NOTEBOOK: WHO CARES WINS TRUST AND RESPECT

By Bill Heaney

Black really doesn’t matter to great sections of the media. The Glasgow stabbings story slipped down the front pages before it had ever got to the top of them.

On the Press Preview last night it was the second item to a flammed up story about Brits going on holiday. Priti Patel was featuring ahead of Nicola Sturgeon, which is quite right since Immigration is not devolved, but she’s not very sympathetic.

The old saw about treating others as you would yourself wish to be treated has never been more relevant.

The Scottish Government’s position prior to this has been to encourage immigrants to come here, but in reality there has been no ceud mile failte for them. When we were in their position in Sixties (Yes, we too were once immigrants and refugees) when the shipyards closed their gates, the Canadian and Australian governments laid on assisted passage schemes.

They insisted that immigrants were sponsored and had somewhere to stay. And that they had employment to give them money to feed themselves and their families.

A woman just said on SKY NEWS that the people in the Park Inn Hotel were treated “like animals” which turned them gradually into savages and then into monsters. She was not surprised about what happened in West George Street, where Badreddin Abadlla Adam, from Sudan, was shot dead by a police marksman.

The 28-year-old’s identity is “based on information the deceased provided to the Home Office earlier this year”, Police Scotland said.

Death in the city – West George Street on Friday at lunchtime.

Politicians complain that they are being shown up by protesters and help groups. They are, and so they should be. These protest marches and food banks, clothing hubs and cheap hotel accommodation with poor food; deprivation of even a fiver for spending money, and poor facilities would not be required if our politicians and governments did their job properly.

Badreddin Abadalla who did the stabbings was thought to have descended into mental illness when the government decided to deport him. He committed the horrible crime after telling fellow inmates (if that’s the same collective noun for prisoners as it is for these hotel residents then it is the right one) that he hated the establishment here and the elites within it and he would love to kill them before he went home.

If his experience hadn’t been as it was then he would have been on a plane back to the Sudan today, deported as an illegal immigrant. He is instead lying in Glasgow City Mortuary.

I sympathise greatly with our police force, our hospital staff and our social work and welfare staff, whose poisoned chalice is full and running over today.

If we are to be in this together then we have start co-operating. The war against Covid-19 is being fought like a competition with different nations trying to get one over each other, and England trying to lord it over all of them. It’s been a shambles.

It is said countries and communities get the politicians they deserve. They voted for them and they will have to put up with them until the next opportunity to vote at an election arises.

If we were as interested in politics as we seem to be in football and sectarianism, elitism and racism then thousands of people who have died in this pandemic would still be alive in our care homes, and that brave policeman’s family wouldn’t be getting ready to go an visit him in hospital this afternoon.

Have a then care for the other five victims of their lonely, despairing and demented assailant. We really do need to get a grip on ourselves as a community and as a country.

BILL HEANEY’S NOTEBOOK