And Back to the Scotland Vote

In The New York Review of Books, 11/6/14 there is an article on the Scottish vote for independence (Ian Jack, 48-9).  He reports that the most votes for "Yes" were in Dundee and Glasgow.  In his analysis of the voting, Ian Jack reports:

"[I]n Glasgow and its formerly industrial hinterland--if the referendum was to be won. Together with newly formed socialist groups in the Yes campaign, it stressed the misery that neo-liberalism and the UK government's austerity policy was bringing to many areas that were already poor and rundown, particularly the towns and settlements around Glasgow that until forty years ago rolled steel, made ships, and dug coal.  Yes campaigners reproached the London government for benefit cuts, food banks (the modern equivalent of soup kitchens), and alleged threats of to funding of the National Health Service, and envisaged a happier future in which a more generous welfare system would be sustained by tax revenues from North Sea oil" (49).

Sounds like some of our class discussions and blogs, doesn't it.

Wayne