AS this goes to press, I will be celebrating my 60th birthday. Once upon a time, a younger me believed that by this age I would have finished working and be driving a campervan across Europe, mortgage-free and without a care in the world. Not an unreasonable ambition back then, given that until 2010, women’s state pension kicked in at 60 and men at 65.

My generation, women and men alike, instead watched this rise and rise just beyond our reach. We work on and on as the state retirement age creeps up each year. It’s currently 66 but is soon to once again leap up to 67.

Since my entry into the world of work, it is well documented that union power has declined significantly.

Counter to the still-dominant trade union stereotype of a blue-collar industrial brother raising his hand for an immediate mass walkout from the factory floor, the average trade union activist in 2025 is more likely to be a working mother in public services, deploying peer-to-peer texting methods in her own time to persuade members on personal email or mobile accounts to achieve at least 50 per cent of participation in a postal ballot to support targeted leveraged strike action — at least until we get the law changes to allow for electronic balloting.

My uncle Jimmy worked in Henry Robbs shipyard in Leith Docks until they closed. I remember as a child, the eloquence of Jimmy Reid on the TV, leading the UCS work-in. Known as “Oor Jimmy,” and with his dark hair and shipyard drawl, it is not surprising that I thought it was our Jimmy (Henderson) on the telly, talking about the Yard.

Generation X despaired at the cold war nuclear arms race. In the early 1980s, the government was scaring every household with Protect and Survive pamphlets on what to do in the event of a nuclear war, such as unscrew a wooden door and shelter your family under it.

I was part of Thatcher’s generation of young activists, concluding better to be Red than Dead, joining Youth CND at age 15, sitting down on the roads against cuts to student grants, taking part in anti-apartheid supermarket round-ups of trollies full of South African goods left at the till.

I joined the Labour Party shortly after the 1984 general election, which denied me a vote, as it fell on the day after my 18th birthday. The Leith Labour Party was dominated by the character of Ron Brown MP back then, but it was distinctly left. I adored the protest gigs organised by Red Wedge — not because Neil Kinnock addressed them, but because it was a cheap ticket to see Paul Weller and Jimmy Somerville in one night.

Not all of my Leith schoolmates made it. The jobs moved out of Leith, my uncle Jimmy took to the pub, and heroin and the Aids epidemic took their toll on too many young people in the port. When Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting, his gritty description of those times, places and spaces that I walked and knew, written in my own dialect, it did not, at times, feel like fiction.

I was one of the lucky ones. I left school just before my 16th birthday, and by the age of 17 and a half, I found myself on the dole and allowed to study part-time at FE college under the 21-hour rule. I was also able to live in a shared flat, with the support of full housing benefit to pay my rent. No-one in my community considered me or my friends to be scroungers back then, despite the Tory rhetoric. I was getting an education and living independently.

We know that many now successful thinkers, writers, artists, musicians and actors in the seventies and eighties, relied on benefits to build their creativity and profile. My daughter, now almost 30 years old, works in hospitality, as she cannot afford to live the creative life that her art degree promised her. She has to feed herself and pay her landlord without the state support that helped my generation.

But this is not intended to be a rose-tinted view back into the so-called “good old days.” I take inspiration from today’s young activists across the labour and trade union movement. They offer hope, solidarity and commitment to make a better world.

The Scottish TUC’s Better than Zero campaign was formed a decade or so ago to organise young hospitality workers away from zero-hours contracts, and since developed into a vibrant and active Unite Hospitality sector.

Living Rent and Acorn, tenants’ unions organising private-sector renters into collective action and solidarity that had declined in my youth, along with social housing and the rise of affordable mortgages — Thatcher’s nation of property owners. These young, vibrant, vocal young working-class political voices give us hope. I see the reinvigorated YCL, in which my godson is active, as a new generation that is determined and mobilised.

Perhaps my coming of age has been on my mind for a while, as in my contribution to Keep left: Red Paper on Scotland 2025, (Bryan, P, Luath, 2025), I wrote about the transformation of the Civil Service and its active workforce over a slightly longer period than my adult working life.

For example, despite the Civil Service marriage bar being abolished in 1946 for married women, it was retained by the Foreign Service until 1973 before finally being outlawed by the 1975 sex discrimination act. Today, more than half of the Civil Service and the PCS union is made up of women. On the retirement of Mark Serwotka in 2024, Fran Heathcote became the first woman general secretary of PCS, and I am very proud to work with her on a day-to-day level.

My Red Paper chapter, written last year, also references the “fag-end” days of the last Tory government in relation to civil servants and rights to wear the colours of the Palestinian flag at work, or even rainbow lanyards during Pride month. On the election of the Labour government last year, PCS wrote to the Cabinet Office on the very concerning issues surrounding civil servants working in arms licensing and international trade being instructed to act in violation of international law.

This matter came to a head last week in the Foreign Office, where 300 staff collectively raised concerns over the government’s collaboration with Israel in the face of allegations of war crimes, and were advised to speak to the line managers, a staff counsellor, or resign. This reprehensible and dismissive attitude under a Labour government must and will be challenged.

Campaigning for the rights of Palestinians has been a deep commitment throughout my adulthood. Today, more than ever, mass protests on the streets are populated with not just activists but young people, and it is the presence of young Muslim women and children, playing a large part in these marches for justice through the streets of Glasgow and other cities, that lifts my heart.

Last weekend, I walked up Leith Walk, passing shops I remember from my childhood, now trendy sourdough and patisserie outlets. The tram lines, the bus depot now housing the tourists that venture down to Leith these days. I was on my way to a Bowie tribute gig, performed by the outstanding Spiders Fae Leith.

Connecting the past to the present, chanting along to Changes: “And these children that you spit on; As they try to change their worlds; Are immune to your consultations; They’re quite aware of what they are going through.”

My concern for the future is the rise of the far right and the populism of Reform. The spitting on refugee children and the blaming and othering of the most powerless need to be countered. I intend to still be marching through the streets in these next decades to come.