‘We are not Rats’

I am delighted to  be interviewed in the launch issue of We are not Rats – Scotland’s Students’ Left Review. So far, I’ve managed to read the editorial and the contributions from Ferdinand von Prondzynski and Terry Brotherstone.

For those who might be confused by the title, it relates to Jimmy Reid’s Rectoral address to Glasgow University students in 1972.

To the students I address this appeal. 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.
This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?