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Coll McCail | New columnist | Scotland's not for sale

We’re Still Out For Life

Last month marked International Workers’ Memorial Day. As trade unionists around the world gathered to mourn the dead, they committed – as Mary “Mother” Jones urged a century ago – to fight like hell for the living. Today, that struggle is of particular importance. Humanity, in the eyes of our rulers, remains an expendable commodity. Working-class life is disposable. The value ascribed to our existence rapidly diminishes as capitalism’s crises intensify.

In Britain, we have stopped living longer. Mortality rates are rising, and life expectancy is falling. Health inequalities in parts of the country today resemble those Mother Jones herself confronted at the turn of the twentieth century. 10,896 people were admitted to hospital in England with malnutrition in 2022, and since 2019, Britain has seen a 380% increase in cases of rickets. In 2016, the average healthy life expectancy (HLE) for a woman living in the poorest parts of Glasgow was just 51 years old. Three years later, this figure had dropped to 47 — some 23 years less than in the wealthiest areas of the city.

Resisting the misery of Victorian Britain in the 1880s, London’s gas workers raised a banner which read “shorten our hours to prolong our lives.” Acutely aware that the greed of their employer would condemn them to an early grave, the gas workers understood that their campaign was not simply for an 8-hour day, but for the right to life itself: For the freedom to determine one’s own destiny.

Their slogan inspired workers across the country. In May 1894, the Edinburgh Evening News reported on the city’s annual May Day celebrations in the Meadows: “Demonstrators demanded not merely the right to vote, but the right to live — not the life of a human drudge, but the fullest and freest life that human society could put before its members.”

Over a century later, asserting our right to life proves ever more challenging. Human society itself has been the subject of a sustained demolition campaign. “Things will get worse,” says Keir Starmer. Breakfast TV game shows offer lucky contestants the chance to win vouchers to pay their energy bills – just so they might survive the winter. Instagram posts crowdfund bombs, bullets and tanks for the Ukrainian army — just so you can contribute vicariously to the horrors of war. Landlords demand record rents for cold, mouldy and damp flats — just so you can keep their second mortgage topped up. Deprived of the power to control our own lives, atomisation festers and tears at the social bonds that once offered an antidote to alienation.

To this lonely, sick and vulnerable population, the British state now offers an olive branch: The drive to war. Rearmament, promises the UK Government, will bring prosperity to the left behind, jobs to the unemployed and growth to the economy. Our nation of shopkeepers are to become bomb-makers in order to enable Washington’s gradual retrenchment — and the public will pay the price. “National security” has taken the place of “fiscal responsibility” in excusing our politicians’ apparent refusal to invest in our cities, schools and hospitals.

What’s more, a cursory glance at the rate of deprivation in the areas surrounding Glasgow’s arms factories dispels the notion that somehow the mere presence of the weapons trade

breeds development. In Govan — home to both BAE Systems and Thales — one in three children live in poverty, while the average male HLE is just 50 years old. Guns, it turns out, do not provide butter. They do, however, assure immense wealth to their private manufacturers.

In his memoirs, the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook noted that “the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10.” The locks are yet to be changed years later. Between the 26th of February, when Keir Starmer announced his commitment to increase military spending, and the 19th of March, when Benjamin Netanyahu shattered the Gaza ‘ceasefire’, BAE Systems’ share price rocketed by 24%. It has risen even higher in recent weeks with the guarantee of increased state subsidy secured.

But it’s not just the economy pivoting toward the military-industrial complex. Britain’s security establishment is talking of conscription. The former head of MI6 demands that Brits “give their service one way or another”. Retired army colonels beat the war drum in the pages of the Daily Mail. The nation must prepare for “full-scale state-on-state warfare,” barks a former NATO Commander from the comfort of his living room. The ruling class demands a war footing – and it’s no surprise.

The war machine has long served as a means for capitalism to dispose of those segments of humanity which it views as surplus to requirements while simultaneously creating a market through which to increase profit margins. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” asked Wilfred Owen from his hospital bed in 1917. “Only the monstrous anger of the guns.”

Importantly for today’s context, war also extinguishes resources and creates fresh demand in an overproducing world economy. Imperialism, notes Ali Kadri, “metabolises more of man to meet higher profit rates.” For capital, war and the suffering which follows are a fundamental necessity.

Abroad, the war machine bombs nations into submission, shattering life and limb until only rubble remains. But militarisation serves to discipline us at home, too. By eroding the social wage and immiserating those it promises to reward, the war drive further shortens the lives of workers whose life expectancy — after 14 years of austerity — is already falling, seriously weakening the potential for organised resistance to exploitation.

The British state, however, has even less regard for those who cannot pick up a gun or build a bomb. The UK Government’s £5bn raid on the disabled, for example, is a stark reminder of the fate awaiting those that capital deems ‘unproductive’. These cuts, which the government’s own impact assessment notes will force a further 50,000 children into poverty, will shorten lives — but, so long as Rachel Reeves doesn’t break her self-imposed fiscal rules, what does that matter?

