On 3 February 2024, I was invited to Edinburgh to a conference organised by Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland. It was a heartening event, largely because it demonstrated to me how the left can and should co-operate to assist our equivalents – socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, feminists, etc. – in Ukraine. The Scottish movement has broad support from MSPs and MPs on the left and from trade unions, as was evidenced on the day with statements figures like Tommy Sheppard, on the left of the SNP, Katy Clark, a Labour MSP, Ross Greer, Green MSP and John Moloney, PCS assistant general secretary.
As always, it is deeply moving to hear from people on the left in Ukraine and Olesia Briazgunova addressed the conference from Ukraine on behalf of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine. The unions are having to both assist the war effort and those of their members who are fighting, and at the same time, defend the rights of their members in the face of a pro-market government that has to be pushed back on legistlation that undermines workers’ rights.
Iryna Zamururieva (pictured, alongside the chairperson of the event, SNP councillor, Graham Campbell) is an ecologist currently researching in Scotland. She highlighted the terrible environmental cost of the war, not least with Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam. She recommended support for Climate Camp Scotland, 10-15 July 2024. Taras Fedirko, a researcher at the University of Glasgow focused on the destruction of the Ukrainian economy, point out how unsustainable the war is. The country’s tax take is entirely absorbed by war requirements, leaving nothing for the social budget. Clearly assistance is needed and trade unions in the West have an important role to play not just in providing donations to fellow trade unionists in Ukraine but in making sure that the grants and loans that do come to Ukraine are not wasted on free-market models and high consultancy fees but are put efficiently in the kind of post-war state-led reconstruction that Europe saw after WW2.
My own invitation was to speak on James Connolly and Ukraine, because of my piece for Independent Left, which has been translated into Ukrainian here. I gave solidarity greetings from Irish Left With Ukraine and appreciated the discussion around the different positions of the left and how looking at the situation through the lens of James Connolly’s politics helped assess them.
The numbers at the event were modest – in part because a pro-Palestine rally was taking place in Edinburgh at the same time – but I came away encouraged that a united left can demonstrably build networks of solidarity for Ukraine among trade unions, political parties and social movements.
Irish Left With Ukraine - Neither Moscow nor Washington 
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