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Jim McDaid is standing as a candidate for Dalry and West Kilbride Ward I have put myself forward in the forthcoming council by election to give voters an alternative to the failed politics of both Westminster and Holyrood. A local election it may be but the impact of austerity politics emanating from, in the first place, the tories in Westminster but ramped up by the SNP at Holyrood. This has had a devastating effect on North Ayrshire including the Dalry & West Kilbride ward where we live. I believe people are beginning to see the sham constitutional wrangling of both these parties for what it is – a distraction from the cuts, failures and neglect in government of both.
I have lived for over twenty years in this ward, I have been active as chairperson of Meadowfoot Tenants’ & Residents’ Association for much of that time with a record of community activism and positive outcome for the area. I am also chairperson of North Ayrshire’s Trades Union Council and have been so for many years. I retired prior to the COVID-19 pandemic but volunteered my services to assist during the current crisis and have worked the past year in a local North Ayrshire school.
If elected I will commit 100% to representing the people of Dalry & West Kilbride ward and I will campaign to improve the life chances of young and old. To do so will require that North Ayrshire Council get the resources necessary to maintain, improve and develop public services in education, housing, roads, amenities, social services and everything else that are so essential to a thriving and happy community – that will be my prime concern.
A start has to begin somewhere at sometime – make it now.
VOTE JAMES MCDAID – SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY No. 1 on August 12th. James McDaid 2/08/2021

On 23rd June this year it was widely reported that a British war ship, HMS Defender was patrolling in the Black Sea. The first question that sprang to mind was why? As Vladimir Putin dryly remarked when asked whether World War III was about to break out, the British ship was over 2,000 miles from home. The Russian fleet in contrast was on home territory. While Russia viewed an outbreak of hostilities very seriously it was clear who were within their rights to defend their territory (Russia Today 24/6/2021). Back in the UK the British Government made a similarly laid back response stating that there were no bombs dropped or aircraft firing close to HMS Defender. The apparent nonchalance hides some more serious facts. Defender was bristling with state-of-the-art armaments, with a helicopter on board and a number of journalists. There is no doubt their intention was to be noticed. There are international agreements concerning the use of the Black Sea by shipping and that is that the waters give priority to those countries bordering it. Visiting ships have 21 days and this is accompanied by a view that they have a peaceful purpose, not for one of provocation. The Defender has been in Ukrainian port of Odesa a few days before where the UK and Ukraine had signed an agreement to jointly create two naval bases along with war ships. It seems as if the purpose of the visit was anything but peaceful, but highly provocative for peace in the region with UK, presumably working within the highly belligerent NATO, siding with the Ukrainian government. Another factor that is not emerging from reports about the confrontation between Russia and UK is the link between the UK and the Ukrainian Government, backed by the U.S. and NATO. For many years governments took note of the delicate nature of acts taking place in the back yards of nations which would be likely to inflame hostility. The outstanding example is when the USSR under Khrushev sent missiles to Cuba leaving the world feeling it was under the threat of nuclear holocaust. The current Government in the Ukraine is seen as corrupt and fascism has been a major problem since World War II when collaboration between the Ukraine and the Third Reich took place complete with associated atrocities. Today the involvement of fascists and rise of the far right continues to be a serious issue to be resolved. That the British Government are collaborating with a right wing government to create bases and develop armaments is more than a threat to Russia, it’s a threat to world peace. John Tyrrell 26/08/2021

In 1959, Cuba overthrew the corruption and domination of capitalism and the mainly United States-based companies which had long oppressed the Cuban people. For more than 60 years, Cuba has been a beacon of inspiration to Socialists around the world with its health and social care system and its provision of education, while its government worked to transform the standard of life of all its people. Throughout that time, Cuba has been under attack from the United States: successive US administrations have levied measure after measure over the decades to destroy the Cuban economy and demoralise the Cuban people, seeking to impede at every turn the further development of the Cuban Revolution. Today, Cuba is facing fresh, intensified US-imposed sanctions – at a time when in common with the rest of the world, it is dealing with the COVID pandemic. As a result, it is desperately in need of international aid. For 30 years, the Communist Soviet Union provided Cuba with the help it needed as a result of US sanctions in building its Revolution. The Socialist Labour Party calls on Communist China to give the same level of support that the Soviet Union gave to Cuba for 30 years and that the United States is giving to countries which surround both China and the People’s Republic of Korea. The United States provides aid to those countries which support its system and accept US domination. The Socialist Labour Party calls on the government of China to provide the same levels of support and aid to Cuba and its people who not only need but deserve that support. DEFEND CUBA! Arthur Scargill Leader, Socialist Labour Party President, National Union of Mineworkers, 1982-2002 19 July 2021

