My experience of being a young adult in the late 60’s was quite good my husband Pat had a job as an electrician in Glasgow Corporation. And through that we managed to get a mortgage to buy our first flat for the sum of £1450. But in the early 70’s Pat got made redundant from the shipyards and we emigrated to South Africa. I hated it there because of the Apartheid system and the many injustices of their country. We left just over a year later. When we arrived back in Glasgow we had enough money left to get a deposit for a flat in Dennistoun. Pat managed to get back into Govan shipbuilders. But it was tough under Thatcher government, we had the poll tax and the area wher Pat grew up Garthamlock was in a right state of deprivation. Life wasn’t easy either in the 80’s when our first daughter was born and there was no work here and Pat was forced to go and work in London. He got a job on Canary Wharf he wasn’t employed by the company it was self employed now so no sick pay or holiday pay. At the same time the oil was flowing and the money was going straight into Thatchers coffers. And with that money they built Canary Whatf, M5 ring road, Blachwall tunnel and many other projects I don’t know about as London was booming. So it was both Labour and the Tories who hid from the Scottish people the amount of money they were stealing from us by stamping the McCrone report as top secret. It was a FOI in 1985/6 that they released what had been done. There was a policy during this time of a managed decline in both Glasgow and Liverpool.
im still angry that £13trillion has been taken from Scotland. Now just yesterday there is a report that the U.K. government have granted licenses for drilling up in Shetland. Now what do you think they will use that money for? Brexit fiasco and Covid fiasco maybe.
Labour had their chance to help Scotland and failed us. Tories hate working poor and will always want to keep us begging for scraps.
I will be voting SNP for independence not obviously for me at my age but for my Grandchildren to hope they will have the opportunity to live in a country where they will get the government they vote for in an independent Scotland. And by that time I hope new parties will have come into play and not based on ‘right or left’ but progressive parties there for the citizens of the country like Norway for example.
as for those not voting that is your choice but remember working people had to fight tooth and nail to get the vote.