Glasgow gives go-ahead for 'tourist tax' on visitors
Where is a tourist tax charged?
Several other regions in Scotland are looking at similar plans, with proposals from Highland and Argyll and Bute council.This week Comhairle nan Eilean Siar paused plans to introduce a similar visitor levy, following strong public opposition and concerns.South Ayrshire Council also abandoned plans for a tourist tax in the region, as only 15% of respondents in a public consultation supported the proposal compared to 79% against.Glasgow accommodation providers would be liable for the levy and required to submit quarterly reports - with potential penalties for non-compliant organisations. Businesses would retain 1.5% of the funds collected to cover their own costs.Report by Sarah Hilley at the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
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Daily Mail
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JOHN MACLEOD: What this Clydeside giant could teach the political pipsqueaks of today
It's a Glasgow shipyard: July 30, 1971. It's muggy, with men everywhere – thousands huddling in around the platform, hanging on Jimmy Reid's every word. Still not 40, assured, fluent, neatly suited and be-tied. Like an achingly cool teacher – and enjoying himself. 'We are not going to strike,' he carols. 'We are not even having a sit-in strike. Nobody and nothing will come in, and nothing will go out, without our permission. 'And there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying' – there is warm laughter – 'because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, with dignity, and maturity.' Jimmy Reid's moment at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in is still one of Scotland's greatest hits. Up there with Jim Baxter running rings around England's World Cup-winning side. Archie Gemmill's goal in Argentina; Rikki Fulton's Supercop pulling up Taggart himself. The 'work-in' – occasioned because, in 1971, the Heath administration would not advance a £6million loan to keep the yards, with their full order books, ticking through a tight spot – was brilliantly framed. Not your usual strike, occupation or demo. But based on the blazing concept of the right to work, not merely the right not to be made redundant – not just the rights of one riveter, but those of an entire community. In an instant it captured the public's imagination. The likes of Matt McGinn and Billy Connolly rolled into Govan, Scotstoun and Yoker to entertain the lads. Donations poured in from the public. There was even a £5,000 cheque from John Lennon. Trounced in the court of public opinion, Heath blinked first. The government caved – and, thanks to Jimmy Airlie (the strategist) and Jimmy Reid (the rhetorician) two of the yards thrive to this day. Both men were stalwarts of the Communist Party. Indeed, Reid was a Clydebank councillor and, when he stood for Dunbartonshire Central in the February 1974 General Election, many thought he would be our first Communist MP since Willie Gallagher. It was an extraordinary era when, though Labour had many more members in Greater Glasgow, the Communists had far more activists. And – as the men of my late father's blue-collar Free Church congregation often told him (for the most part, wiry Lewismen) Communist shop stewards and officials served them far better than the Labour jobsworths. They listened. They cared. Indeed, they were weirdly Presbyterian. They spoke with the certitude of a preacher; their cadences – and Jimmy Reid, really, was our last great platform orator – echoed the Scottish Metrical Psalms and the King James Bible. Born in Govan in 1932, Reid's formal education ended at 14. He served briefly and unhappily in a stockbroker's office, found his metier as a shipbuilding engineer, joined the League of Labour Youth, and drifted rapidly to the Communist Party even as, bright and curious, he took avidly to lifelong learning. This was a world of dignity and structure that has all but gone. Boys did not just learn a trade; they learned to be men. There was constant discussion and debate, from which sparks flew and leaders emerged. A wider community – some 20,000 supply-chain jobs depended on those shipyards, as well as the 8,000 immediately employed – sat on the shoulders of strong women, family values, corner shops and churchgoing. And a planet away from the graffitied, heroin-addled drear to which much of West-Central Scotland is reduced today. That merry – if dignified – oration was not even Reid's greatest speech. In 1972, he was installed as Rector of Glasgow University. His address would win headlines all over the world and was even printed, verbatim, in the New York Times. 'From the very depth of my being,' Reid declared, 'I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable…' His theme was alienation: a warning against blind pursuit of personal success, regardless of the consequences for others. 'Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement…' It was, someone said, the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address. Yet only fragments of video and audio survive. This week, Reid's daughter Eileen, 66, has called for it all to be restaged and reinvented digitally, with the aid of artificial intelligence. For all Jimmy's ability, abundant charm and iron-clad integrity, he would never secure a national platform on which to stand. Time and again he lost elections for high union office. He slipped into the Labour Party, and stood against SNP incumbent Gordon Wilson at Dundee East in 1979. But terrified Tories in Broughty Ferry and so on voted tactically for Wilson, dreading anyone straight out of the Communist Party, and Reid was defeated. He would have the ear of Neil Kinnock, but could not win the trust of the wider Scottish Labour movement. He was thought too clever by half; too prone to unpredictable announcements, too thoughtful to be a knee-jerk supporter of every last, fashionable Left-wing cause. In 1984 he slammed the smuggest of union barons for the betrayal of his members: 'Arthur Scargill's leadership of the miners' strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. 'He will have destroyed the NUM as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader.' It wowed the country – but appalled the comrades. From 1994, disillusioned, Reid moved away from Blair and New Labour. In 2001, he founded the Scottish Left Review; in 2005, he joined the SNP. In August 2010, Reid, 78, was felled by a brain haemorrhage. He was quintessentially a youth of the 1940s. Immaculately groomed, formally dressed and with the poise of Hollywood, Jimmy Reid could have stepped out of a Vettriano painting. Hugh Kerr, sometime Scottish Labour politician, met him for the last time in 2004, when the two addressed a London meeting of United Left MEPs. 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an hour ago
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