THOSE of you from my generation may remember Creamola Foam from your childhood.
It came in a little tin with a lid you had to prize off with a spoon. Drop a teaspoon of the sparkly crystal powders in a glass, fill it with water and it basically exploded into an effervescent volcanic eruption. I thought it was magic but it turns out it was just a chemical reaction between the sodium bicarbonate and the citric and tartaric acids. Anyway, I thought it tasted great. Creamola Foam fell out of favour and production stopped in about the year 2000, but recently I saw a tin that looked just like it and thought let’s give it a go, and despite all the great memories it just didn’t taste good at all.
Maybe it’s my adult pallet, maybe tastes have changed, maybe kids still love it, maybe it’s the fact that the actual Creamola Foam product doesn’t exist anymore and two tribute products have taken its place, Krakatoa Foam and Kramola Fizz. Whatever it is, the new breed aren’t the same, the original recipe and the magic of the time lost to history.
For some reason, when I heard that the voting for the Labour leadership had closed and that Jeremy Corbyn’s victory, sorry, the result, would be announced tomorrow, I was reminded of Creamola Foam.
Labour, a once-great political power that stood up for workers, the poor and disenfranchised and dominated Scottish politics for 50 years, has become the Creamola Foam of political parties: A pleasant memory replaced by something not a patch on the original experience; even if they got the original recipe right again they would find that tastes have moved on and that the SNP have perfected a left-of-centre political stance that fits with the modern age. In England and Wales, Ukip are also stealing their clothes, and so just as there seems to be no place for Labour in Scotland anymore, England will soon ask the question the people of Scotland have been asking these last few elections: “What is the point of Labour?”
I can’t see Owen Smith beating Corbyn, short of vote rigging and eligibility gerrymandering on a massive scale, and so Labour will be back where they were a few months ago. They will have an unelectable unionist lefty in charge that the vast majority of their elected MPs and their leader in Scotland can’t work with. England will never vote for Corbyn, and if he wins he will either purge the party of all Blairite candidates and the party will split in two, or he will try to appease them and find himself challenged by a more credible candidate closer to the next General Election or just after it, when he loses swathes of MPs. Even if he were to win over his MPs, the new electoral boundary reforms look set to offer between a 50- and 90-seat majority to the Tories over the other parties added together.
He can’t win, and even if he could he offers nothing more to Scotland than any other Westminster Unionist prime minister would, because the interests of the UK and the interests of Scotland are no longer aligned. The most likely scenario is that Corbyn will win, make lots of nice noises about working with his detractors in the party and then behind the scenes a leftist deselection purge of Blairites will begin and Labour will be taken to the cleaners by the Tories in the next General Election. Doubly so if the right and left of the party split and stand as New Labour and Old Labour (they may come up with better names than that). In Scotland, Labour have no way back, their existence may rely on Holyrood’s proportional representation system. Yes this means more Tory MSPs but that’s a clear and easy-to-understand battle-line, and so good news for the SNP and Greens when it comes to the independence issue.
Still, harking back to the past it’s worth pointing out that I predicted these events in my column for The National back in August 2015. As Corbyn was starting to emerge as a potential Labour Leader, I wrote: “Déjà vu is an interesting feeling. With Foot in 1983, just as now with Corbyn, the left thought they had an uncompromising, principled, socialist politician to admire, but the cold, hard fact is that it is easier to admire such politicians than it is to make them prime minister.
“Labour’s own Gerald Kaufman called the 1983 manifesto the ‘longest suicide note in political history’. If Corbyn wins the Labour leadership race on an almost identical manifesto against a background where voters in England have moved significantly to the right in the last 30 years, then Labour’s next manifesto will be more of an obituary than suicide note and civil war will ensue within the Labour ranks.” I also pointed out that “Corbyn is no fan of the EU and if he doesn’t effectively champion the EU, then the scenario of England voting No to the EU and Scotland voting Yes becomes probable”.
If my predictions on the future of Labour are half as accurate as they were in 2015, then Labour in Scotland, and even across the UK, may find themselves extinct unless they can find a charismatic, heavyweight, modernist progressive to lead them back from the brink. But unless that person is also for independence then the people of Scotland will know that they don’t fight for Scotland and they would essentially just be a watered down version of Nicola Sturgeon, a bit like Corbyn is.
I don’t like Corbyn, I could never vote for him; old-fashioned political posturing from the left and right have had their day, even the SNP’s pragmatic, business-friendly and progressive social policies are just a stop-gap solution to a changing political-social dynamic that most have not figured out yet. The old politics and the old economics have failed and we need a new direction, not left or right, or even the childlike Liberals’ straight up the middle, but a radical rethink about how to structure society.
The UK’s indebtedness, slow growth, low inflation and rising inequality are all signs that the London-centric approach coupled with a neoclassical economic dogma have failed completely. Another economic shock and we sink, blame the immigrants and leave the EU panicked, while unhinged British unionists’ response will only make things worse.
Only independence – a complete break with failed traditional thinking – offers the flexibility to consider new solutions to growth, poverty, inclusion, environmental sustainability and a new set of economic measures that focus policies on our society’s well-being rather than the value of stock markets that by proxy widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, driving us towards an inevitable, and looming, breaking point.
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