TO be a socialist in this world is to be fired with optimism, as they say, but these days I’ll have to admit that optimism can be tested more than a little.  

Whenever I can, I pop along to the Communist Party Saturday stall on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street. The table is littered with literature, badges, and, of course, copies of this newspaper. There’s even the odd cake, and, to be absolutely clear, even in the midst of my recent health kick — I do love the cake.  

I like a blether even more, though, and apart from catching up with comrades, it’s always interesting to hear what people have to say as they take shelter from the carnival of consumption ’neath the red gazebo.  

Sometimes it’s curiosity and genuine inquiry, sometimes bemusement, sometimes it’s someone looking for a reasonable debate, and sometimes it’s someone looking for unreasonable debate. Such is life. Next door is the Palestine solidarity stall, and up the road, Mossad has theirs. There’s a friendly drinker, who regularly swings by to tell me I look like a sailor and give me a hug. Harmless enough.  

Last week, a new face — to me, at least — appeared. He was sporting a James Connolly T-shirt and announced himself a communist. “Have you any books about Connolly?”  

Glancing at the table, not a single book or pamphlet on him could be seen. “This must be a first, but it doesn’t look like there is,” said I.  

He didn’t seem too fussed and immediately launched into a description of who Connolly was. “Yes, I’m familiar with his work,” I joked. “He formed the Irish Citizen Army...” and before I could intervene, he added “we need one of them here... those asylum hotels...”  

And so it was that a man in a James Connolly shirt, proclaiming himself a communist, proceeded to tell me that the “asylum hotels are costing a fortune, we’re paying for an invading army to move in.”  

“Well, that’s just nonsense, isn’t it?” I said. “Where are you getting this from?”  

I’m not sure he heard me as he proceeded on what has become a depressingly familiar trot through everything from the usual “fighting age men” rhetoric, to the presence of a UN plot.  

“Why would they do that, and even if they had a reason, do you think the UN could organise people to come from all corners of the Earth to come to a hotel in Erskine, or Aberdeen, to take over this country?”  

In a disarmingly cordial way, he threw in religion before he left. I went on the coffee run, disappointed at what I’d heard, disappointed I couldn’t have talked more with him, and disappointed that he left the stall apparently unmoved.  

The powers of persuasion may be on the wane, but there’s always the hope that perhaps a seed of doubt might take root in a soil polluted by far-right sloganeering.  

He may have been at it, he may have not, but we have to try. Outside of the — often absolutely necessary — yelling matches at demonstrations, there’s a world out there of people who are now so routinely exposed to the virus of chauvinism and racism, their immunity decimated by a crumbling civic realm, that no-one should really be surprised that some will fall victim.  

That, of course, is not to let the real bigots and racists out there off the hook, but those of us who would wish to see their hate swept into the history books need to up our game.  

Goodness knows we can’t rely on governments, Labour or SNP, to genuinely take this on.  

The SNP may talk a much better game on dealing with the symptoms — even if the “summit on the rise of the far right” was a gift to the far right — but their New Labour in a yellow mack policy platform, and apparent inability to understand the difference between announcing something and doing it, creates the anger and resentment-filled breeding grounds fascists love.  

Labour in government, meanwhile, managed to look at the mess they inherited and chose to crank it up to eleven.  

On entering Number 10, Sir Keir Starmer took a look at those decades of disappointment and decline, and gazed upon the growing menace of the far right with what appears more like envy than any sort of determination to challenge it.  

They used to say that “there’s nothing so former as a former politician,” but “former human rights lawyer” now tops it.  

When he could be focusing his power and his airtime on the real causes of decay in our society, chronic low pay, chronic private debt, chronic underinvestment in industry and services alike, we instead have a seemingly endless supply of tweets crowing about detaining refugees, repeating the far-right canard of “illegals,” and removing rights to claim asylum itself.  

The idea that by agreeing with Farage you’ll win back the Labour voters who have gone that way is straight out of the very New Labour/New Democrat playbook of triangulation that made people feel disenfranchised in the first place, and patently ludicrous. 

If the gamble is that a straight fight between Labour and Reform will deliver a second term for Labour, it’s a gamble not being played with Starmer’s future — he’s already finished — it’s being played with ours.  

The cynicism may be mind-boggling, but it’s the sheer laziness and craven cowardice of the approach that I just about still allow myself to be disappointed — but not surprised — by.  

The answers, as they always did, lie elsewhere. Great spirits are now sojourning, and not always where you might expect — unless you’ve been watching closely.  

The fear that has been cranked up in working-class life over recent decades rests on replacing wages with debt, anti-trade union law, and insecure work.  

Perhaps the most notorious sector for that is hospitality, where low wages, appalling working conditions, and, to put it mildly, a sketchy approach to contracts are commonplace.  

I’ve been privileged to have always worked in workplaces with trade union recognition. It feels odd describing that as a privilege, but as things stand, it is.  

Twenty-five years ago, our manager told us Royal Mail had lost more strike days than the rest of British industry, and that our office in Govan had lost more than any other. A cheer went up. Not the reaction he was looking for, I wager, but we had the organisation and confidence not just to walk on official strikes, but walk unofficially as we saw fit.  

That was power.  

The idea of exercising that power at a hotel might have sounded far-fetched just a month ago, but 46 years on since the chambermaids walked out of the Grosvenor in London, Unite Hospitality workers at the Village Hotel, Glasgow, have shown that confidence.  

After a year of organising and recruitment, they have the strength not to bother waiting for government or any other saviour on high to deliver a real living wage, an end to pay discrimination or even paid breaks.  

They’re going to do it themselves, standing shoulder to shoulder in solidarity.  

These comrades are learning about worker power on the job, and teaching the rest of us a lesson in the process. Standing up to a company owned by the trillion-dollar Blackstone is no mean feat, but bringing the hotel chain’s £5.4 million-a-year CEO to direct negotiations with young workers — the eldest striker is 26 — and extracting concessions in the first meeting is nothing short of heroic.  

That is power.  

A confidence that breaches beyond the workplace and can sweep away the far-right’s code of helplessness.  

Power to put food on the table, a roof over our heads, and serve up everything the world has to offer.  

And if it can’t put fire in the hearth any more, it should at least put some in our bellies.