Sorry anyone reading this stuff I said I’d post something about Dostoevsky and I will, but first I need to fill the historical gap because the argument I want to make about Corbynism only makes sense if we share an understanding of what came before. I know folk will know their history and I don’t want to bore or patronise anyone, so skip this to my next post if you want, but you never know I might just say something valuable here. Thatcherism was brutal, and it’s personal to me and working class folk who lived and felt the way it battered us.

My Granda worked in Singer’s in Clydebank. My dad worked in John Brown’s shipyard. These aren’t historical footnotes to me — they’re my family, my place, my inheritance. Singer’s closed with 3,000 jobs gone within a year of Thatcher’s election. John Brown’s followed. The yard that built the QE2. The factory that employed half of Clydebank. They weren’t inefficient relics to me or my family, they were the centre of the community. Even if you hated working there those manky sheds and soot-covered buildings were the reason Clydebank existed and the reason people in Clydebank knew who they were. When these places (containers for our identity) went, something went with them that no amount of retraining programmes or enterprise zones was ever going to replace. You can’t backfill real people’s lives with good intentions and “action plans” when they’ve already been wrecked. My dad ended his time with John Brown’s Shipyard with a psychiatrist for his depression and anxiety. I’m sure many others trod similar paths of ill health and dark clouds. It’s not just a shipyard shutting, it’s a town.

Widen the lens out from me and my family. Look at photographs of closed factories and shuttered collieries and you’re usually looking at something worse than war damage, but bombs don’t choose their targets. What happened to the pit towns and the steel towns and the dockyard cities was chosen, and what my dad and his work mates went through together was planned too. The machinery was sold off, the land left to rot, and there wasn’t even the acknowledgement of loss that you get after a bomb falls. What followed was a lecture. Tories from Essex and the Home Counties telling folks who built ships to “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, “Get on your bike” and find work. Suddenly working class folk were redundant, out of date, not with the modern times. Whole towns, regions, sections of society, all working class, all now anachronistic and slapped down with the language of self-reliance delivered as a scolding by people with private school ties who’d never had to rely on anything in their lives except their class connections. Working class people weren’t given managed managed decline, it wasn’t even that “good”, what we got was managed contempt.

Let’s be clear, the past wasn’t perfect. Council housing could be grim. Services were often inadequate. Working class life was hard in ways that shouldn’t be romanticised, but as a class we had power, and that power meant conditions were improving. The welfare state, the unions, the collective bargaining — none of these were gifts from kind governments. All of it was fought for and won by working people who knew what they were fighting for and who would benefit. My mum and dad had the reasonable expectation that their children, my younger sister and I, might do better than them. That hopefulness has been robbed — not just that future kids might have it worse, but that there might be no planet left for them to exist on. A robbery and disaster carried out by people who understood exactly what they were doing. The same people digging luxury bunkers and planning to fuck off to Mars.

When Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was taking place in England’s green and pleasant land a Channel 4 News reporter was dispatched to Glasgow to interview people and get their views. One older Glaswegian woman was asked what she thought of Margaret Thatcher’s death and the reply was at once brutal and worthy of cheers and celebratory choirs, she said “They should put a stake through her heart to make sure she disnae come back!”, what a woman! Sometimes Glaswegians just make me so damn proud of the unashamed working class pride and identity we share. Her hatred of Thatcher was widely shared among working class folk, not universally for sure, but viscerally and with good reason.

I was a teenager during the 1984–1985 miners’ strike, which was no more or less than the British state under Margaret Thatcher’s Tories making a decision to deliberately break the strongest organised force in the working class. The National Union of Miners. Thatcher had prepared for years: coal was stockpiled, the policing operation planned, and the National Coal Board ready to close pits regardless of economic logic. This was a turning point in British history as much as any battle or war. Through a year on the picket line, communities held together through terrible hardship, with solidarity coming from across the labour movement. In the end the strike broke, the union fell and the working class was in retreat. The print workers at Wapping followed, Murdoch and the state working in explicit collaboration. The dockers too, and others besides. Each one a lesson delivered to the whole class: organise and we will break you.