Globe & Mail, Canada. First Nation to release report on unmarked graves at Kamloops. Canada gets a good press generally as a matter of course. Over the years stories emerge showing that the whole story is withheld and the domination of the demands of Capitalism are upheld over and above the well being of its citizens. The term “First Nation” was brought into use in the 1980s to refer to part of the indigenous population which consists of many groups apart from Inuit inhabiting Artic region of Canada and intercultural groups, or Metis. Recently unmarked graves have been found near to two residential schools where first nation children were sent, removing them from families and culture and imposing on them an eduction designed to integrate them into the dominant language and culture of the country. The are 139 such schools across Canada. Amazon Front lines have sent a message of solidarity with the indigenous people of North America, the Amazon and other places where residential schools exist. As for land ownership treaties were drawn up in the past but they appear to be partial and many have never made one. Major schemes often encroach on First Nation land with the huge oil pipeline intended to take tar sands oil to the United States or ports near Vancouver needing to cross. Mineral wealth has led to massive excavation resulting in the release of toxins affecting drinking water used by indigenous people and food grown. Colonial power continues unabated. After talking about what’s happening to Africa’s wealth I read in the Washington Post (5/3/2007) about a booming diamond industry in northern Canada, once the scene of a gold rush. The article claims it could be the answer to “blood diamonds” resulting from conflict zones. However on reading the article you might see that there are more than superficial similarities. You see land there is owned by Inuit – the earlier settlers on land which they saw taken out of their hands before. Now there is a surge in interest in education. The report goes on to say there are not too many Indians on the boards of the mining companies which form an industry larger than South Africa’s

Canada’s MiningWatch comments on the diamond industry and makes the point “there are no clean diamonds”.
“There are no clean diamonds. Exploring for them, digging them out of the ground and selling them requires sacrifices from the natural environment, from the wildlife and fish that live on it, and from the Aboriginal people who depend on it.
We want to ensure that the public understand that Canada’s Aboriginal communities are engaged in a daily power struggle to ensure that the mines benefit their people, and to ensure that these mines do not irreversibly damage the intricate web of life on which we all depend.
We want to ensure that the DiCaprio film and its response strengthen the ability of Canadian Aboriginal communities and indigenous communities elsewhere in the world to protect their interests.” John Tyrrell 18/7/2021

Morning Star 7.2021 In view of the Government’s stated intention to delay a review of the Covid crisis, the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public set up the Peoples’ Covid Enquiry led by the distinguished human rights barrister Michael Mansfield. They have just issued an interim report which needs to be read as a matter of urgency, particularly given the complacency which is setting in with the belief that the vaccine role out is the complete answer to the problem. The enquiry took place with 9 sessions chaired by Michael Mansfield where each week experts and lay people gave evidence to a panel of senior health professionals. We were already talking about 100,000 deaths across the UK and now we have been told to expect more given the advent of a new (“Indian”) variant that arrived in a period of lax border controls, particularly with people travelling to and from India where it was well known the situation had become out of control. JT 8.7.21

Rob J. Hawkins 10.07.2021

The recent G7 meeting in Cornwall was to all extents and purposes a very expensive, high security, long photo opportunity yawn as far as the British working class were concerned. Although originally intended to have representatives of major countries, the G7 now has over-representation from the undemocratic EU. As a Country, we can’t seem to shake off their constant meddling in our internal affairs. We had about 45 years in total of being under their illegal, fascist- run, austerity- driven subjugation and to continue to ‘entertain’ them in Britain is a ‘wind-up’ to those of us who have consistently campaigned to have no part in the EU ‘stitch-up’. What obvious conclusions can we draw from the Cornwall meeting. The first is the parallel between the atmosphere polluting G7 and NATO pollution of the environment. NATO, it has been reported, has been a high polluter with its military gas guzzling tanks and military vehicles. It would seem that it wants to spread its evil influence to all parts of the globe, from China to the Arctic. The G7 in comparison were busily polluting the atmosphere in Carbis Bay, with billowing clouds of smoke from out-of-control industrial scale beach barbeques catering for the high- powered, low- productivity personnel on display. To add to the pollution, the ‘Red Arrows’ left their trail of fumes above the Cornish skies. These were only a small part of the planes and helicopters also involved in this ‘photo pageant’ which also saw the British Royal family popping in for more photogenic opportunities. With the new strains of Covid emerging to large extents in the Greater Manchester area, we had the local Devon and Cornwall police complaining about the influx of over 6000 police into the Cornwall area, including many, untested and unvaccinated, from the new covid ‘hotspots. Despite the emphasis on picturesque photo opportunities, the Cornwall reality couldn’t be totally hidden from the foreign leaders in that to make their way to venues like the Eden Project, they had to drive through areas of deprivation in one of the poorest counties in Britain. Rob J. Hawkins 17.6.2021

