LAST week’s equal pay strikes showed the best of Scottish politics — working class women speaking for themselves and many of their male colleagues at Glasgow City Council standing in solidarity and refusing to cross picket lines.

One sickening reaction to the dispute, however, has shown the very worst.

This came from nationalist blogger Gareth Wardell, who writes and tweets under the pseudonym “Grouse Beater.” He described GMB Scotland official Rhea Wolfson, who is Jewish, as deploying “fascist demagoguery” in her stewardship of the strike.

His blog post cited Hitler’s opposition to trade unions as set out in Mein Kampf, stating: “He accused ‘The Jew’ of gradually assuming leadership of the trade union movement.”
 

Wardell defended his article, insisting it was not anti-semitic and telling the Herald: “The only sinister aspect to my essay is the way political opponents tried to make it sound sinister. They use the fascist language it warns about, anti-intellectual, portraying everything in terms of ‘them and us.’

“In this case it’s quite a stretch for me to be anti-semitic brought up in Jewish family.”

It was not just Wardell’s overt references that are deeply offensive. His blog, titled GMB — a Cockney Clique, described the union as being “born in east London late in the 19th century.”

To invoke an area strongly associated with Britain’s Jewish community as evidence of a sinister outsider takeover is bad enough. To do so in the same breath as launching a vicious attack on a (Glaswegian) Jewish woman is to go considerably further.
 

Wardell’s analysis of the GMB is also blatantly ahistorical. He stated that the union “has no historical association with Scotland, no record of intervention in any of Scotland’s great social-political upheavals or events, from the Clearances to Glasgow’s slum tenements.”

Gareth Wardell described GMB Scotland official Rhea Wolfson,
who is Jewish, as deploying ‘fascist demagoguery’ in her stewardship
of the strike

This couldn’t be further from the truth. The 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in is one of the pivotal moments in Scottish industrial history. Sammy Barr, who according to several accounts was the originator of the groundbreaking work-in tactic, was a shop steward with the Boilermakers’ Society, one of the main GMB predecessors.

It is also absurd to characterise the contemporary GMB Scotland as the lackeys of “London Labour.” Its formidable regional secretary Gary Smith has, to the annoyance of many in Labour, championed fracking in defiance of the party line.

When the GMB consulted its members on who to back in the 2016 Labour leadership election, the Scottish division opted out of the process.

“It isn’t practically or useful for us to send out an open-ended question to our 55,000 members across the country,” a spokesman said back then as the region sought to emphasise its focus on industrial, not party political, issues.

A prime argument from nationalists belittling the equal pay strike has been that unions did not speak out when the council was Labour-run. Officials acknowledge that unions did not always handle the issue well and senior Labour figures have said the party was wrong to resist equal pay claims from workers.

But along with fellow GMB organiser Hazel Nolan, Wolfson has been key to strengthening the union’s resolve to fight for its women workers in Glasgow. And Wolfson spoke out against the council under Labour too. In 2016 she said the Labour administration “should take note” of innovative councils resisting austerity in other parts of the country.

When Richard Angell, the head of pro-business lobby group Progress, criticised her for “having a go at a Labour council,” she replied: “I will fight for my union members and challenge Labour to do better.”

At First Minister’s Questions on Thursday, Labour MSP Neil Findlay called on Nicola Sturgeon to suspend SNP councillors who retweeted Wardell’s article. “The councillor in question has written to the young woman today with an apology,” Sturgeon told MSPs.
In response to other questions, the First Minister said her government was “committed to tackling hate crime and prejudice.” She said it was “incumbent on all of us to be careful” as “words do matter”.

It is indeed time for politicians reflect on their own rhetoric. Thanks to the SNP, progressive politics in Scotland has become dominated by simplistic attacks on “London” and “Westminster rule.”

Similarly, the wider left — Labour and its left flank included — failed to emphasise political education over the past three decades. This, coupled with an abandonment, until recently, of a class-based analysis, has left baseless conspiracy theories unchallenged.

This is why Momentum founder Jon Lansman’s call for a “widespread programme of training and education” on anti-semitism should be taken up — not just in Labour but in any party committed to anti-racism.

Of course, Wardell’s diatribe is not representative of Scottish nationalism or the SNP, from which he has now been suspended, but it’s not hard to see how both anti-semitic and anti-union sentiment have been enabled by the wider climate.

And any self-styled progressive party that does not reflect on this is unworthy of the name.