The communities left behind after those defeats weren’t forgotten by accident. They were left deliberately, as proof of what resistance costs. So let’s be super clear about the shared root of anger, and the root of my anger about what I carry home from every shift — the damage in lives wrecked and communities broken is the long tail of all of it. The people on the other end of the line who are, in many cases, the grandchildren of miners and steelworkers, growing up in places that were never meant to recover, carrying the weight of a defeat their grandparents didn’t choose and didn’t deserve. The suicide rate of young men in Scotland was born in the defeats we’ve just mentioned. Those are just the tip of the iceberg. No wonder the brilliant old woman wanted to put a stake through Thatcher’s heart.

Blairism and the Labour victory in 1997 came as a wave of joy and relief. Surely now “things could only get better!” as the song said over and over wherever the man grinned his way through crowds. Getting rid of eighteen years of Thatcher and Major felt like something. The contempt stopped, the scolding stopped, there was money for schools and hospitals. Lots of folk, even loony lefties like me were relieved, but looking back it feels obvious that what won wasn’t the working class movement, it was never really “us”, it was a party that had made its peace with everything Thatcher had done and proposed to manage it more humanely. Still, even that felt better than the Tory boot on the neck, for a while at least. But trade unions became even more marginalised. Clause Four and any such commitments to nationalise for the public good remained beyond-gone, and of course The City was courted. I remember a certain Peter Mandelson telling us all that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. What working class people got in place of wage growth and real security was access to credit and rising house prices — debt dressed up as prosperity, the illusion of wealth without the substance. You couldn’t get a pay rise, but you could remortgage.

What Blairism built institutionally was the lanyard and the liaison coordinator — whole career structures built around managing the consequences of the right’s destruction rather than reversing it. I remember attending a lecture by Tariq Ali in the early noughties in which he argued that Labour had shaken off any semblance of being a workers’ party and was now a career for the middle class. Labour politicians, instead of being mostly like us, became the liaison co-ordinator hell spawn of Tom Leonard’s poem.

I might as well be emotionally honest here. I don’t believe the Labour right held working class people in any less contempt than the Tories did. The contempt just changed its accent. Tory contempt told you that you were worthless. Labour right contempt told you that you were incapable — that you needed to be managed and guided by people who knew better, rather than having the power to speak and act for yourself. One was honest about its hostility. The other dressed its hostility as concern. Now where do we think working class hatred of Labour “wokeism” might really have its roots?

New Labour didn’t really resolve the anger or the losses and bereavement that Thatcherism inflicted on us. Blairism simply made it a career to manage the smouldering wreckage and wounded. So the anger didn’t disappear, it just turned inwards to working class self harm. Nowhere to vent or hit out as a class, so inward to despair, the addiction, the physical and mental health crisis that is the political story written in bodies. If even the party that was supposed to be yours accepts the new reality, builds the liaison coordinator career structure, and tells you the answer is a skills assessment and a benefits form… of course ordinary people are beyond angry, they should be! The utter failure of the Labour Party, the betrayal of Blairism in surrendering the class war and the emergence of a lanyard wearing class to manage the undeserving poor stoked white hot anger with no political home. Into that vacuum came Farage, who at least sounds angry, who at least names enemies. The wrong enemies, but still enemies. The relief of that, of someone finally acknowledging the fury, is what I try to remember when I’m watching the roundabout painters and the flag wavers. The anger is legitimate. The direction is catastrophic.

I’ll need to dedicate a whole piece or more sometime to the Indyref which was joyous, and to Brexit which was far from joyous, but let me say all too briefly that the anger I’ve been illustrating found other expressions in both referenda. Two constitutional earthquakes in two years, rooted in the same forty years of loss.