The British Government, The BBC, and the majority of the UK’s media’s protests at the decision by the Government in Hong Kong once again exposes its hypocrisy in respect of its propaganda against China. Yet again the UK conveniently ignores its own past. In 1988 the British Government  banned all voices of Sinn Fein and other Irish Republican groups on TV and Radio. We have not forgotten the British Government’s role in banning organisations in India, Kenya and Rhodesia and many more of its Colonies. and 80 years ago the British Government banned the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker.  The Capitalist  West has infiltrated all Socialist Parties and all Trade Unions and individual Leaders. It is political hypocrisy to condemn another country when it has for decades done the same thing. Arthur Scargill 17.6.2021

The Battle of Saltley Gate which took place in Birmingham in February, 1972 is a defining moment in British Working Class History. A mural was commissioned for display at the Digbeth Campus of what is now South and City College, Birmingham.

Channel 5 decided it was time to bring Margaret Thatcher back to life. Exactly what demand there is for her exhumation is not clear, but lovers of the neoliberal global onslaught and Margaret Thatcher’s friend and ally, Augusto Pinochet are still cheering. Not so those who are enduring life threatening cuts to pay, benefits and “essential” services”. So Mrs Thatcher vs the Miners was aired on Channel 5 during May 2021. “A shameful contribution to British industrial history”. Ken Capstick was one of those invited to take part in the travesty and he responded immediately having viewed the finished programme: “Tonight’s Channel 5 program about the miners’ strike was the most blatantly biased program about the strike I have ever witnessed. It was no more than a disgraceful attempt to resurrect the tainted image of Thatcher and a wrongful attempt to destroy Arthur Scargill’s image and leadership qualities in keeping miners on strike for 12 months in a fight to save the industry. It ignored the justice of our fight. In the end it was a shameful contribution to British industrial history that only ended up tainting the credibility of Channel 5 and its duty as a broadcaster to be unbiased. I have already made my views known to those from Channel 5 who produced this program and its twisted version of an historic event to rewrite working class history.” “Channel 5’s new documentary about the 1984 Miners’ Strike paints Thatcher as a hero and covers up her government’s real intentions – it is just the latest establishment attack on the miners who fought back.” Ian Lavery M.P. was another person conned into taking part reveals Thatcher and her Government’s true agenda. He wrote the following article for Tribune in response: Failing the Miners Again. “Channel 5 aired a documentary that blew the lid on a secret buried for almost four decades. Admittedly, with a hugely sympathetic narration which depicted Margaret Thatcher as a heroine and Arthur Scargill as a bumbling idiot, you had to look very hard to find it. But the truth is that the British people have been repeatedly lied to. I have told my story many times before. In 1984 I was an apprentice miner. Despite the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) arranging that we should be able to continue work, I joined my father and brothers on the picket line. We stuck it out for the entire dispute – not because we wanted to spend a year without pay, not because we owed allegiance to Arthur Scargill, but because war had been declared on us, our community, and our way of life by the Prime Minister of Great Britain. For its failings and factual errors, the documentary gets one thing absolutely correct: that Margaret Thatcher meticulously planned the dispute and micromanaged the state’s mobilisation against the NUM and the coalfield communities in order to destroy opposition to her disastrous agenda of liberalising the economy. It charts her vindictive quest for revenge on communities on whose backs Britain was built for bringing down the government of Ted Heath, her predecessor, and her use of the police, press, state, and judiciary as political tools against ordinary men and women fighting for a future for their communities. It depicts the strike as pivotal to her tenure as Prime Minister – and pivotal it was. For a century, the miners had been at the forefront of improvements to working-class life in the UK. Without the decimation of the industry, it would have been impossible to press ahead with her reforms which sought to undo the post-war consensus that had prevailed for 40 years. For more than three decades, it was claimed that Margaret Thatcher was simply a bystander in a dispute between the National Coal Board (NCB) and the NUM. Arthur Scargill’s claim that a secret closure list of more than 70 collieries was also vehemently denied, the government countering that only 20 economically unsustainable pits were at risk. But in 2014, cabinet papers pertaining to the strike were released which categorically proved both government assertions to be incorrect. The documentary fails to mention these facts at all. It also fails to make any mention of the role Sir Ian Kinloch MacGregor played in the dispute. Handpicked by the government to gut the workforce of British Steel and move the industry into private hands, he was then moved to the NCB with a similar role in mind. Arthur Scargill correctly branded MacGregor as ‘the American butcher of British