We may be a long way from Gaza but its fate has been on our minds this week, and for the last two terrible years. Scotland has shared in the international anguish over the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s overwhelming response.
Marking the two year anniversary of the start of the conflict on Tuesday, students in Edinburgh and Glasgow, took part in UK-wide demonstrations calling for an end to the war and the recognition of a Palestinian state.
The demonstrations were condemned as “Un-British” by the prime minister Keir Starmer, coming as they did just a week after the attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. There were other demonstrations earlier in the week at Waverley and Glasgow Central stations against the arrest by Israeli forces of Scottish members of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
Edinburgh is holding its breath for peace in the Middle East.
Over the past two years Scotland has seen many pro-Palestine demonstrations. The black, red and green flag has been part of the war of flags all through the summer. The former First Minister, Humza Yousaf, has family members in Gaza and has been a vociferous critic of Israel, calling the bombing of Gaza “genocide”. And the current First Minister John Swinney has supported the call for the recognition of a Palestinian state. He was subjected to calls of “shame on you” when he spoke at a Friends of Israel vigil outside The Scottish Parliament last Sunday.
On Thursday at First Minister’s Questions Mr Swinney welcomed news of the ceasefire and exchange of hostages. He said it would be “a moment of relief after two years of devastating brutality.”
This weekend, the SNP will be holding its annual conference in Aberdeen, the last ritual gathering of the political season. Independence, of course, will be on the agenda, but not in capital letters. John Swinney’s slowly- slowly approach is likely to be acknowledged as the only realistic road to independence. And his latest encyclical, issued on Monday in the gloomy lobby of the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, repeats the usual arguments and adds a figure from the Resolution Foundation which reckons that every Scottish household would be £10,000 a year better off under independence.
Mr Swinney injected a little adrenalin into the coming Scottish elections in May by suggesting that there is an increasing “rightward shift” in UK politics which is, to borrow a phrase, Un-Scottish. And I can see what he means, after the rhetoric coming out of the other party conferences this season – Labour clamping down on immigration, the Conservatives cutting welfare, Reform promising all sorts of bar-room final solutions and forcing the other parties to react.
As things stand, the SNP look set to remain the largest party in the Scottish Parliament. Labour and Reform will battle it out for second place. The UK Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has been in Scotland this week claiming they could win 10 seats, pushing the Conservatives into fourth place. The beleaguered Conservative leader in Scotland, Russell Findlay, told his party conference the SNP had turned Scotland into “a laboratory for weird and wacky policies” without realising that his own party has done the same…we need only mention the poll tax, de-industrialisation and austerity.
And so we are left with a pile of election issues that will only be solved by a sharp rise in public spending – NHS waiting times, school attainment, child poverty, police numbers. And, as John Swinney suggested this week, we have reached the limits of what a devolved administration can do on public spending and it’s now up to the UK Chancellor to shake the money tree or increase taxes.
My hero of the week is the explorer Alice Morrison (63) from Edinburgh. She is setting out on the second and last stage of her 1,430 mile trek on foot across Saudi Arabia from north to south.
She completed the first half of the journey earlier this year, reaching Madinah, but had to pause because of the summer temperatures. She’ll be the first person known to have walked every step of the way, though she is supported by a navigator and two camels carrying water and provisions. She hopes to finish the journey by 17 December.
Alice Morrison
The Saudi trek is the latest in a long career of travel adventures for Alice Morrison. She’s written books on her trips from Cairo to Cape Town, the Atlas Mountains to Timbuktu and other expeditions, among them walking the 155-mile Hebridean Way. On her website she says: “We live at a time when the world is in crisis in many ways…… I want to tell stories that bring we humans together rather than the ones which drive us apart.”
I hope her next trek will be along the Israel-Palestine border.
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