I have worked in public services my whole working life and have always been committed to the public sector as a way to deliver essential services to all in our communities. So it has been really hard to see them devastated, especially council services, which have been hit the hardest over the past 12 years of a Tory government And let’s not pretend that the SNP government’s “a wee bit better than the Tories” approach to public services is anything to write home about. We know that there is much more that they could be doing with existing powers – the STUC’s “Raising taxes to deliver for Scotland” makes that very clear. Instead, over the piece, rather than protect local government, they have passed on more cuts to councils than the Tories have passed on to them.

DURING a fringe event at last year’s Labour conference, Jim Murphy offered his insight into how Keir Starmer would govern.

“I think they’ll be the first truly private-sector Labour government,” said the former Scottish Labour leader, admitting Labour intended to govern from the centre.
His reflections are not ill-informed. For a politician in search of power, Starmer has kept Murphy — who oversaw the near complete wipeout of Scottish Labour at the 2015 general election — remarkably close.
Together with his consultancy business, Arden Strategies, Murphy is firmly in Starmer’s tent. His unashamedly honest appraisal of the Labour leader’s plan is instructive in determining the direction of the Starmer project as the general election looms.

The discussion in the Morning Star and elsewhere on the Left, on the approach socialists should take to the Labour Party seems to be growing more intense and while I understand and am sympathetic to the frustration and anger many socialists feel, I continue to believe that the left should dig in and challenge the current Labour Party leadership.

The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill is bad legislation in so many ways. It is a blatant attack on  trade union rights and those of individual workers. It is a Bill designed to avoid the scrutiny of Parliament. It further undermines the powers of devolved administrations and it will ultimately lead to a worsening of relations within important public service that depend so much on the good will of workers.

The decision of Nicola Sturgeon to stand down as First Minister of Scotland was sudden, but not unexpected. There has been speculation on her future for months despite her claim just two weeks ago that she had plenty in her tank to keep going.

After 16 years of SNP government in Scotland, we have become used to seeing just a few high-profile figures. I feel reasonably confident that few members of the public could name no more than a handful of SNP Scottish ministers.

After two years work Gordon Brown has delivered his Report from the Commission on the UK’s Future. For those, few, who were aware that it existed, there was little or no information about what was happening and how they could submit their ideas to it.
The report has finally been launched after a few weeks of to-ing and fro-ing in the media raising questions about one of its more eye-catching proposals: would the House of Lords be abolished and would it would be a first term commitment or be delayed to sometime in the future? On the same day different news outlets were claiming that Keir Starmer had committed himself to a first term change and others saying that he had not given that commitment. Starmer did state clearly at the launch that it would be consulted on in advance of the next General Election so that it could be in Labour’s manifesto and its recommendations could be ready to be implemented in the first term.

The Scottish Government have indeed broken new ground with the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. Never in the field of parliamentary scrutiny has a piece of legislation been so panned by so many so completely. The Bill was published by Humza Yousaf in June. It is currently being examined by Parliamentary Committees They asked for views, and boy did they get them. Seems a Bill to create an ill defined system based on outsourcing and delivering contracts not care has found few friends.

For the past 10 years the Red Paper Collective has assessed the different options for Scotland’s future against three criteria:

• Would it allow the redistribution of wealth across the whole of the UK?
• Would lay the basis for the democratisation of the Scottish economy?
• Would it build working class unity?