THE political blame game over the bin strikes and who needs to pay up isn’t cutting it with workers or the public.
SNP Edinburgh politicians Angus Robertson MSP and former council leader Adam McVey were quick out of the gate to criticise Labour for allowing the pay dispute to escalate after photographs of the capital in a complete state dominated social media and traditional headlines at the start of the week.
And to be fair they had a point – Labour pushed through the original and offensive 3.5% pay offer at Cosla, the local authority umbrella body. It’s unlikely that if 5% had been the initial offer it would have stopped the strikes completely, but it might have bought some time in negotiations, and avoided the strike taking place during the festival.
Instead of engaging in the debate constructively, Labour and Tory council leaders have been teaming up to obstruct the negotiations. Ahead of the 5% pay offer being put on the table, the vote was tied at 16-16. The SNP Cosla president took it over the line with the deciding vote, but Labour and the Tories were against even that.
Labour also tabled an amendment – backed by the Tories – which would have delayed the offer being put on the table, but thankfully it didn’t pass. The supposed party of the working class are officially in cahoots with the architects of austerity in Scotland. If it wasn’t clear to the public before, it will be now.
But this is still a cross-party issue. Of the 20 local authorities where workers are taking strike action, 10 are SNP-run, seven are Labour, two are Tory, and one (Dumfries and Galloway)is a joint SNP-Labour council.
The only parties who are relatively unscathed from this dispute are the Greens and the Lib Dems, simply because they aren’t in control of any councils.
Yet Alex Cole-Hamilton tied his party’s colours to the Unionist mast when he teamed up with Labour and Tory colleagues to make a stunt out of the issue, posing in front of a pile of rubbish in the authority where his councillors voted with the Toriesand voted to install a Labour administration.
It was no surprise that they were heckled. The crowd watching was unimpressed, and the two Tory MSPs in attendance made a quick exit after the photographs had been taken.
How politicians from a party where its two leadership contenders have both vowed to “ban militant trade unions” can stand there with a straight face as if they support the working class during a strikewas, as one woman said succinctly, a “brass neck”. The fact that they don’t get the irony and were more than happy to pose for the press just shows how utterlydeluded they are.
The issue is also an economic one. We are living in a country where Tory policies have chipped away at the rights of the most vulnerable in society and pushed wages lower, while at the same time companies are seeing record-busting profits and not passing them on to their workers.
There is a reckoning coming, and the usual passing of the political buck football of passing the buckisn’t going to cut it this time – people are scared. Wages are stagnant and everything is getting more expensive. Working people are being forced to use foodbanks, or to limit their power use, anxiously awaiting the staggering and immoral 80% hike to energy bills set for October.
This is a national emergency of pandemic proportions – where is the equity in response?
As STUC general secretary Roz Foyer said: “People are waking up. They’re not believing the hype that the right-wing usually put out to try and turn working people against each other.”
The UK Government is nowhere to be seen while this chaos reigns and the Scottish Government has a fixed budget. We still don’t know where the £144 million John Swinney gave Cosla to let the 5% pay offer go-ahead will come from, with a renewed budget set to be put forward when the Scottish Parliament returns. from recess in September.
If Swinney fronts up the cash for the extra £133m needed to take the pay offer closer to 10% , where is that going to come from?
Across numerous picket lines, speaking to workers and the public, one thing was clear – whether they blamed the Scottish Government or Cosla, the consensus is that they should pay up. Everyone is experiencing the sharp hike in prices;We are all feeling the pinch but for the most vulnerable it could literally mean life or death.
We need an end to the bickering and for a constructive approach to find a solution – the working people of Scotland deserve better.
