 | 'I'd hoped to get to a hustings where I could sit on a platform alongside Bill Butler so they could see what a real socialist looks like' Rosie Kane 21 st September 2000. |  |
| 'I'd hoped to get to a hustings where I could sit on a platform alongside Bill Butler so they could see what a real socialist looks like' Rosie Kane 21 st September 2000. | |
"It's the politics of the bus stop. It's about the dirt and grime and tears of poverty. When Tony Blair came to power, 36% of Glasgow kids qualified for free school meals.
Now it's 44%. Nothing has been done to lift people out of poverty, certainly not £5 here or £10 there. Where if your wean has a birthday party, or needs new winter tights, or you have to pay for Irish dancing lessons, it's a crisis."
Actually, I couldn't swear all of that was Rosie Kane. The bit in the middle about percentages on free school meals might have been her Westminster candidate colleague Charlie McCarthy. To be honest, the shorthand was struggling to keep up with the indignation. But it was good stuff. Real. Raw.
The sort of stuff politics was about before they invented focus groups and telephone canvassing. The politics of envy, you might sneer. It's socialism, in fact.
And not nearly as grim as that short passage sounds, for Kane fairly sparks with feisty humour. She recalls the days when all the Labour Party men in her native Pollok were real, decent folk and the kids would follow them down the street as they chapped on doors.
"Now," she points across the road in the shadow of Anniesland railway bridge to the Labour rooms, "it's all wee Ally McBeals with their perfect hair." The visceral hatred between the SNP and Labour takes some beating, but the SSP's contempt for Labour runs it close.
"I'd hoped to get to a hustings where I could sit on a platform alongside Bill Butler so they could see what a real socialist looks like," says Kane, a jibe at the fact that Councillor Butler convening the Labour grouping the Campaign for Socialism cuts little ice with those who consider themselves the real thing.
Kane, her party's environment spokeswoman, was politicised by the campaigns against the M77 and M74, believing that driving motorways through communities without their consent marked a breakdown in democracy.
That took her into the Scottish Socialist Alliance which became the SSP and should stood in Shettleston at the 1997 General Election, finding her voice.
"Before that, you wouldn't have heard me behind a bus ticket," she says.
Now a new green and red march side by side, as she links the thinning ozone layer back into the politics of socialism.
"Does a mother pay £9 to a company for a tube of cream to prevent the damage from something that company has caused? Or does she just keep the bairn in out of the sun? Or should sun block be provided on the NHS?" asks the daughter of a builder who had to battle against skin cancer caused by exposure to the sun.
Into all this flow of issues - global warming, air safety, pensions, council housing, hospital closures - Charlie McCarthy feeds in a constant quiet drip of points, facts and figures. A staff nurse, whose partner Kate is also a nurse, he is juggling the by-election with a run of night-shifts.
He doesn't seek the limelight, but says local people are proud that the likes of he and Rosie are making a stand.
He came into the SSP via the anti-poll tax movement and he believes that his party's case for replacing the flattened property bands of the council tax with a proper wealth-based tax will eventually propel his party to political prominence.
For now, there are two £500 deposits to be fought for and Tories and Lib Dems to be overhauled. Party leader Tommy Sheridan believes that even in Glasgow's least fertile constituency for the socialist message, this is not beyond them.
-Nov 22nd
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