This is the ground everything else grows from. I want to talk about The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky, Corbynism and Starmer in the next post. Let me say it loud and clear though — every voice on the line at three in the morning, every closed factory photograph, every pit town that became a food bank town is fed by this well of generational betrayal and anger. The losses were greater than any war. The trauma was legitimate then, it remains legitimate now. But before it found the fag breathed, beer-belching racism of Farage and the referendum ballot boxes, it briefly found something that pointed it in the right direction. That moment, and why it ended, is what comes next.

This is the fourth in a series of posts.

The next post is the one I promised — Dostoevsky, the Grand Inquisitor, Corbynism, and why the last serious attempt to change things tells us something we need to hear before we talk about what comes next.

Clydebank, June 2026

The voices I hear most often are women carrying the trauma and experiences of abuse. The effects of the abuse leave marks that aren’t always visible, in self-harm, in behaviour that’s hard to be around, in a discomfort with themselves so deep that simply being alive can feel painful. Of course there’s plenty of men too, broken men who haven’t spoken honestly to another human being in years, sometimes decades. Then there’s lonely people working their way through a list of support services, calling one, then another, then another. They’re not in acute crisis but they need some human contact to get through the next few hours, returning again and again because a five minute conversation is the only thing that dulls the pain of isolation and abandonment. People shattered by loss, by addiction, by lives lived without enough of what we all need to hold ourselves together — decent housing, some friendship and just the feeling that we belong to something with others like us. It’s in this sense that mental health crisis is most often rooted in the loss and bereavement of the social things that hold a person together, the things that used to exist in those working class containers we talked about in the last post, the unions, the clubs, the pubs, the workplaces where people actually knew each other, before it all became “inefficient”.

The stripping and hollowing out of our shared needs wasn't limited to the pubs, union halls and workplaces where people knew each other. It happened to the public services too — but differently. They were hollowed and not demolished. The welfare state, the health service, the systems built on a genuinely radical idea: that there are things every human being is entitled to simply by virtue of being human, regardless of what they earn or who their parents were. Then came Thatcher and Reagan, GDP replaced solidarity as the measure of everything, and what had been built to change lift us together became infrastructure for processing us in mass.

When you’re working to support people in the context I’ve laid out it can be hard. People you’re trying to help are often genuinely difficult to be with. The rage that has nowhere else to go lands on you. The behaviour that comes from a lifetime of being let down presents as aggression, as impossible demands, as something that has to be consciously worked through. You feel it — the flash of annoyance, the resistance, the moment where you need to wilfully choose compassion rather than just doing it naturally. That’s the human reality of it and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

But that’s not what I carry home. What I carry is colder. The Kafkaesque sensation of being a rational person inside a service that is, at its foundations, completely mad. Processes. Procedures. Frameworks. Criteria. The whole soul crushing inhuman apparatus of a system designed — by people who mean well, I genuinely believe that — to reassure us all that it is functioning, while we live the reality that it is often broken and harmful to us, and certainly to the most vulnerable and in-need of us. What that means for us dafties working in health, social work, local councils, immigration, government departments and so on, is that you do what the system asks of you. You work through what needs working through. You point people in need toward whatever is available. The system notes another engagement and moves on. The person moves on too — usually to the next door they can find that might open. Too often nothing has changed and really, nothing was ever going to change through this particular exchange, within a system structured the way it is. The alienation in that gap — between what the system tells itself it does and what it actually does — is something I’ve never fully come to my peace with. That’s the weight I carry home from work. I want it to be genuinely helpful, sometimes I doubt I actually am.

This system — its elaborate self-reassurance, its measurement of process rather than reality, its fundamental indifference to whether anything actually changes — isn’t a failure of our capitalist democracy, it’s democracy and our system working exactly as it is meant to. No wonder then that the right can see that something is catastrophically wrong. They’re not mistaken about the diagnosis. They’re dangerously wrong about where the blame lies. The same ideology that produced the broken system points the finger towards the people it has damaged — the broken are to blame for their own suffering, victims are culpable, and freedom means it’s your own damn fault, whether you’re alone and addicted in Clydebank or suffering in Gaza.

