A link to a very moving and pertinent YouTube video made some time ago about MJ's situation, by Chris Leslie, a supporter.
Margaret met with the District Valuer yesterday and presented her claim for what she sees as an equitable settlement - a broadly comparable 2-bedroom flat to her present home, which she owns free and clear. I know the standard of such homes - my first flat when I got married in 1960 was just such a tenement flat, substantial, with generously proportioned rooms.
GCC seems to think she can be fobbed off with a 2-bedroom flat at the bottom end of the price range in relevant districts, roughly £63k to £140k plus. The top end is represented by exactly the kind of flat MJ now lives in, before the area and environs were vandalised by GCC and the development process. Margaret also wants her legal and conveyancing purchase fees paid and has a claim for excessive heating and lighting bills caused by the emptying and boarding up of all the flats surrounding her in the Ardenlea Street tenement.
No resolution was reached, and no offer was made by the valuer at yesterdays meeting. MJ now faces a hearing at the Sheriff Court in Glasgow at 10.00 am tomorrow, Thursday 20th, which will consider whether due process has been followed. It is essentially an eviction hearing, and an eviction order could be confirmed tomorrow morning and action to evict would follow swiftly thereafter.
The Scottish National Party has been kept fully apprised of the case, SNP councillors on the GCC are actively pursuing aspects of her case: Billy McAllister, SNP Glasgow City councillor is in active discussion with Margaret about her case. The SNP Communications Director, Peter Murrell is also closely monitoring the case, and reporting to the highest levels in the Scottish Government.
At the court hearing tomorrow, MJ will be accompanied by friends at court, and the freelance reporter Paul Dury, who placed the sympathetic Scottish Sun coverage of the case, will also be present. The Scottish Daily Express have been in touch with Margaret.
There has been a predictable, shameful and deafening silence from the Herald, the Evening Times and the Daily Record, all Labour-supporting papers, with a disgraceful representation for bias in what should be objective news reporting.
The Herald, which as the Glasgow Herald can lay claim to be the oldest newspaper in continuous publication in the world, has fallen a long way from its formerly high standards of journalism and editorial objectivity, almost as fast as its circulation has over recent years.
If individual don't matter enough to get their voices heard in this tortured world of ours, what does matter?
A last word - Glasgow Sheriff Court is in the old Gorbals district of Glasgow, famous and infamous in turn for its slums, its old Glasgow gangs and the seminal 1930s novel No Mean City.
But today's Glasgow, under Labour and the GCC can be a very mean city, and a brutal injustice is being done to an archetypal Glaswegian family here by the very people and party that claims to be their champions.
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