Our city is a vibrant mix of many communities and cultures. We want everyone in Glasgow to feel at home here - to have access to housing, healthcare and justice; to go about life without fear of attack; to have good food, good clean air and good places to live. Instead of peddling false divides to set groups against each other, Scottish Greens will keep pushing the Council to take a holistic, intersectional approach to decisions, policy and funding, and keep amplifying the voices of people with the most expertise on how to make our city fairer - those with hard-earned lived experience who are often the most silenced in our city.
Support better decision making
We will:
- Build intersectional equalities competence by making regular training on intersectional equalities and human rights, led by experts with lived experience, a mandatory requirement for all councillors and across the workforce.
- Councillors’ training records should be published alongside their Register of Interests.
- Co-design how the Council measures equality impacts with equalities organisations, including making explicit the links between poverty and protected characteristics and the intersection of multiple protected characteristics.
Remove barriers to power
We will:
- Make it easier for those with direct experience of inequality to be involved in making Council policy, and directly fund equalities and anti-poverty groups where their expertise is needed to support the development or implementation of council policy.
- Make explicit that receiving Council funding does not affect groups' political independence, and they maintain the ability to campaign without fear of losing funding.
LGBT+ solidarity
We will:
- Support and show solidarity with the LGBT+ community and their right to live free from fear and harassment, including seeking safe spaces for the community to gather, and support for community organising.
- Consistently oppose efforts to demonise and roll back the rights of trans people.
- Work with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to introduce an informed consent mode of trans healthcare and for urgent improvements on access to inclusive physical, mental, sexual and reproductive healthcare for LGBT+ people.
- Support LGBT+ inclusion in sport, working with LEAP sports and others to ensure best practice is cemented across all Glasgow Life venues, and is protected in any that go into community control.
- Campaign against the deportation of LGBT+ asylum seekers.
A feminist Glasgow
We will:
- Ensure policy decisions address the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women, including embedding feminist budgeting across Council departments, and intersectional feminist approaches to town planning in the new City Development Plan.
- Work for long term, sustainable funding for organisations working to tackle gender-based violence, including support for women with No Recourse to Public Funds and trafficked people. Work with Disabled People’s Organisations, LGBT+ and BME organisations to improve support for women experiencing violence and abuse who have multiple protected characteristics and specific needs.
- Support actions that effectively prevent and respond to violence, centred on the needs of survivors, including consent-based relationship and sex education, training and information campaigns, and ensuring public services better respond to survivors of abuse.
- Protect safe access to sexual and reproductive health services as a human right, and support legislation to introduce ‘buffer zones’ to prevent harrassment
- Advocate for improved support for women’s specific health needs including birth control, trauma-informed sexual and reproductive health care, menstrual health, menopause, endometriosis, pre and post-natal care, breastfeeding support, and care for FGM survivors.
Disability justice
We will:
- Work with Disabled People’s Organisations to embed disabled people’s experiences, voices, needs and priorities in all Council policies, and progress the recommendations of the Disability Workstream of the Social Recovery Taskforce
- Uphold the calls of DPOs to create ongoing healthcare passports for disabled people to ensure human rights and essential access needs are upheld in a crisis, and that vital lessons are learned from the pandemic
- Deliver public realm improvements that remove barriers to disabled people getting about the city safely and easily, including by extending the Accessible Design Forum to cover all public realm projects to ensure disabled people’s input at design stage.
Racial justice
We will:
- Support the leadership of BME community organisations, and work with third sector partners to build anti-racist competence across Council policy and practice, including in schools
- Support the Council to grow a workforce that reflects the racial makeup of the city and to take action on the racial pay gap.
- Celebrate the culture and heritage of and protect the rights of Roma and Gypsy/Traveller communities in Glasgow.
A welcoming Glasgow
We will:
- Provide free bus travel to people seeking refugee protection
- Campaign for dignified, safe housing and enough support for people seeking refugee protection, based in communities not hotels
- Continue our Welcome Home campaign to take asylum housing out of private hands, and run in partnership by the Council and the third sector on principles of dignity, hospitality and democratic accountability
- Support people with No Recourse to Public Funds and the right to work for people awaiting a decision on their case, and campaign for an end to destitution in the asylum system.