© INKCINCT Cartoons

The last post ended with three words. They are winning. Given what I’ve been describing and struggling with personally — the calls, the system, the flag wavers and roundabout painters — you can probably see why. So the question becomes: given all of that, what is to be done? where do I turn?

Not inward. There’s a strain of thinking, usually comfortable and middle class that says the answer is always within. Look inward, practise self-care, find your truth. Be authentic! (I used to like Camus and Sartre too, I was young, we all make mistakes). I understand the appeal and see the benefits of self care but I utterly and angrily reject the politics of it. Fuck you if you think people can yoga their way out of how poverty crushes them, our how childhood sexual abuse damaged a person, or how being disabled and alone is a horrific life. The mantra is….Your poverty is about your poor choices. Your mental health is your responsibility. Your suffering is a thing you alone are responsible for. Now of course we must take individual responsibility and be accountable for who and what we are but let’s also be crystal clear about the nature of our modern freedom, it is the freedom to blame yourself for everything that is breaking around you while the structures that produced the breaking remain completely untouched. Hyper-individualism dressed as empowerment, pointing you away from the collective and toward the mirror every time things get hard.

Engels documented what the alternative looked like in Manchester in the 1840s — the reading rooms, the Chartist papers, the fierce self-educating culture of people who had every reason to be too exhausted to think and chose to think anyway. It frightened the people in power then, and a century later Paulo Freire named what it actually was — conscientização, people developing a critical understanding of the world they’re living in and their power to change it. There’s hope in it because it’s not education handed down from above, instead it’s education built from inside the experience of the oppressed, by and with them. It’s what I am trying to do right now, it’s what this writing is about. After a horrific work weekend and watching Farage supporters riot about immigration I’ve had to think, educate myself and work out my own thoughts and way of living in the here and now. The labour movement understood this instinctively with reading groups, books passed between shifts, and arguments running late into the night about ideas that gave people a framework for what was happening to them. They stood on the shoulders of the giants in their class who proceeded them. We need to know our own history to advance our own future. That’s the tradition, and it should frighten the people in power now just as much as it did then.

So here’s a slice of my own attempt at what Engels, Freire and others have encouraged us towards, my working hard at self-education because it’s where our hope and our collective truths lie. I often read Darren McGarvey, because he’s from here and he challenges my old-left instincts in a healthy way. He’s using autobiography the way Žižek uses Lacan to get at how ideology actually operates on people, except Žižek requires a prior reading list and McGarvey is immediate and specific and from twenty minutes up the road. Žižek matters too — maddening and inconsistent as he is — for puncturing the left pieties that need puncturing. McGarvey does it in a way you can’t retreat from into theory, because the theory is the life, not an abstraction above it.

And reading McGarvey, thinking about why the left has lost people like the ones I talk to every night, is what sent me to Nancy Fraser. She named the thing I’d been nervously carrying for years: the alliance between identity politics and financial capital, between the language of inclusion and the practice of extraction — or in plain terms, how a political class that claimed to speak for ordinary people ended up speaking mainly for itself. Trans people, like every working class person, need housing, safety, friendship and belonging — their struggle is part of ours, not separate from it. We know solidarity across difference is possible because we’ve seen it. When gay and lesbian activists raised money for striking miners’ communities in 1984, and the miners’ union marched with them at Pride the following year, nobody had to choose between class solidarity and standing with a marginalised group. They were the same thing.

But the professional managerial class that captured progressive politics found it easier and cheaper to fight over toilet signs than for the housing and wages and public services that working class trans people need just as much as anyone else. Scotland banned fox hunting in 2002. Right call. Also costs nothing — the people whose weekends it disrupted don’t share a postcode with anyone on a housing waiting list. That’s symbolic progressivism: correct, cheap, and carefully positioned away from anything requiring actual redistribution. Food banks kept multiplying while the argument raged. The left has still largely refused to face this. That refusal is its own kind of catastrophe.

