With support from Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and First Minister, Alex Salmond, the marchers set off from St Andrew’s Square, Glasgow, to a rally in Glasgow Film Theatre with a message for the whole of Scotland that Scotland should be proud of our multi cultural society, but we have to continue to fight to ensure that we have a “Future Free from Racism”.
St Andrew's Day March in Glasgow
In keeping with the theme, the first two speakers addressed the rally from the perspective of young people. Helema Moghul from GARA spoke on racial crime and discrimination in the workplace and Georgina Wardrop from the STUC Youth Committee expressed the concerns of the Youth Committee on the growth of the far right and their policies to repatriate migrants and their descendants.
Cathy Pound from Hope not Hate spoke of her own experience in growing up in a multi cultural environment in South London and the treatment white families and their children received for mixing with families from ethnic minorities. The final speaker was Vaughan Gething, the first Black President of the Wales TUC, who spoke of his own experiences of racism in the United Kingdom; of being accused of a Black man that wants to be Welsh and how this compared to his father’s experiences as an economic migrant to Zambia, where the racist hatred that he has suffered was not part of their society thirty years ago.
This year’s rally was, once again, extremely successful, with an excellent number of trade union banners, and we look forward to continuing to campaign to end racism and fascism in our society.
Ian Tasker
Assistant Secretary
No comments:
Post a Comment