SNP/Scottish Greens agree deal to run Glasgow – so cuts will continue
Matt Dobson reports
The SNP and the Scottish Greens have struck a “working deal” to form the ruling administration in Glasgow City Council.
The agreement, which includes keeping SNP councillor Susan Aitken as council leader – her previous SNP-led administration clashed consistently with the trade unions and accused unions taking strike action of breaking anti-union laws – will see the Greens get the chair and vice chairs of a number of council committees, including neighbourhoods, housing, education and early years.
This is a coalition that mirrors the current Scottish government deal, where the Greens have junior ministers in the Scottish government.
Every year since 2018 the SNP and the Greens have acted together to vote for cuts budgets in Holyrood and at Glasgow City chambers.
As well as the escalating cost of living and social crisis in Glasgow, anger is building in the city and there are key industrial battles coming. There is the continuing equal pay bill, cuts to Glasgow’s funding from Holyrood and Westminster, and the trade union demands for above inflation pay rises.
Rather than demand a fighting no cuts budget strategy be adopted, as supported by the Glasgow trade unions and by the council candidates of the Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, whose vote also increased, the Greens will follow the cuts agenda of the SNP.
Sections of the so called left in Glasgow with very short memories also have wrongly raised that a Labour/ Green coalition could have been a “progressive” alternative to the SNP/ Green deal.
If the Scottish Greens were on the socialist left their ten councillors would have drawn up a legal no cuts/ needs budgets policy as a basis for a negotiation with other parties, which of course the pro-cuts parties would have rejected, exposing themselves further.
By joining with the SNP in a cuts coalition, the Scottish Greens will undermine their electoral base.
Socialist Party Scotland, whose activists play a key role in Glasgow City Unison, will be to the fore in fighting back industrially and in communities against attacks by the incoming administration.
Workers in Glasgow and across Scotland need a new mass workers’ party that fights on socialist policies.
Brian Smith, branch secretary of Glasgow City Unison, told us:
“No party in Glasgow City Chambers appears to have a serious plan to win more money for the city. It is the elephant in the room. The city cannot maintain services, never mind expand them, do more to assist citizens with the cost of living crisis, eliminate gender pay discrimination permanently or provide a decent pay rise to all workers without more money.
“The trade unions have proposed a fighting campaign to win more money from the national governments. We will continue to make that case. Glasgow’s council leaders need to do more than write the odd article for the local media or send out a few Tweets. That is not a serious approach.”
