Robinson successfully defended his school from closure, fought for the unification of the teaching unions, mentored future trade union leaders and transformed teaching at the Marx Memorial Library, writes JOHN FOSTER

MY daily bus commute to work used to take me past the gates of the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. Relatively often I would see a small group of people standing outside the hospital bearing placards decrying the evils of abortion and the rights of the unborn child.
The spectacle was so roundly pathetic and visibly necrotising in terms of both message and messengers that I wrote off the scene as merely another of Glasgow’s nasty Victorian heirlooms which would expire with the crusade’s last elderly soldiers.
How wrong I was. Less than a decade later, a growing number of anti-abortion protesters regularly host “vigils” outside various medical clinics and hospitals — in particular the maternity ward of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and the Sandyford Clinic.

We want our cultural institutions to actually stand for something, says HAILEY MAXWELL, as the art world fails to interrogate or acknowledge the onslaught on Gaza


