In this area we have a proud history of electing people we perceive to be left of centre, and we have done this for over a hundred years.This tradition started in 1911 when three women, part of a team of 15 in Singer Clydebank, were removed from the team with no consultation or agreement by the management. The ladies and 400 of their co-workers went on strike and were joined by 10,000 of their colleagues — the entire work force at that time. Working people then as now did not have substantial savings to bolster their living conditions, and after three weeks the majority of the workers were starved back to work.

Just about four years later a lady called Mary Barbour led a rent strike in Govan in 1915. This was because capitalist landlords decided to put rents up and families whose fathers and husbands were fighting the Kaiser in the bloody fields of France were threatened with eviction by these cruel factors. Mary went on to become the first lady councillor and Baillie in Glasgow.

These two unrelated events were to prove a catalyst for social change in the west of Scotland, and a few years later we sent the Clydesiders Maxton, Shinwell, Wheatley, Kirkwood and Mclean to parliament to represent us. They were members of the ILP and served the electorate well, working for social reform and universal suffrage.

Since then we have, particularly in the west of Scotland, elected or voted for people we consider to be of a socialist bent, sad to say we have not always got what we thought we were voting for.

I have written about this before and compared it to the fact that when I was a boy and bought crisps in a green bag you could reasonably expect them to be cheese and onion flavour, and by the same criteria if you voted for someone wearing a red rosette you could be reasonably confident that you were voting for a socialist. How things have changed.

Now the green crisps are salt and vinegar and the red rosette could elect you a person who subscribes to Thatcherism or Blairism.

And there is not a lot of difference between the two.

But to return to my theme, Anas Sarwar came to debate the question ‘Should the working class support independence?’ And he spoke about everything but that subject.

He spoke about Alex Salmond, he spoke about Linda Fabiani, he even spoke about Jimmy Reid but he gave not one concrete reason why a people who have been subjected to over thirty years of government they did not want from both the Tory’s and Labour should vote to continue that arrangement A yes vote in 2014 will not elect Alex Salmond and the SNP, but it will set the scene for a government elected by the people of Scotland to govern the people of Scotland.

So if you want to choose who governs Scotland, vote yes.