HERE in Scotland, the old regime is dying and the new is yet to be born.

The nationalist government and its market-driven agenda has betrayed the nation. State-monopoly capitalism in a kilt is a bad look.  

People grow more conscious of the fact that big business is served by political elites of all shades, in Westminster and Holyrood, who manage the common affairs of the ruling class at the expense of working people and their families. 

How will our class obtain power? Through sustained extra-parliamentary action for a start. Left organisations must reckon with some difficult truths: great social change is impossible without feminine upheaval.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. 

Where is working-class power located? The Wyndford Residents Union believes it is in social housing schemes like ours.

For two decades, Scotland’s biggest “social” landlord the Wheatley Group has orchestrated a spree of large-scale demolitions. This has dramatically changed the face of Glasgow, a city once famed for social high-rise living. 

There were even plans to make a live television spectacle out of the Red Road flats demolition for the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Why such a fetish for blowing up homes? Because high-rises are remnants of the modernist housing revolution. Symbols of mass council housing for the people.  

No wonder we have been conditioned to see them as “eyesores” and to stigmatise schemes as hotbeds of crime and drugs — home to a lesser, undesirable kind of people.

In reality, the eyesores of the modern urban skyline are the symbols of finance — oppressive glass towers that dominate our city centres in times of record homelessness. 

The Wyndford four are next in line for demolition. Our community has been put through the preparatory stages seen elsewhere — blocks run down, hundreds of tenants made to feel forced out, Safedem contracted to carry out the explosion. Six hundred social homes and a community centre are to make way for 300 mid-market rental properties.

At this year’s May Day rally, Glasgow Trades Council expressed solidarity with the direct action taken by activists to occupy the high flats in opposition to the plans. The demand is retrofit and renovate.

The recent report In Praise of Sturdy Buildings, carried out by leading sustainable architects, proposes this as the greener, cheaper option.

Significantly, the STUC has also backed the deep retrofitting of existing housing stock. 

The weight of the movement behind local action is desperately needed. Since the crushing of the original Scottish Tenants Organisation and the daylight robbery of Glasgow’s council housing stock in 2003, its beneficiaries have shapeshifted into a national monolith. 

The biggest threat to us and Living Rent are the executives on the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations. So we extend the hand of comradeship to all organised tenants taking on these so-called social landlords. 

Unless renewed industrial muscle is joined by an angry mass movement of the poor, our class is fighting with one arm tied behind its back. The challenge is to unleash a widespread community offensive. If not we will get poorer and risk a passive retreat into yet more blind alleys, down the dangerous rabbit holes of identity politics. 

Let’s stop the rot by working together. If not Wyndford, where? If not now, when? We will continue to defend our built heritage throughout a summer of struggle, taking some kind of public action every day in June.

Then on to Refurbish Don’t Demolish on July 8, when we will represent Scotland in co-ordinated anti-gentrification action with housing estates across Greater London — from Islington, Haringey, Camden, Kensington, Bexley, Southwark, Lambeth and Harlow. 

Stand with us against social cleansing, for affordable homes under community control. For retention, retrofitting and the mass revival of council house building by and for the working class. Because nothing is too good for Scotland’s schemes. 

Sean O’Neill is Secretary of the Wyndford Residents Union. You can sign the Save The Wyndford petition at Wyndford.hopp.to/save.