industry’. Where 170 collieries were working in 1984, only 15 remained by 1994. In 2015, there were none. While presented in a celebratory manner in the documentary, civil liberties were dramatically curtailed across the coalfield. In the end, 11,291 people were arrested, with 8,392 being charged with breach of the peace or obstructing the highway. The NUM estimates that at least six in ten of those arrested were on bogus grounds. Men were told to accept lesser charges to avoid jail and were then forced off the picket lines. Many of these people who had never before been in trouble are still haunted by criminal records. The documentary’s portrayal of Arthur Scargill as stumbling from one mistake to another is particularly galling. Scargill, in my view, is the most principled trade union leader in modern British history. Despite facing a militarised police force, a government intent on starving miners and their families, a hostile and incendiary press, and a judiciary in the pocket of the government, Arthur Scargill led hundreds of thousands of miners on strike for a full year. In the end his resourcefulness and cunning were defeated, but only by the full force of the British state being pitted against us. It was equally as galling to see the triumphalist contributions of Neil Kinnock on the programme with no reflection of his own failings as Labour leader during the strike. Sadly, the solidarity expressed by Labour councils and the trade union movement to mining communities did not extend to the Labour Party leadership. We can only imagine what the outcome of the strike might have been had it done so. But to see him add weight to the premise—that this was a battle between two individuals, rather than the government being hell bent on destroying mining communities—is shameful. The documentary goes to prove that history is written by those with the power. Having denied her active role in the strike for three decades, those closest to Thatcher now celebrate her use of state machinery to destroy ordinary people. Our communities still bear the direct scars from the Conservative government’s industrial vandalism, and the entire country has been shaped by the outcome of that dispute. Perhaps the new attempt to paint Thatcher’s role in the strike as a heroic one is fuelled by the current state of British politics. We’ve entered a period where the truth no longer matters, and the taboo of a Prime Minister lying at the despatch box has well and truly been broken. We should not forget that Boris Johnson is on record as having joined the Conservative Party in support of Thatcher’s treatment of mining communities during the dispute. As Britain drifts ever nearer to authoritarianism under an emboldened right-wing Conservative Party, we should never forget what the Thatcher government did to our communities and to Britain. Their agenda, unimpeded by a hollowed-out trade union movement, has fuelled rampant inequality in a country where both billionaires and poverty are on the increase. But we should also remember the miners’ role at the vanguard of working-class politics. We can never return to coal, but the spirit of solidarity that built our communities and public institutions, and was prepared to fight for them, is something that should be the basis of our movement as we face the future. The working class of our country has never been the ‘enemy within’ – they are the backbone of our nation. Some would do well to remember that.” Ian Lavery is the Labour Party member of parliament for Wansbeck. It is clear that those who were responsible for producing the film were less than candid with those they approached. The article “Miners Failed Again” appears in Tribune. “Channel 5’s new documentary about the 1984 Miners’ Strike paints Thatcher as a hero and covers up her government’s real intentions – it is just the latest establishment attack on the miners who fought back.” “Never seen anything so despicable.” Ricky Tomlinson, himself the victim of a stitch up in 1972, said he’d never seen anything so despicable. The miners and Arthur Scargill had his full support against such deliberate lies. The Most Excruciating bit of State Propaganda. Ian Isaac, a former miner, made this response: A Truly Biased Inaccurate Load of Tosh. Nick Wroughton commented: “A truly biased inaccurate load of tosh. ‘Scargill fell for this/was blindsided by that’ etc etc. Using the same union rule (41) that areas such as Notts and S. Derbys had previously employed to force through a divisive bonus scheme, a Special Delegate Conference of the NUM (with its loose federal structure) decided to allow NUM (each area [unlike eg the T & G] a separate union within a national union) with pits threatened to defend themselves. Arthur had nothing to do with it.” “The Operational Briefing (of police at Orgreave) was something (I’d) never heard of”. A Channel 4 documentary on Orgreave Police Officer’s damning revelation of his orders: In 2016 Channel 4 interviewed a member of the police force who was “ordered to carry out instructions he believed to be wrong” clearly contradicting claims repeated in te Channel 5 documentary presented as historical fact: “He says the operational briefing was something he had never heard of: a bizarre ticketing system whereby South Yorkshire Police officers would write statements even if they had not arrested the pickets themselves. That ran against the fundamentals of policing: the arresting officer makes the arrest statement concerning the prisoner, and nobody else.” Channel 4 News 2/9/2016.