I learnt today that staff at a JCB factory, one of the companies suffering most as a result of the housing bust, voted to cut their hours rather than face large redundancies.
It's very seldom you hear people display such comradeship as those workers did when they voted just hours ago. We saw it after 7/7 and when a whale got lost in the Thames, but solidarity has become much less a central structure of our society, and much more a one- off event.
During the war bread wasn't rationed. You could have as much bread as you liked. You probably couldn't have butter with it, but you could have the bread.
But at the end of the war, once fathers, brothers and friends came back from the beaches of France, the sands of Africa and the islands of the Pacific, we rationed it.
To everyone I tell this to nobody knows why. It seems to make no sense.
But we rationed it so we could feed the German people who were now starving. We fed our enemy when they were most in need.
In this world, never mind our society, there is so much more that unites us than divides us. Not as nations or groups, but as human beings. Now we talk about carbon credits: this strange idea where the rich can buy the right to pollute the earth while the poor can't.
I hope these times of crisis, like many others, will bring us closer together as Scots, as Brits and as people.
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