Beautiful portrayal of kindness of strangers - Bruce Whitehead
On Friday night Your Party members joined a counter demonstration at Wester Hailes called by Trades Unions in Communities, to reassure ethnic minorities being intimidated by the far-right.
Police bravely protected the group after they were threatened and pelted with missiles. I'm proud of the counter demonstrators – and of the police. Because “we are the police” – and they are us.
The film I saw on Sunday night at the Bo'Ness Hippodrome (Scotland's first purpose-built cinema) sadly showed police in a different light. Everybody to Kenmure Street is a beautiful portrayal of the kindness of strangers, when Pollokshaws residents prevented Scottish police from enforcing Home Secretary Priti Patel's deportation drive on Eid – a Muslim holy day. Two of their neighbours, who'd lived there half their lives, were suddenly dragged out of their home at dawn and thrown into a police van. One man (played by Emma Thompson) crawled under the van to prevent it leaving, and soon over a thousand people blocked the street, forcing police to back down. The taunts and insults can't have been easy, and many police look visibly upset at what they were being ordered to do.
But ordinary Scots took the law into their own hands and forced them to give up, ensuring a dignified and respectful process took place, instead of a traumatic abduction. It showed that sometimes, despite Westminster laws, Scottish people will stand up to the colonial oppressor and shout, in the eponymous words of this director's other great film: “Nae Pasaran!” – They shall not pass! (That film celebrates Glaswegian Rolls Royce workers who refused to repair engines used by Pinochet’s airforce to kill civilians in 1974.)
Perhaps on May 8 we’ll awake to a similar cry from John Swinney, clutching a pro-independence majority, for a referendum, whether Westminster likes it or not. I still believe our interests are best served by sticking with our neighbours across the UK to demand social justice. But sometimes I do get to dreaming...!