying nothing on wealth inequality - and I don't think their proposed highest rate is high enough.
Green - definitely yes. £10 an hour minimum wage by 2020, 18% tax on incomes to £19,000 the 40p tax rate increased to 43p, and 60% for earnings above £150,000. (I say this as someone in the current 40p band.) Growing up I thought I'd be a Labour supporter for life, but at the moment the Greens are way to the left of the centrist mess that the LP has become.

My DFs drinking was nothing to do with poverty.

I cant help feeling that the poverty is due to the drinking rather than the other way round.
Sadly I can't vote green as they want to swathe the whole of Scotland in great big wind turbines, same as the SNP.

In theory wind power is great, if you don't live next to them!