AMONG the most desired traits Napoleon sought in his generals before promoting them was luck. He would have loved Nicola Sturgeon. The First Minister is possessed of many political attributes but, as this week has demonstrated, she possesses luck in abundance. Facing an industrial crisis that threatens to cripple Scotland’s largest and most important city, the UK Tories rushed to her aid.

Their attempt this week at suborning Westminster’s rules so that corruption could be stitched into the fabric of parliamentary business was quite spectacular. They also provided a lifeline for Ms Sturgeon, which she gratefully accepted.

In Glasgow, though, her party was doing a reasonable impersonation of these Tories’ political hero, Margaret Thatcher. As Scotland’s First Minister desperately sought selfies with world leaders at COP26, the rights of low-paid workers were being trampled into the ground by the SNP administration which runs Glasgow City Council.

Almost as unforgivable were the SNP bottom-feeders who participated in orchestrated attempts to undermine and disparage the strike by refuse workers seeking fair pay and dignity. We were transported back to the rhetoric of Mrs Thatcher and her adherents during the 1984-85 Miners' Strike.

But this was Scotland in 2021 and a governing party which has hoodwinked its supporters into believing they are progressive. In truth, they have become the enemies of Scotland’s low-paid working-class.

READ MORE: Political class hold the people in contempt

Nicola Sturgeon at COP26 is a metaphor symbolising her administration’s entire social outlook: literally cosying up to the rich and powerful while poorly-paid workers are standing outside being jeered by her supporters.

COP26 has already proved to be a major let-down for those like Greta Thunberg who were looking for something real and binding. Asking capitalism to make short-term sacrifices to spare tomorrow’s youth a climate apocalypse is delusional. Capitalism seeks instant gratification and fast returns. You might as well ask an alligator not to eat that last stray antelope for fear of making itself sick. In Scotland, this has formed the SNP’s entire industrial strategy. The strike by Glasgow’s refuse workers is a microcosm of this.

Glasgow possesses some of the most complex waste management issues in Europe owing to the vast networks of back courtyards in its many tenement buildings. The city chooses to pay the service-workers tasked with keeping the city clean in unforgiving conditions between £17k and £20k a year: barely sufficient to maintain a household.

The city’s waste crisis has been flagged up by workers and their trade unions for five years, most especially when the city moved from fortnightly waste collection to three-weekly ones. While the council were urging people to recycle more they were unwilling to provide them with the basic infrastructure to do so.

To suggest then, as some of Ms Sturgeon’s most infantile supporters have, that the strike is opportunistic against a backdrop of Cop26 is pathetic.

READ MORE: COP26 can change nothing without the death of capitalism

The bin-workers have been met throughout this period with universal contempt by council leaders, especially its permanent managerial, departmental heads. This is a cockroach class of fluffers who somehow always survive the changing of the political guard. They are beholden to nothing other than topping up their fat pensions and counting down the days to early retirement and the beguiling possibility of a lucrative contract with a council supplier.

When the GMB Union, representing these workers sought time and a mass meeting to discuss the council’s late attempt at averting the strike, they were arrogantly dismissed. Many of these workers were physically and emotionally exhausted from 18 months of risking their health and that of their families working throughout the greatest health crisis the city has ever known.

The Scottish Government seeks to pursue a fair work agenda but Glasgow is the antithesis of this. Scotland’s largest city should be a beacon for it. Instead there is a one-sided industrial strategy reminiscent of an era when Margaret Thatcher was seeking to destroy the trade union movement.

There’s also an obnoxious goading of workers going on here. Comparing trade unions to the far right for daring to stand up for value and respect at work is defamatory and a lie. The Thatcherite union-busting legislation with which the council is seeking to undermine the right to strike; the deployment of 'scab' workers to dispose of contaminated city centre waste at Glasgow Green; the suggestion that these are fire hazards on Bonfire Night and that the workers are putting the city at risk: Margaret Thatcher would have been proud of Glasgow City Council bosses.

She too would have sought to mobilise armies of Twitter trolls to attack the trade unionists for doing down Glasgow; for casting the city in a bad light during the COP26 festival of excess.

We see it too in Susan Aitken’s shameless trumpeting of David Cameron’s Big Society. When the council shut city libraries – a potential post-Covid lifeline – she lectured the people for choosing to be angry at this and for failing to realise that they’ve never had it so good. The attitude is: Only we know that’s good for you, so be quiet; go away and let us rule your lives.

A year ago the political classes who feed from the giant trough that runs the length of the city chambers were applauding these workers and competing to be seen to be doing so.

The SNP’s ruinous relationship with big business has led to the country being shafted on building ferries; buying airports and literally making a gift of Scotland’s clean energy assets to global capitalism. Much of this has come about because the SNP, quite literally, do not possess any principles beyond a thirst for power on the back of a bogus commitment to independence.

Lacking basic decency, this party’s leaders scan Scotland’s social and political landscape seeking any passing fad or caprice so that it can self-identify as progressive. In truth they care little for any of it, seeing it only as a means of maintaining power at any cost.

The current administration of Glasgow City Council is so far out of its depth that the coastguard ought to be alerted. Their conduct during this dispute involving the city’s essential service providers has been a disgrace. We should bin all of them at next May’s local council elections.

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