Councillor outlines new path forward is needed as more strike action commences
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Banff and District councillor Glen Reynolds has outlined that the current monetary and economic model failing families means that a future of strike action being carried out by various private and public sectors cannot be ruled out.
He believes as a new year begins that a new path forward is needed.
Councillor Reynolds said: "The buzzword ‘polycrisis’ is what we are in, through the desire and fault of a few.
"Industrial turmoil and financial meltdowns are nothing new under the sun, but in the wake of the pandemic and the ongoing crisis surrounding long Covid, labour shortages and the economic catastrophe of Brexit, droughts, floods, storms and threats of another world war, it’s about time that we look at strikes as a symptom, not a bug, of where the Westminster-led economic model finds itself.
"Typically, the ‘ordinary’ working class are getting the blame, and paying the price of generational austerity.
"The same people who were key workers and rightly trumpeted on the doorsteps only a few years ago.
"Surely, our necessary just transition into an environmental and economic model of the future has to be accompanied by a new model of a just transition of social infrastructure based on the many and not the few.
"A new intellectual and political reckoning would be less surprising than the absence of one.
"The great monetary revolution of the 1980s has for too long been accompanied by stagnant wages for the low paid whilst others bask in a value system rooted in greed, suppression and austerity, directed at ordinary working people left feeling increasingly alienated; having no voice, no value and no influence upon the decisions that impact on their lives and those they love. Enough is enough.
"This is more than a challenge – we are at that stage and arguably beyond, where the economic model, the ‘system’ is unable to cope and we sit at that precipice where we have to ask how we have got here and what is to be done?
"Economists see this as the most complex, disparate and cross cutting set of challenges witnessed since the last world war, and whether the prospect of a Trumpian vulture hovers over a fragile world alongside fresh roots of far-right extremism and popularism in Europe, the parallels with pre-1939 history are all too prevalent."
Councillor Reynolds outlined that the failure to improve the population’s health is undermining the ability to generate wealth.
He added: "We have to surely take a step back, recognise that the great Scottish economist Adam Smith, never alluded to ‘greed is good’ (that was Michael Douglas in Wall Street), and as the scale of the pain to be shared is large, with the highest inflation in four decades, capital and labour are in an unusually high stakes contest.
"Adam Smith will be turning in his grave over what has happened to his blessed capitalism. You cannot rule out a future of social unrest and a general strike rooted in a current monetary and economic model failing desperate families.
"We can be judged as caring and compassionate Scotland of international repute by the way we treat our nurses and our carers.
"Both are underpaid and overworked, due partly to nonsensical policies that have caused staff shortages, like Brexit. The level of creative blame-shifting is nauseating."
The councillor stated that there has been a consistent failure to explain that nurses’ pay has fallen 16 per cent in real terms in the last decade.
He said: "The sure fire way to work out who’s a decent politician in Holyrood, Westminster or wherever, is to see whether they support the nurses striking. That’s the test of us individually, and as a nation."
