Scottish makar calls for cultural boycott of Israel

Liz Lochhead, the Scottish makar - basically our poet laureate - has called for a "total cultural and academic boycott" of Israel.

She said she had been "glad to join other Scottish artists and writers in signing a letter protesting the appearance of the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company at the Edinburgh International Festival" last week because of a journey which had changed her view of art and politics.

Lochhead visited Palestine during the summer and she describes her visit to the Aida Camp in Bethlehem and to East Jerusalem.

The injustice of thousands of people forced off their own land in the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, a whole community incarcerated in a "temporary" camp for over 60 years at the mercy of the brutal, illegal Israeli occupation.

Lochhead is as outraged as I was on my visit to Palestine that her "hosts and new friends" imprisoned in a place like Aida and under constant watch through Israeli Defence Force (IDF) gunsights can have their water supply turned on and off at will by the Israelis, and are not even allowed to travel the few miles to their own capital city.

Writing in the Sunday Herald she identified the incidents which turned her into "someone who feels that we must use all possible means, all the time, always, of bringing the attention of our world to the Israeli apartheid - for that is what it is - and to the appalling and illegal actions of Israel. The wall. The settlements."

"Was it," she asks, "witnessing the tear gas and the rubber bullets (no skunk water and only one live round that day, thank goodness) of the IDF at the peaceful, weekly, post-prayer demonstration against the wall in the olive-growing village of Ni'lin?

"Was it the bullet holes in the lintels of the House of Poetry in Ramallah?"

The cultural boycott of South Africa was effective in undermining apartheid. Israel operates a system of apartheid as odious as that of South Africa ever was, symbolised by the wall and resulting in the suppression of the Palestinians and their culture.

That's why it was right to protest against the Batsheva dance group, which is funded by the Israeli state though the Brand Israel policy.

I am glad Liz Lochhead went to Palestine to see for herself. And I am glad she is speaking out.

The living wage challenge to SNP

Scottish politics - or at least party politics, since politics is happening all the time - gets back into full swing this week. The Scottish Parliament has resumed this week after its summer recess.

One important item which is absent from the Scottish government's agenda is the living wage.

There are no plans to legislate on this as part of the Procurement Reform Bill in the coming session, but it is on the parliamentary agenda thanks to Labour MSP John Park. His proposed Living Wage (Scotland) Bill is currently out for consultation.

Park's bill would require private-sector employees working on public-sector contracts to be paid the living wage - currently £7.20 per hour.

These contracts are worth £9 billion, almost a third of the entire Scottish budget.

Around half a million workers in Scotland are paid less than £7.20 per hour.

The vast majority of low-paid workers are in the private sector, where over a quarter of employees get paid less than the living wage.

The public sector is mainly a living wage employer, though around 4 per cent of its workers still fall below the threshold.

So a public-sector procurement requirement to pay the living wage would have a massive effect in tackling low pay, poverty and inequality.

The Scottish government itself is one of the main public-sector employers, and SNP ministers always claim that all they can do to promote the living wage is pay it to directly employed staff. The excuse for not taking action through procurement is that it would be against EU competition rules.

But there is evidence from other areas - not least the London living wage campaign - that implementing the it through procurement is possible, and effective.

If Boris Johnson can support it, what's stopping the Scottish government?

Given that there is an SNP majority, and the effectiveness of SNP whipping, on the face of it John Park's bill is unlikely to succeed in this parliament even if it gets the required cross-party support to be tabled.

But it should prove another acid test for the more left-wing nationalist MSPs, on top of their leadership attempt to overturn the long standing SNP policy of opposition to Nato.

Let's see what they are made of.

A Just Scotland is just what we need

I arrived in George Square outside Glasgow City Chambers on Saturday to find people running all around me and lots of police, noise and shouting.

For a moment I thought the council had brought in the riot cops to clear the city centre of hundreds of trade unionists demanding a "Just Scotland at the STUC's first constitution consultation event.

But the crowds in the square were there for the Great Scottish Run Super Saturday.

The thought occurred that if George Square is OK to use for thousands of young runners, it should be OK to use for the big demo we're planning against austerity on October 20.

Inside the City Chambers - yes, the council did allow us to use our building to campaign for political change - there were indeed a couple of hundred trade unionists and community activists debating the STUC's vision for a Just Scotland and how we can best achieve that.

I have often wondered what Bill Speirs and Campbell Christie, whose leadership of the STUC did so much to win the Scottish Parliament in the first place, would have done in the current circumstances.

I think I know now. The STUC's consultation kicked off in Glasgow and runs each Saturday this month across the nation, in Dumfries on September 8, Inverness on the 15th, Edinburgh on the 22nd and in Dundee on the 29th.

If anything can cohere the Scottish constitutional debate - which so far has been mainly about process and suffered from lack of focus on real issues and class politics - it should be this intervention of the STUC in opening up to its affiliates and communities.

Saturday was a good beginning. It also saw the publication of a new Red Paper pamphlet, People Power: The Labour Movement Alternative for Radical Constitutional Change.

This is a collection of short essays which help to sharpen the constitutional soup with some pungent left-wing seasoning.

It is no coincidence that the People's Charter in Scotland is launching a new petition on 17 September and a series of public meetings in the month after that on the six charter demands and how they relate to the Scottish independence referendum.

Get involved at www.ajustscotland.org, www.peoplescharterscotland.org and www.redpaper.net