TO pass the time during lockdown, I have started to browse through some rather ancient Scots Independents and came across a small item in the front page of the issue of February 1, 1969 which reads as follows:“Reform Farce, The house of Lords in its present form, should be abolished.
It is quite wrong that people, whose remote ancestors, were rewarded for prowess in battle, or the bed chamber, should be in a highly privileged position. True, The Labour Party have decided on a pitiful reform – by filling the Lords with the Prime Minister’s own nominees. So what happened when 44 MPs, plus Mr Harold Wilson turned up at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party to discuss this “Reform” that has turned out to be a farce? Nothing – apart from the odd remark that the proposals were, ‘not much good.’ The meeting was abandoned.”
Well well, poor old Keir Hardie must have turned, nay, spun in his grave. He being the first Labour MP whose main platform was the abolishing of the House of Lords and home rule for Scotland. Both items dropped by the Scottish Labour Party at the behest of their English Labour party colleagues.
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Forgetting the fact that they had been voted in on those two main principals. I well remember my grandfather chasing two labour canvassers from the door at the next election, calling them betrayers of the Scottish people for dropping policies that they were elected on.
Years later still, betraying these promises, they temporarily changed their official name to The Labour Party in Scotland – not long later changing it back, on realising that the title was too honest, exposing their true role as an establishment Unionist party, from outwith Scotland, with its interests now firmly established in foreign London control of Scottish affairs.
Eventually, to try to stop the advance of independence, they put home rule back on their agenda and campaigned with the SNP for a devolved parliament. This was a victory for democracy and a parliament was set up in Edinburgh.
Labour said this would kill independence stone dead. Much to their horror, it only whetted the appetite for political freedom and the SNP continue their unstoppable advance to their goal of independence.
Labour in Scotland has now only one MP. There is one tiny thread of hope for Labour which comes from the (LFI) Labour for Independence, a grouping within the Labour Party which supports Scotland being a self-governing, independent country. They know that this is the only hope they have of ever regaining the trust of the Scottish voter and of gaining any seats in an independent Scotland.
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When that great leader of the SNP and MP for the Western Isles, Donald Stewart, was retiring he was offered to sit in the House of Lords and to collect his £400-a-day attendance money. He not only turned it down, but I remember that he added, in an Independent Scotland there will be no House of Lords. God speed that day.
Iain Ramsay
Greenock & Inverclyde
JUST when you thought Richard Leonard couldn’t get any worse he goes and does it.
In a pathetic effort to gain a headline for his failing leadership and his doomed Scottish Parliament election campaign he is now promising to build 12,000 council homes each year.
The last time Labour were in government in Scotland, over a period of several years, they built six council houses. Not 6000 or 600 or even 60. Just six, and from memory they were all in Orkney.
Brian Lawson
Paisley
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