Our party stands with workers and aims to deliver a greener future

THIS week, we’ve seen city hospitality businesses successfully challenge Covid closure orders issued by the Council. This was inevitable given legislation which was drawn up in haste, without consultation, and with little basis in the real world.

Suggestions from SNP councillors that venues wanting clarity were trying to bend the rules have been unhelpful.

Any any future regulations must be much clearer to avoid putting jobs and livelihoods at risk.

It’s vital that we do everything we can to keep hospitality businesses going, especially the independent venues that are distinctively Glasgow’s. We’ve heard lots from people running cafes, bars and restaurants on the desperate fight they face.

Scottish Greens are committed to amplifying the voices of workers too.

This week, we’ve backed the Unite union’s hospitality and tourism rescue plan and stood in solidarity with workers at the city’s West brewery and The Ivy restaurant whose bosses had declined to put them back on furlough through the current shutdown.

We’ve previously raised questions in the Parliament and City Chambers about the disgraceful treatment of 500 workers at the city’s biggest hospitality employer, the Council- owned SEC, drawing an admission from the Council leader that she couldn’t – or wouldn’t? – intervene.

In a failed neoliberal system, clung to by all the other major parties, there will always be good and bad employers.

We’ve called on Government to start putting the better ones first, with targeted business support which recognises firms who invest more in staff welfare and pay a real living wage.

We don’t want any businesses to fail but it would be a deep travesty if the best employers go to the wall first. The SNP says they support such conditionality, but despite knowing second wave support would be needed, they’ve nothing to deliver it.

This weekend, the Scottish Greens annual conference is moving online for the first time. The centrepiece is our Green New Deal for Scotland’s workers, with commitments to strengthen trades union recognition, job security and a real living wage.

Scottish Labour, despite its roots in the workers‘ movement, is increasingly out of touch – languishing in the polls, riven by bitter infighting, and damaged locally by its toxic legacy on equal pay.

But it’s being harmed most of all by its unwillingness to accept the reality now voiced loudly within the trade union movement – that the Tories’ ongoing assault on devolution, which Labour was once so proud of delivering, now makes the case for Scottish independence inevitable.

Next week, at the Full Council meeting, Scottish Greens’ councillors will stand with workers and for radical change.

We’ll bring a motion calling for public control and new investment in the public transport network, building on our recent campaign that has saved the iconic Subway.

We’ll ask why the SNP is insisting on slow- lane climate targets that will do nothing to drive the revolution in green jobs demanded by young people who’ve gone on strike for the planet.

We’ll renew calls for the long- standing Green policy of a universal basic income, and speak up for pregnant and Covid- vulnerable teachers who are being denied safe home working.

We will continue to show that the party which stands with workers, and has a vision to deliver a fairer, greener future, is the Scottish Greens.