Scottish Students Set Moral Example
The British Army’s increasingly desperate attempts to recruit young people to aid their imperialist wars and occupations have been dealt a blow by the courage of a group of Scottish young people. Students from St Andrews in Glasgow and Edinburgh’s Boroughmuir High School have formed School Students Against War in the past week to launch a campaign to stop the British army targeting children as young as 14 for recruitment.
And the young people have already gone on the offensive. Patrick Orr, a fifth year student at Boroughmuir, led a recent picket against recruitment by the British air cadets in his school, and believes the SSAW movement will keep growing.
He said, “There’s a strength of feeling among parents and teachers about this too.”
In July, the Educational Institute of Scotland, the country’s largest teaching trade union, took a decision to oppose British armed forces recruitment in Scottish schools and colleges. The EIS decision was influenced by fears that the British war machine was targeting children in economically deprived areas to make up for falling numbers in the ranks of their regiments.
Scottish National Party MP and former teacher Christine Grahame discovered that in one case, a school in the working class Govan area of Glasgow received 14 regimental visits in one year.
She is encouraged by recent developments.
“I’m delighted school children are taking up the campaign and I’d encourage schools to get involved. The (British) army admitted to me in a letter it had been proactively recruiting, which is entirely inappropriate. One has to suspect it’s because more soldiers are leaving than joining. Recruitment is in crisis, for obvious reasons.”
14-year-old Lorna McKinnon, a student at Glasgow’s Bellahouston Academy, summed up the sense of resentment that Scotland’s young people feel at the sinister gaze being pointed in their direction by the British military.
“I thought school was the one place you could get away from the horror of the Iraq war, so I was shocked to go into the playground one day and see a helicopter and 20 (British) army guys trying to recruit us. This was without my or my parents’ permission, and I had no choice but to listen ... but they won’t get me.”
Developments in Scotland appear to reflect growing Celtic concerns about being used as foot soldiers in Britain’s imperialist project. In January of this year the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru expressed opposition to British army recruitment in Wales.
Éirígí spokesperson Daithí Mac An Mháistír said the example set in Scotland should be taken note of in Ireland.
“The British military is continuing to recruit for its illegal wars and occupations in schools and colleges across the Six Counties. As a result, Irish students are subjected to the propaganda stunts and material of these government employed murderers on a regular basis. Our schools should be a place of sanctuary and learning for our children, not an arena where the British government can add further insult to the injury of their continuing occupation of the north-east of Ireland.”
Daithí continued,
“Students in the Six Counties have a proud history of showing civic responsibility. In 1981, they left schools and colleges en masse to join demonstrations in support of the H-Block hunger-strikers. In 2003 they repeated this feat to show their disgust at the commencement of the British-US war on Iraq. Hopefully, the brave actions of the Scottish students will not have gone unnoticed among the young people currently attending our educational institutions.”