Hope and Despair: Lifting the Lid on the Murky World of Scottish Politics 
Neil Findlay, Luath Press £14.99

THIS is the second volume of Neil Findlay’s account of his 10 years in the Scottish Parliament. It provides a brutal exposure of Scottish politics from 2017 to the present. 

The years of hope were those between 2017 and 2020. Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto provided a programme for working class empowerment which transformed the perspectives of the Labour movement in Scotland.  

The last two years, 2020-21, were those of despair. Corbyn and, in Scotland, Richard Leonard were despatched — and Labour’s new leaders made it clear they would move back towards the politics of New Labour. Then, at the same time as Covid exposed the fatal flaws in both Scotland’s social fabric and its current political institutions, the SNP imploded.

Yet Neil Findlay’s account is ultimately one of political optimism as well as anger. As a front-bench spokesperson for Labour up until 2019, and Corbyn’s campaign manager in Scotland, he remains committed to the struggle to ensure that working people, united around a socialist understanding of democracy and public ownership, eventually do determine Scotland’s future. 

The book’s day-by-day narrative of Findlay’s work as an MSP gives its pages an almost surreal character. Side by side we find the real issues, Neil’s campaigning on behalf of his working-class constituents in the former mining areas of central Scotland, and the bizarre preoccupations of Scotland’s parliamentary politics. 

Findlay details his campaign on compensation for his female constituents over faulty mesh implants. Over the same days and weeks Scotland’s SNP government attempts to prosecute its former leader, Alex Salmond, on charges of sexual misconduct — and fails.

As Neil exposes the death rates in Scotland’s largely privatised social care homes during Covid, worse even than England’s, the opponents of Corbyn in the Scottish Labour Party plot to seize control and do so after having sabotaged the party’s 2019 election campaign. 

And, post-2021, as Neil continues his campaigning for adequate social care for drug users in Scotland — where deaths run at four times the level in England — Salmond’s successor as First Minister is being arrested as part of investigations into potential financial misconduct.

Now liberated from parliamentary politics, Findlay remains committed to a perspective of political transformation true to the principles of the Scottish working class and to the beliefs of one of his heroes, the miners’ leader Mick McGahey. This is for a Scottish Parliament that exerts real power over Scotland’s productive economy but at the same time maintains working-class unity across Britain against big business. 

As with his former colleague Elaine Smith, he is deeply critical of those who see salvation through renewed membership of the European Union – where corporate interests institutionally supplant those of working people. He is even more critical of those who believe, as the Scottish government’s current economic policy document puts it, in delusionary detail, that a Scotland in the EU will flourish as “a magnet for inward investment and global private capital.”

For Findlay the future depends on rebuilding the power of the working class locally through trades union councils, shop stewards committees and local tenants’ organisations. This is where he now concentrates his energies at a time of both unprecedented economic challenge and of growing working-class militancy and response. 

The book’s down to earth realism makes it a delight to read.