ALTHOUGH the Brexit fiasco has temporarily grabbed the political headlines, it won’t be long before the mainstream media resort to type and focus their energies on attacking the SNP.
The latest opportunity to help them justify this was the recent announcement of the timetable to establish who will become the next temporary resident in charge of the Labour branch office. The British media (and Labour politicians) will be frothing at the mouth using this as an excuse to run even more SNP-bad stories.
It doesn’t matter that they would do it anyway, the excuse of covering the ongoing Labour leadership debate will make the BBC and others feel they have a credible reason to continue their relentless negativity about all things SNP.
It is entirely up to the remaining members of Labour in Scotland to make their choice but it’s not one that I or many other people would relish. On the one hand, they have a multi-millionaire who claims to support Corbyn despite signing a letter to get rid of him only last year; a former MP who either abstained on benefit cuts or voted them through; and someone who preaches that businesses should be paying the real living wage – well except for his family business, where it’s only a long-term aspiration if everyone else does it first!
On the other hand there is a relatively unknown first-time MSP, someone who claims to be a CND member who supports unilateral disarmament while simultaneously fully backing UK Labour’s policy of retaining nuclear weapons in Scotland! What a choice! Of course, both candidates are now running through the usual list of policies that the SNP should be implementing – despite being well aware that Labour sat on the Smith Commission, blocking the Scottish Parliament from obtaining the powers to meet Labour’s new-found aspirations for the Scottish Government!
There was an initial bout of what seemed like internal bickering between the candidates and their supporters; one claiming Scots wouldn’t vote for an Englishman (Leonard) while the other side claiming Labour voters wouldn’t back a multi-millionaire (Sarwar).
However, both camps have tried hard to ignore the common private education background of both candidates. It’s easy enough to say it was their respective parents who made that decision to send them to private schools so why should it be held against them.
However, that doesn’t sit well for Sarwar as he has decided the state school system in Glasgow isn’t good enough for his children, who he prefers to send into the private education system. I’m not sure many voters would want to entrust the future of Scotland’s education system to a politician who seems to have no faith in it for himself or his own family.
No doubt the mainstream media will fail to cover the Labour infighting, nor will they examine in any detail the proposals put forward by the candidates who will be free to make any unsubstantiated claim they wish. The focus of the candidates will purely be on who can denounce the SNP the most in a sad attempt to appear as a strong leader for an ever-dwindling band of Labour members in Scotland.
Councillor Kenny MacLaren
Paisley
ON Thursday morning, I inadvertently tuned into the Radio 4 series entitled The English Fix, and found what could only be described as a befuddled piece of Brexit propaganda. Almost inevitably, it exhibited the usual inability to recognise the difference between “English” and “British”.
I can accept that the English education system probably doesn’t do much to eliminate this particular piece of ignorance, but the error is routinely propagated by the so-called British Broadcasting Corporation, and its inability to comprehend that continual misuse of “England” and “English” in this way alienates those of us who do not consider ourselves English.
The content of the programme majored on arguments about the EU’s responsibility for corruption of English Common Law by the introduction of such things as the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU’s part in the despoliation of the English countryside and way of life. It claimed English law and the English countryside to be central to the common civilisation and history of this island of England going back 1000 years.
To be fair, there were a number of counter-arguments presented during the programme, but it was pretty clear that “take back control from Johnny Foreigner because he can’t possibly understand how different we are from everyone else” was the message the audience was supposed to hear. In a land where there has been 300 years of systematic Anglicisation of Scots law, and where the way of life for so many has been devastated by foreign rule, from the ethnic cleansing campaign that was the clearances of the highlands to modern-day austerity, these complaints about EU meddling sound petty and superficial. I wonder how many families have been burned out of their homes by regulation?
The colour of Britnat nostalgia just gets rosier and rosier, and more and more exclusively English.
Cameron Crawford
Rothesay
IS Jacob Rees-Mogg still being touted as the new darling of the Conservatives – the great white hope set to revive an ailing party from the infighting that has existed since the EU became an issue? Even following incest/abortion claims? Even after calling food bank use “uplifting”? Deary me.
Shaun Byrne
Glasgow
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