Tuesday 21 December 2010

Happy New Year?

It was down memory lane this morning as I thought of Dick Gaughan and how his music inspired me many years ago. He raised my spirit and made me proud to be of real working class decent, and brought out all the socialism that my father had planted deep in my soul from an early age. I remember getting taken the union meetings and hearing tales of John McLean and other Clydeside Reds!

Later, I was to be inspired by Jimmy Reid and others of that time. The miner's strike, was it 1984, again brought out all my feelings of injustice and anger at the way things often are. When I look at the present situation in the UK, I'm wondering if we're heading for more confrontation between government and people. Maybe the student riots are only a wee warm-up. There are hundreds of thousands who are facing the dole next year, and as fat cat bankers continue to pay elegant bonuses, I wonder how long it will be before the ball bursts, and the inherent deep-seated socialism, especially in the souls of Scots, raises its head and seeks confrontation with a government who seem hell-bent on taking us back to the Thatcher years.

Gaughan sings of the miner's strike, but his message is still prophetic.

3 comments:

MadPriest said...

Brilliant. Like you, I have been a fan for many years and have been fortunate to see him in concert a few times.

My favourite song of his is "Song For Ireland."

I can't speak for Scotland, where the political scene is complicated by the existence of the SNP, but in England I think we are living through a period of opportunity for real socialism. Certainly it doesn't seem to be the dirty word that Thatcher made it for many years. In fact, there is a lot of kudos to being able to state that you have been a life long socialist who never wavered and was never corrupted by the temptations of New Labour. Of course, whether we take advantage of this opportunity or not is a different matter.

Fr Kenny said...

Count the number of Tory MPs in Scotland, MP. I think there is one, so it won't be hard. The socialist soul of Scotland lives on and has never been diminished, even within the SNP.

MadPriest said...

I wasn't getting at the SNP. I'm just saying you have a more complicated choice than we do. And, yes, one only has to look at the way Scotland treats its students and old people to realise that you lot still have a residual social conscience whilst we dumped the last vestiges of ours when we voted Tony Blair into power.