Mark Fisher found me at a low point. My own exhaustion, and the exhaustion I carry home from every shift. What he gave me wasn’t a new idea so much as a way of understanding what I was already living through on both sides of the phone line. The paralysis, the inability to imagine things being genuinely different, the sense that the system is simply weather — Fisher showed that this isn’t weakness or political failure. It’s what capitalism produces in people, deliberately. Left melancholy isn’t a mood. It’s a mechanism. The same mechanism that tells the person on the line at three in the morning that their pain is their own problem. He knew what this cost personally, said so honestly, and died in 2017 before he could see how completely the world proved him right.

These are just a handful of the voices and ideas that have given me some light in the darkness, and there are so many others — different books, different writers, different conversations that suddenly made something click. That’s fine, that’s the point. What matters isn’t the specific reading list. What matters is that we read, we learn, we argue about what we’re finding, and we build together the collective framework of understanding that used to live in those containers before they were stripped out. The reading groups. The arguments late into the night. The shared sense of what’s happening to us and why and who’s responsible. We need to rebuild that collective intelligence, from whatever materials we have, because the odds are stacking toward a tipping point involving the deaths of billions — not rhetoric, a trajectory we’re already on.

I know how that sits next to what I’m about to say. I sit with that tension every day — it doesn’t resolve and it’s not meant to. But looking away, turning inward, accepting the mirror — that’s worse. That’s the Germans baking bread.

The stuff I’ve read and mentioned here is just part of my own version of self-education as resistance. It helps me in grasping some sense of my working class reality here and now. You’ll have your own. We can do this.

This is the third in a series of posts.

The next post is about the last serious attempt to change things — what Corbynism proved, why it mattered, and why simply repeating it won’t work. There’s a moment in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov that crystallises exactly what happened to it. I’ve been sitting on that argument for a while. Time to let it out.

Clydebank, June 2026

The 1970s is where I want to dive in. Before then life’s not perfect, far from it, for many it’s miserable but for most of us, people like us, working class people in places like Clydebank, we expected life to be better for our kids. We’d fought for a welfare state, for improving lives, housing, health, education, less poverty and full employment and we’d won some of it. Things changed.

We had a framework for some form of flawed democracy and the delivery of some sort of welfarism to lift us all universally. Then during what seems like a miserable decade, certainly for flairs and hairdo’s, these victories started being undone and reversed. First economically, Bretton Woods — the post-war international agreement that kept capital under democratic control, made currency speculation impossible and gave governments the room to build welfare states and pursue full employment — was deliberately dismantled. There was a new breed in the ruling class and their political advocates who (in The Powell Memo for example) laid out an explicit blueprint for how big business should take back political power from labour and government. Pinochet’s Chile became the laboratory where they tested what was coming — the first full experiment in the new order, implemented at gunpoint and openly removing the elected leader of a modern country. Then Thatcher, then Reagan. I remember the miner’s strike in the early 70’s because mum and dad had candles in the kitchen and living room when the power was off. I remember the night of the General Election in 1979 when Thatcher and the Tories came to power because Britain wasn’t working. Mum and Dad were worried because Dad worked in John Brown’s shipyard, my Granda had worked in Singer’s which within a year of Thatcher’s election would close with the loss of 3,000 jobs. The working class to which we belonged was fearful of what was to come, and rightly so.

What changed wasn’t just policy or tax rates and union laws, though those mattered enormously. What changed was the government’s ability and will to maintain and improve our lives, states (and through them “us”) were disempowered from ever really being able to control the things that matter for everyone. Capital became King and held absolute power. Capital was set free to move while states were left competing against each other for its favour. Our “representatives” in our government were left with no options but to compete globally by lowering taxes, weakening regulation, suppressing wages, dismantling protections. Every government essentially bidding against every other to be the most attractive destination for money that owed loyalty to no one and nothing.

