Hello world. Welcome to Glasgow. Welcome to Scotland. We are drawing on Glasgow’s radical past to inject hope and urgency into the moribund COP process.

YOUR VISION OF our country may be an idealised one of lochs brimming with salmon and glens filled with deer, but in reality we’re a petro-chemical economy being held ransom by the British State. Our most famous icons and exports – our salmon and deer and grouse – are really symbols of a country disfigured by landed power. We remain a semi-feudal nation with one of the most unequal distributions of land ownership in the world.

In Gaelic, Glasgow means ‘Dear Green Place’, but Glasgow was also known from the 19th century as the Second City of the Empire, a city that became synonymous with massive expansion, global trade, industry, invention, and shipbuilding.

For almost 200 years, the statue of the celebrated Scottish inventor and engineer James Watt has stood in George Square. Every schoolchild is taught about the invention of the steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution across the world. What’s less well known is that Watt’s father was a slave trader, a colonial merchant who subsidised his son. The development of the steam engine was funded by slavery. Watt himself was involved in colonial commerce and played a direct role in the trafficking of enslaved people.

With Glasgow playing host to the COP in 2021, we have historical symmetry. It’s more of a loop than a continuum; as the world faces climate catastrophe, the same city that was pivotal in the Industrial Revolution, colonisation, and Empire is the city that must now be the pivot towards decolonisation and degrowth.

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