I was in Italy when the news came through via a friend on Twitter. David MacLennan, the theatre writer, director and producer, had lost his short battle with Motor Neurone Disease. The co-founder of 7:84 Theatre Company and Wildcat Productions, the man who had been part of the foundation of MayFest, and who created the Play, Pie and a Pint format, who was in a new ascendancy with the National Theatre of Scotland (NToS) commissioning him and David Greig to co-curate The Yes, No, Don't Know, Show, had left us and in particular, left a huge hole at the centre of Scottish Theatre, Political Theatre and Popular Theatre.
There is no better volume of trade union history which charts the public sector trade union real time response to the excesses of Thatcherism than the third and final volume of NALGO's history - Facing Up to Thatcherism: The History of NALGO 1979-93 by Michael Ironside and Roger Seifert. UNISON's founding General Secretary Alan Jinkinson, in a foreword to this important book, written in June 2000 but which has found many echoes this week, states that: ‘Thatcherism became the global phenomenon of the era.
Many NALGO members were angered by an ideology which undermined the post-war welfare settlement, that worshipped monetarism, the market and the individual,that asserted that there was ‘no such thing as society’, and that sought to humiliate public servants and trade unionists.