Of course there was resistance, Mitterrand tried in 1981 and the markets punished France within months. Syriza tried in Greece in 2015 and the Eurogroup — the assembled finance ministers of a continent — made clear that the democratic vote of the Greek people was simply not relevant to their deliberations. The lesson has been administered enough times now that most governments don’t need to be punished anymore. They’ve learned to punish us all on the altar of the ruling class without even having to be asked. Like offering our lives up to a divinity to appease them. “Sorry your life is ruined but we must please the Gods” isn’t quite verbatim but it’s what Thatcherism meant and we were the sacrifice.

What really changed was the balance of power between capital and us — and it changed because specific people, representing specific interests, worked to change it. The result was a world in which capital moves freely across borders while governments find themselves increasingly unable to protect the wages, housing and public services that working class lives depend on.

Meanwhile a large part of ostensibly left wing politics quietly drifted away from the terrain where working class life is actually lived. The focus shifted from wages, housing, security, dignity at work toward a politics of recognition and representation. Of course these issues matter, the dignity of every marginalised person matters, but identity without redistribution, and representation without material change, became a language that served the interests of a liberal professional class while leaving the working class with nothing - not even a language for our experience.

Tom Leonard understood this with a poet’s ear for the essence of a thing. In his poem ‘Liaison Co-ordinator’, written in the phonetic Glaswegian dialect he makes the point through the title alone, highlight the deadening bureaucratic language never found in the mouths of working class people and the immediate chasm between it and the lives of people in Govan or Drumchapel. In the poem itself, a Glaswegian voice describes the person who actually holds that job. The gap between the bureaucratic nonsense of the title and the working class clarity of the description is the whole point:

sumdy wi a digree

in fuck knows whut

getn peyd fur no known

whut the fuck to day way it

Tom Leonard, ‘Liaison Co-ordinator’

That’s what the left lost when it drifted from class politics. Not just the argument, the voice and ability to see the world from where most working class people actually stand, and to describe it in language we actually use. The liberal professional class that captured social democratic politics speaks in Liaison Co-ordinator. The distance between the language of the lanyard-wearing-class and us is the distance between a politics which is about the working class and a radical and threatening politics of and from the working class.

The right’s diagnosis of this failure is, infuriatingly, largely correct. Their prescription — blame migrants, blame Muslims, blame trans people, blame anyone except the people who actually did this — is a vicious, deliberate lie. But the grievance underneath it is real, and the liberal left has had no honest answer to it for decades.

There’s something else too, deindustrialisation destroyed the containers and space we lived our lives in together — the unions, the collective workplaces, the working men’s clubs, the local political cultures — within which class consciousness was actually formed. That consciousness of us together isn’t found in books or universities, but in the daily experience of working alongside people, organising together, learning through solidarity what your interests are and who shares them.

I see this in my work every shift — the people on the other end of the line carrying grievances that were once organised and directed and now have nowhere useful to go. Strip the containers out — and they were stripped out deliberately — and what you’re left with is genuine, justified anger with no organisational form to give it direction. Orphaned anger. Into that vacuum came Farage, Reform, the street fight, the culture war foot soldier who believes, sincerely, that his enemy is a refugee on a small boat rather than the hedge fund manager who made his town uninhabitable.

Now. The exhaustion. I promised I’d come back to it.

This is not just history. It is the daily operating reality. The relentless churn of right-wing outrage isn’t the noise around politics. It is politics. Antonio Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison cell in the 1930s, understood that the battle is not only for power but for the capacity to think and organise. Exhaust that capacity in permanent outrage, shock and reaction, and you win without ever needing to be engaged in the argument. Every time Farage says something that demands a response, working class energy that could be building something is spent reacting to something instead. The exhaustion you feel when you open the news is the point. The overwhelm is the weapon.

They are winning.

This is the second in a series of posts.

The next post is where I turn to what’s helped me think through all of this — the writers, the thinkers, the tradition of collective self-education, the places where a little light got in. Because if this post is an explanation of how we got here, the next one is the question of how you keep looking when you know what you’re looking at.

