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AUGUST IN Edinburgh. And as the global middle class descends on the Scottish capital for the International Festival and Fringe, it can seem that the entire city is nothing more than a bourgeois cultural playground.

THE TRAGEDY of New Labour’s draconian asylum policy moved north last Friday night, from Harmondsworth to the Dungavel detention centre in Scotland.

The opposition to Dungavel, a former prison in an isolated part of the South Lanarkshire countryside, has spread across Scotland’s civic organisations.

WHISKY WORKERS at one of Scotland’s largest privately owned companies planned to strike this week over pay.

TEACHERS AT the annual general meeting of the EIS, Scotland's biggest education union, voted for an industrial action ballot to reduce class sizes recently. If negotiations with the government are not successful by December 2004 action should follow in next spring.

JUST HUNDREDS of people turned out for the pensions demonstration in Edinburgh organised by the Scottish TUC. My union, the teachers' EIS, sent only one A5 leaflet to each school. The Unison union did not even have its banner at the demonstration. It is clear that the union leaders will not act unless they are pushed from below.

OVER 1,000 workers in Scotland and Lancashire walked out unofficially last week in response to management's suspension of PCS civil servants' union activists. Management also suspended four PCS members in Leeds on Monday of this week. Some 500 workers in two offices, Hume House and Park place, walked out. Eight offices in East London walked out unofficially on Tuesday of this week after managment suspended Nigel Prendergast, a union activist in Hackney. These activists refused to carry out staff appraisals under the Performance Development Scheme.

AROUND 2,000 protesters marched through Glasgow last Saturday calling for an end to the council tax. The demonstration marked the launch of a national \"Axe the Tax\" campaign and was led by Scottish Socialist Party MSP Tommy Sheridan. He told the rally at the Barrowland Ballroom, \"The council tax has a death warrant issued. Let's establish 'Axe the Tax' committees in every part of the country in trade unions, communities and pensioner groups to establish a campaign that puts the interests of ordinary workers and pensioners before the wealthy and big business. Let's stop taxing the pensioners and start taxing the rich.\"

THOUSANDS of nursery nurses across 17 councils in Scotland were still on all-out strike as Socialist Worker went to press. They were battling on even though officials of their union, Unison, had abandoned the key plank of their fight.

THE MAGNIFICENT all-out strike of 4,500 nursery nurses across Scotland is still going strong in its eighth week. The strikers, members of the Unison union, are fighting for a decent national pay deal from COSLA, the Labour-dominated local employers. Scottish nursery nurses voted to continue their action at a meeting on Tuesday of this week.

Nursery nurses in Scotland are continuing their all-out strike to win a decent national pay rise and regrading. The 4,500 strikers are members of the Unison union and have been out for almost seven weeks. On Tuesday they marched through Ayr.

THE SCOTTISH nursery nurse dispute has reminded activists like myself of the tremendous energy, endeavour, imagination, determination and inspiration of the Timex strike some 12 years ago. The Timex strikers were another group of mostly women workers who showed no regard for the accepted limitations of trade union struggle.