Fortunately, some world leaders think differently — and do not mince their words. “We are not thinking about how to expand life to the stars,” Gustavo Petro told the UN General Assembly in 2023, “but rather how to end life on our planet.”

When the Colombian President delivered his remarks, the average life expectancy for a Palestinian born in the Gaza Strip was 75 years old. Today, after 500 days of genocide and

more than 186,000 deaths, that figure has nearly halved to just 40. Enabled by decades of systematic dehumanisation, Israel’s war on the very idea of Palestinian existence can be understood as a testing ground for global capital in its efforts to manage surplus populations — the result of a world system content to view human life as disposable.

Confirming Gustavo Petro’s point, imperialism today obscures even the stars. The night sky is darker than ever. More satellites — the majority of which are now owned by just one man — mean we can no longer see what we once could. Since 2020, Elon Musk has launched more satellites into orbit than the Russians, Chinese and Americans combined. Private monopoly has constrained humanity’s horizon while destroying Earth’s complex and delicate systems.

Global temperatures in the first quarter of 2025 were the second warmest on record. For all but one of the last 22 months, average global temperatures have surpassed 1.5°c. This protracted period of extreme heat saw global sea ice – the combined area of ice around the north and south poles – hit a new historic low in February 2025. Increasing the threat of catastrophic flooding, ice coverage was found to be 8% below average in the Arctic and 26% below average in the Antarctic.

The ecological vandalism wrought by over-exploitation, war and extraction, however, no longer confines itself to the world’s periphery. This month, Las Vegas received more than a third of its average annual rainfall in just four days, while scientists attributed more than 7,000 deaths in Spain during the Summer heatwave of 2022 to global warming. On the hottest day of the same year, Britain recorded more excess deaths than British soldiers died during the entirety of both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent weeks, as Scotland endures record-breaking Spring heat, Dumfries and Galloway, Shotts, and Edinburgh have all seen dangerous wildfires.

The degradation of our natural world is not distinct from, but rather central to, an economic project which treats humanity as disposable. Extracting resources from every corner of the globe, capitalism has divided the human race into those who accumulate wealth and power, and those who suffer under the weight of violence and exploitation. Planetary collapse, like the loss of thousands of lives to war and austerity, is the consequence.

“We are out for life and all that life can give us,” declared John Maclean from the dock of Edinburgh’s High Court in 1918. Railing against those who eagerly waved young men to their death in Flanders Fields, the fighting Domine’s 75-minute self-defence entered Scottish folklore long ago. Maclean was charged with sedition and sentenced to a period of five years of penal servitude in Peterhead. The Call, the newspaper of the British Socialist Party of which he was then a member, reported that: “Before Maclean’s removal by the gaolers, our comrade turned to the public gallery, courageously crying, ‘Keep it going, boys. Keep it going.”

Today, in the darkest of times, that is our most urgent task: To continue the struggle for life — and all that it can give us.

Read Coll McCail every month on Conter

Introducing our latest columnist: Olly Haynes

We are pleased to welcome Olly Haynes on board as our latest monthly column writer here at Conter. He works regularly in France, and has reported across Europe, bringing that coverage and expertise to the site. He has written for the Guardian, Vice World News, The i newspaper, Rolling Stone UK, Huck Magazine, Novara Media, Open Democracy, Sidecar and many others. We interviewed him on our latest podcast.

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The Scottish Parliament convened in 1999 with the pledge to establish a people’s parliament. A quarter of a century later, Scotland’s political class have abandoned this promise.

Behind closed doors, politicians take their lead not from the electorate but from the corporate lobby and vested interests. Outsourcing has become the organising principle of government. A litany of key infrastructure projects have been entrusted to private consultancy firms. Meanwhile, our democracy suffers the consequences as Scots grow increasingly apathetic towards a parliament that prizes rhetoric over delivery.

Scotland is being asset-stripped. The ScotWind auction leased responsibility for the development of renewable energy to the fossil fuel industry. The design of the National Care Service was outsourced to PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG. Two new ‘Green’ Freeports have arrived on the Firth of Forth and the Cromarty Firth. Glasgow and Aberdeen are to become ‘Scottish Investment Zones’. Even Scotland’s trees are on the market thanks to a £2bn Scottish Government PFI deal for nature restoration. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government has given almost £8 million worth of subsidies to the arms industry over the last 6 years. Since 2016, £240 million has been handed to a selection of wealthy landowners in forestry subsidies.

More than a decade after the independence referendum, Scotland’s future is being torn from Scotland’s hands. If this country’s land, seas, wind and trees belong to anyone, they belong to us, the people of Scotland.

Scotland’s establishment has had it their way for too long. That’s why, in Glasgow on Saturday the 28th of June, activists, academics, politicians and trade unionists will gather to interrogate this assault on Scottish sovereignty and pose an alternative rooted in the politics of class, democracy and ownership. Join us for ‘Scotland’s Not For Sale’.