READER Peter Craigie (Letters, March 31) commented on my long letter to affirm Labour’s aft publicly declared aim of counting on Labour votes in Labour cooncil hooses. He cited his own experience of hearing this electoral bribe repeated during the Hamilton by-election.

I too worked in the Hamilton by-election and boarded the famous Winnie Train to the Holy City of the Westmonsters, and wondered if we crossed paths.

I wonder if he was there when Labour’s Young “Socialists” taunted us outside the Hamilton count by waving a huge Butcher’s Apron. The late SNP cooncillor for Glasgow’s Coocaddens, Angus MacIntosh, who had more socialism in his little finger than all of Labour’s auld Young “Socialists” put together, tried to calm the ensuing tug of war by calling “halt”, then proceeded to run his lighter down the middle of the flag, giving both sides half each.

John MacLean also proposed building residential towns by seizing lands in the Campies and elsewhere, but would have been horrified to see Wheatley’s housing-for-all dreams being slashed by what he called “Labour Fakirs”, new cooncil slums with zero amenities. Even arch royalist and Unionist court jester Sir William Connolly described the soulless housing “schemes” as a “desert wi’ windaes”.

During the Scottish Insurrection 1820, where more than 60,000 workers rose in support of a Scottish republic and the army of the provisional government, they sported a banner proclaiming “Scotland Free or a Desert”. Scotland is still not free and is now a deindustrialised desert and still part of the declining residual empire.

This Saturday, April 7, the 1820 Society will be gathering in Greenock to commemorate a plaque to workers killed there by British Hussars, after they used a battering ram to lease the political prisoners from the town jail. In Glasgow the angry “mob” tore the railings to attack English troops overseeing the hanging of an insurrectionist, Paisley weaver Purly Wilson, who was reckoned to have invented the purly stitch. Two others, John Baird and Andrew Hardie, the latter with an ancestral connection to ILP republican Keir Hardie, were hung in Broad Street, beneath Stirling Castle. Their sentence included being hung, drawn and quartered but it was commuted and the deed was committed after their death by Glasgow medical students. The rest were transported to Australia.

I remember working alongside older workers in the early 60s who still hated the Glasgow Herald for supporting students for that and for scabbing in the General Strike. Nowadays no-one seems to know, or care, or have any traditional folk memories left.

Peter Craigie spoke of his belief in Scotland’s future, citing the yoofs who are breaking away from the traditional brainwashing of their parents. The past is the father of the present and the present is the father of the future. Orwell was among many others to proclaim that he who controls the past also controls the future. In the spirit of Continuity Greenockian, Iain Ramsay, chair of the 1820 Society, will not only address the 1820 memorial in Greenock this weekend but will address an 1820 memorial plaque in Stirling before the rally proceeds to Bannockburn Heritage Centre on June 23, not only to commemorate but to continue Scotland’s War of Independence to a brighter future. The two martyrs executed there had their remains taken to Sighthill Cemetery in Glasgow in the middle of the night to avoid further hostilities.

All the present government has to do to avoid further resentment is not oppose the will of the people and the current generation, who are now demanding a peaceful referendum to decide the matter without ever having to draw the sword again.

Donald Anderson
Glasgow