Cat Boyd

The daily images of atrocity from Gaza have a way of reaching all human senses. Even in a single snapshot, terror and sorrow are audible. Facial expressions reveal the cries of men mourning families trapped under rubble; I hear the wailing of a mother with her head bowed embracing her dead child.

Hospitals bombed; electricity, water and communication cut off; journalists and aid workers killed in their beds; hundreds of videos of wailing rescuers, lifting lifeless children’s bodies from piles of ashen grey rubble. Apocalyptic scenes, but none of it enough to move Britain’s official representatives of the parliamentary left.

Growing up, I remember spending countless hours outside Lanarkshire supermarkets, playing games behind stall tables with the other kids as the adults around us clutched piles of soggy leaflets. My mother would explain to shoppers and passersby why they shouldn’t buy oranges with the Outspan sticker or Cape apples. The small act of boycotting was my family’s little contribution to raising awareness of our government’s complicity with an odious regime.

An article in the Washington Post once observed that all internet conversation, given time, tends to boil down to three themes: irony, pornography and Nazis. Pundits across the political spectrum act as if constant references to fascism will eventually equate to greater understanding of its deadly legacy. I tend to disagree. Persistently screaming danger doesn’t always make people more vigilant, otherwise hoax 999 callers would be treated like public safety heroes.

Whenever I hear the term “free trade”, I tend to think of the maniacal and chilling final scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The oil industry epic ends as Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day Lewis, has gone from frontier pioneer to deranged, drunk robber-baron, devoid of conscience. He has sucked the land dry of oil and cheated preacher’s boy Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the more honourable side of capitalist enterprise.

Covid-19 no longer dominates daily life, but it remains a divisive topic, as the ongoing Scottish public inquiry will no doubt testify. And the virus is still with us. Scotland’s national clinical director Jason Leitch is not alone in warning of an impending grim winter.

What do we, as a political community, really believe about poverty? There are simple answers to that question, but sometimes simplicity can be the enemy of accuracy. Take Scotland, where, on the surface, our national parliament has backed ambitious targets to virtually eliminate child poverty by 2030.

I was born in March 1985 as the miners’ strike was coming to its brutal, tragic end. I mention this because now, working in the trade union movement, I’m daily confronted with the task of rebuilding the collective power of working people.

This week, I’ve just finished reading Empire of Pain, a book charting the rise and fall of the Sackler family and their role in America’s opioid crisis. In the seven days it took me to read, approximately fifty people will have died of drugs-related deaths right here in Scotland.

From Boris Johnson’s parties to Keir Starmer’s pledges and Nicola Sturgeon’s referendums, recent British history is a monument to the art of political untruths. All sides roundly accuse the others of fake news, disinformation and spin.