ON Thursday Dundee had a gathering in the City Square called Love Dundee: Stop the Cuts; a heartfelt plea to the council to rethink the devastation their budget plans will deliver to the city’s people they’re supposed to represent.
I went along to support the event because Dundee can no longer absorb the year-on-year cuts that our councillors deliver from on high.
My problem is that we have an SNP council; in what world do our SNP representatives think it’s okay to preside over cuts which will hit the poor, the vulnerable and children the hardest? Because we believe in independence we have to accept such treatment?
When school breakfast club charges will rise from 25p to £2 per day, who will find this eight-fold increase difficult/impossible to find?
When home care workers, delivering care to the elderly in their own homes, are told that they must work double shifts or have their weekly hours cut from 30 to 23 or less, yet their management say that they must deliver even more hours of service to their clients.
When long-serving, experienced staff are encouraged to take redundancy or early retirement, so their jobs can be given to new workers on “annualised” contracts – zero-hours by any other name.
There has been talk of re-introducing compulsory redundancies.
Classroom assistants and support workers will be paid off. Most principal teachers in our secondary schools will be removed.
What a catalogue of disaster for Dundee! And yet the SNP council leader, John Alexander, appears on TV and defends these decisions, saying it’s like any household budget; when times are hard you have to cut your cloth differently.
No Mr Alexander, what you’re doing is damaging the indy movement! Others in the City Square were talking about the Scottish Government, even Nicola Sturgeon herself, holding back funds to pay for indyref2! Absolute rubbish I know, but the anti-SNP feeling is growing – and no wonder.
This SNP administration should be ashamed of themselves; they’re damaging both our city and the cause of independence.
They’re providing ample ammunition for the Unionists to throw back at us. If they had any principles, they would resign en masse rather than vote for such huge backward steps for the city and the people they’re supposed to represent.
I don’t want to support any anti-SNP causes, I’ve been a campaigner for independence for years. But I’ll be on the “Stop the Cuts” march this coming Saturday, starting at 11.30am from the Unite office to Albert Square, and I hope our SNP group take heed and have a serious re-think about what it is they’re supposed to be doing for Dundee people.
If not, I’ll be finding it impossible to put my X in any SNP box at the next elections.They need to demonstrate good governance at ALL levels.
Paul Robison
Dundee
WE have to support the plea, expressed in the letter from Elizabeth Buchan-Hepburn (February 15) for an aspirational, cheerful, yet simple song.
My interest in Estonia started in 2013 when I was chair of Scottish Rural Action and planning our first Scottish Rural Parliament the following year. I was fortunate to be able to attend the Estonian Rural Parliament. More recently I was given a DVD, The Singing Revolution, which relates how the Estonians’ stand against the Soviets was bound together through culture and national pride.
READ MORE: We have the marches and the flags ... what we still need is a song
This was sparked by one song that translates as Land of my Fathers, Land that I Love, first composed and sung in 1947 when the Estonian annual singing festival was resurrected after the War and early in the Soviet occupation. The song, in Estonian, slipped by the Soviet censors but after being sung by the festival’s 20,000-strong massed choir, became the symbol of unity for the country virtually overnight.
We can certainly do music and poetry in this country – so let’s have it. Not a national anthem but a positive, campaigning, marching song; the national anthem will follow later.
John C Hutchison
Fort William
IN 1961 I wrote a song “The USA are gi’en Subs Away” with the tag line “We Dinnae Want Polaris” to the tune of the Three Craws.
This was taken up and other verses added by marchers at demonstrations and spread as far as the USA, taken and sung by Pete Seeger.
It featured on the LP Ding Dong Dollar released in 1962. Instead of We Dinnae Want Polaris one could sing “We want oor independence” as the tag to each verse.
This kind of chant with easy to remember verses ... each first line is repeated, excellent for groups marching. The first verse was, as an example: “The USA are gi’en subs away, gi’en subs away, gi’en subs away ay ay, the USA are gi’en subs away but we dinnae want Polaris.”
Jim McLean
London
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