Socialist Party of Scotland's pamphlet on Alan McCombe's book - Downfall - Tommy Sheridan

‎"Those former friends who crossed the class line" - Peter Taffe, yeh right. 

Not sure what to make of the pamphlet. Feel quite ill after reading it. A reliable narrator, I think not. 

Baleful poisonous and wilfully spiteful. Like a scientist trying to explain why we do not float up to the sky without bringing into the equation the laws of gravity.

A self styled Marxist who has clung to a vulgar debased cartoon version of what Auld Charlie was all about. Not a sceptical bone in his body- who accepts and dolefully regurgitates, his well burnished, dog eared catechism as profound insights from on high. The Auld pub bore bitterly nursing his pint at the end of the bar.

A simple question - who is capable of building wider communities of resistance and if so why? I just can't see the remnants of the old Militant Tendency such as Phil, capable of reaching out to younger generations of people. Maybe I'm wrong.

At what point in our lives to we become a hindrance rather than a help to the radical left. Phil Stott the lost boy of neo-Stalinism

Maybe I'm wrong but they seem as relevant today as a Kajagogoo reunion is to modern music.

coatbridge

People may sneer at the old coke-in-the-fridge. But for all the mud there were always the stars and dreams of a better world to come in this world or some life. Some say Coatbridge is the most dismal town in Britain and there some very dism...al things about it. But. But. But.

My Dad was born there along with 5 Aunts and an Uncle. The erudite snob may sneer but all kids have no choice in where they live or how they live and who they live with. Oliver Twist would not speak the way he speaks but only in a musical would he speak in such a manner rather than share the same vowel arrangements as old Artful Dodger. Ken what I mean, likesay.

My grandparents fled here to escape the rural poverty and the sectarian trench wars of County Down and Armagh. My Granda an orphan wooed my farm girl grandmother not with dreams of wealth beyond avarice but with dreams of adequate needs on the whole fulfilled. Coatbridge was a wild west boom town but most of the wealth flowed to the few not too the many. People drunk hard to remember, drunk hard to forget. Beasts of burden muscle monkeys to forge the infrastructure of Scotland. Ever thus.

All my Father's generation are now dead. Everytime I see the Old Monkland Graveyard from the motorway I feel sad that the Coatbridge that I knew as I boy is one utterly gone. Buildings are beautiful and the best ones will hopefully endure long after we have gone. But the memories of those gone can never endure but nor can they be replaced. Dismally sad I know.