Clydebank, June 2026

I still believe that things can and should be very different. I believe that together we are strong and that solidarity works, that working class people have always been, and remain, the only force in modern history that can change the fundamental conditions of ordinary lives for the better. Some days I wish I didn’t believe any of it. It would be easier, but the belief in “us” is still there, and it’s because I really give a shit about “us” the watching of our daily reality is so traumatising and so hard to come to terms with.

So brace yourself. This is me trying to come to terms with how fucked up I am feeling with work, with life, with our lives and with people just like me who’ve chosen to victimise the weakest among us instead of giving them the love and support we all need.

It starts, specifically, with the sight of working class people being used as weapons against themselves. I mean folk from backgrounds and places like mine out in streets waving flags or shouting angrily about immigration. They’re not there by accident, or through some failure of communication, or even the lack of the right messaging. People are angry and in these scenes because, deliberately and with considerable skill, they have been fed information and led by their anger and fears to it.

Billionaires and their political managers stripped out the factories that dominated and anchored our towns - now hollowed out and loveless. The same folk made sure to drive down real wages and made housing a thing for exchange and investment rather than a home for our families and lives. The filthy rich and the political class have redirected the anger that should rightfully be aimed at them and they’ve given angry people a different target: migrants, Muslims, trans people, the metropolitan elite — anyone except themselves. It is working, and that is what makes it unbearable.

I am angry too, so I want to be clear about where my own anger sits, because it is not evenly distributed and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Of course there is anger at the billionaire class — a rage — at what they have done and continue to do with an open contempt for the majority of humanity that would have seemed cartoonishly villainous twenty years ago and is now just taken for granted and quickly renewed in and endless news cycle of the same shameless greed and cruelty. Then there’s my anger at their political operatives, the Farages and the Trumps who have made their way in politics by redirecting legitimate grievance into something vicious and self-defeating. I’ll come back to my anger with the whole political class in later posts.

The most painful anger, the one that really gets to me personally, professionally and politically is complicated. It’s mixed with something closer to grief. My anger towards the people outside asylum seeker hotels, the roundabout painters and angry flag wavers, the caustic element of the working class itself. They have accepted the misdirection and found cruelty as a substitute for solidarity. I don’t think the emotion is contempt. Contempt would be easier. This is something else — watching people you believe in being marched somewhere terrible by people who know exactly what they’re doing, and the deep helplessness in not being able to stop it. That’s what’s underneath all of this.

I’ve spent twenty-four years working in this landscape professionally as well as politically, in mental health services in Scotland. Every shift brings me into contact with the people this piece is talking about. They’re real, not academic abstractions, not class analysis, but as voices on a line at three in the morning. The lumpen, the underclass, the broken and the breaking. People who hurt others because they’ve been hurt, and people who’ve been shaped by precisely the forces described here — the deindustrialisation, the dissolution of the containers — the unions, the workplaces, the clubs, the local cultures that once held working class life together and gave it direction — the orphaned anger with nowhere useful to go. That’s the specific context my political exhaustion lives in. I’m not watching this from a distance — I’m answering its calls.

Rosa Luxemburg — a revolutionary socialist thinker murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in Berlin in 1919 for the crime of meaning what she said — left us with a formulation that has never felt more urgently current. She put it simply: socialism or barbarism. By which she meant: there is no stable middle ground, no comfortable third option where things just muddle along. Either we build a society organised around human need, solidarity and collective dignity — or we slide, through specific choices made by specific powerful people, into something where cruelty becomes the organising principle, where the strong do what they like to whoever they like, and where there is no floor beneath which a human life cannot fall. That’s the fork in the road. That’s where we are, in 2026, with rather less time to make the choice than we probably imagined.

We all witness what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Bear witness and make your choice, socialism or barbarism. It’s a choice that matters in the Middle East, but it matters just as much in Clydebank.

This is the first in a series of posts.

The next post examines how we got here — the deliberate dismantling of the post-war settlement, the destruction of working class institutions, and why the exhaustion you feel is not an accident but a strategy.

Clydebank, June 2026