RW

I think I would, yes. By the time of the first leadership election last year I was on the left of the party and supported Jeremy Corbyn straight away. I had moved back to Scotland from Oxford then so I began organizing young Corbyn supporters there. We phone-banked, campaigned, really threw ourselves into it. After he won we set up Scottish Labour Young Socialists, which is the group I’m affiliated to now, so it has really shaped my involvement in the Labour Party.

But it also shaped me. His win was a big moment, it represented something profound. I began to read more radical material: Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg. We began to have these debates inside Scottish Labour Young Socialists too. It isn’t enough to just be supportive of Corbyn, we have to develop politics to understand what is happening.

It is important to say that this wasn’t the only influence. I am also a branch secretary for the general trade union, the GMB, in Glasgow and a committed trade unionist. I work with outsourced workers, mainly women in catering and cleaning services in schools and public buildings across Glasgow.

It’s a pretty devastating state of affairs because it’s mainly older workers who need to retire, but can’t because they can’t afford to. They have been paid terrible wages for the past sixty years. At the same time they’re being forced out because of massive cuts that are being passed down from the Scottish National Party (SNP) to the councils. So I have also seen the realities of capitalism at the industrial level.

This work in the GMB has made the role of the Labour Party clearer to me. It isn’t just a party fighting for social justice, it is a class movement. That’s why I was so excited by the Jeremy Corbyn campaign because he’s not talking about reducing inequality, he’s talking about fundamentally restructuring society. I think it’s that or bust at the moment.