COME home to Labour, said the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell this week, because after everything, Labour still thinks that it’s owed allegiance.
That’s the arrogance that lost it support in the first place. But even if we overlook the sense of entitlement that drips from his speech like grease from a piece and chips that leaves nasty stains on your trousers, the call is somewhat premature. It’s a bit like the management of the Fukushima nuclear plant telling local residents who fled the meltdown that they can come back to their radiation-blasted houses because the plant has just appointed a new chief executive who’s received glowing reviews in the Morning Star.
Labour says it’s the only anti-austerity party in the hope that voters won’t notice that in Scotland we have a few anti-austerity parties to choose between. But the truth is that nothing of any substance has changed in the Labour Party in Scotland. Come home to Labour and you’ll still find a Tory landlord sitting in your living room, telling you when you should go to bed, setting all the rules of the household, and keeping the TV remote control well out of your reach. The right-wing entryists are still dominant on the benches of the Commons. Labour’s house is still toxic, and there’s a considerable amount of rebuilding to be done before it’s in a fit state for habitation. The party hasn’t even started on that work yet, although Kezia Dugdale is already leafing through the B&Q catalogue looking for a wallpaper that will cover up the rubble left by the fight between Jim Murphy and Johann Lamont.
People in Scotland just love being patronised by Westminster politicians who have no clue about Scotland but who suddenly pop up with a great new idea that will solve all our problems. We’ve heard all this before, and Westminster promises are very cheap indeed, despite all the vows that they’ve changed. The problem that John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn have got is that they’re far more interested in the history of socialism in Chile than they are in Scotland, and for their Scottish policies they are relying on advice from the same set of home-wrecking arsonists who burned down Labour’s home in the first place. In fact Jezza gave one of them the job of education spokesman. It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are; if you’re dependent on the people who are the cause of the problems you claim to be solving, you’re not going to solve them. It’s like asking Ronnie Biggs for advice on extradition treaties.
Jeremy claimed this week that Labour is going to win next May’s Scottish Parliament elections. We’ve heard this kind of prediction before from Labour politicians, like when Jim Murphy predicted that Labour was going to gain a seat at the General Election. Jim’s prediction was stunningly accurate, Labour did indeed gain one seat, it’s just a shame for them that they lost all the others. Jezza’s prediction looks like going much the same way, the more so because the party will have a very hard time making his socialist credentials appear credible in Scotland. While Jeremy spent his early political career campaigning against the House of Lords. Labour in Scotland is led by a politician who spent her early political career working for a Lord.
Even if you wanted to, you can’t come home when you’ve got no home left. Labour’s problem is that voters are certainly not going to want to return when they’ve made themselves quite cosy somewhere else. Home is where you make it, and Yes voters have fled from Labour’s perfidy and made their homes in the SNP, the Greens, RISE and other pro-independence parties. If UK Labour is serious about attracting these voters back they’re going to have to do a whole lot better than repeating the same kind of obvious lies about the Scottish Government that Labour in Scotland has been parroting for decades.
ONLY a few days ago, Jeremy Corbyn accused the SNP of inventing a time machine and going back to the 1990s to privatise the railways. He’s also blaming them for not re-nationalising the railways even though it was Labour that ensured that this would be a power reserved to Westminster. It’s like tying a person’s hands behind their back and then demanding that they blow their own nose.
It’s already looking very much like a case of here’s the new boss, the same as the old boss. Perhaps, once we have substantial evidence that a party that is in thrall to nuclear warheads has really changed, then the electorate in Scotland will be ready to suck it and see before swallowing, as the pig head said to David Cameron. But we’re not anywhere near that Oxford student party just yet, no matter how much apple sauce Labour lubricates itself with.
The signs were not good before this week, and now they’re receding into the far distance almost as quickly as a far-off galaxy turned red by the Doppler Shift, although to be fair that’s easily confused with David Cameron’s face as he desperately seeks somewhere to hide his embarrassment. After electing a new leader who’s a leading light in the CND, the hopes of those of us opposed to Trident were dashed when Labour decided not to debate Trident after all. He’s determined to tell us how patriotic he is, although in a resolutely non-nationalist way of course, because British nationalism isn’t nationalist.
Jezza’s speech to the Labour party conference quickly became notable for alleged plagiarism. His team rushed to Twitter to deny the claims that large sections of the speech had been lifted from a speech submitted to, and rejected by, every previous Labour leader since Neil Kinnock. It was written by people who are a lot cleverer, a spud-like spad said, before being forced to admit that they had in fact copied the speech from someone he’d just claimed wasn’t so clever after all. Recycling the past in the hope that it turns out differently this time, that’s going to be the epitaph for the Labour party.
For all his promises, Jeremy Corbyn isn’t going to change the Labour party, he’s an aspirin hoping to cure cancer and his new politics are already terminally infected with the old politics he claimed to be replacing. We know how to get real change in Scotland, and it doesn’t involve voting for a party that has had more than 100 stalled years on the Parliamentary road to socialism, and has blown every chance.
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