MICHAEL Fry’s Monday article “Why was Labour’s first PM branded a traitor to cause?” Ramsay MacDonald, historically named “The Highland Traitor”, was no more or less a traitor than any other Labour MP or Labour opposition leader.

Compared to Sir Keir Starmer, Ramsay Mac was as far to the left as the insipid Jeremy Corbyn, whose mild aspirational reforms nowhere near touched the Scottish Government’s actual achievements, such as free prescriptions, to name only one of many actual achieved reforms.

Staunchly Unionist and pro-Trident, Corbyn would rather speak to the right-wing DUP than the radical SNP parliamentary group. Sir Keir claims to have reached the centre of Great British politics, which is Brit-speak for further to the right of English nationalist politics.

His Union Jack “God Save the King” conference was much more than a geographical distance from the SNP conference in Aberdeen.

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Read Ramsay Mac’s Scottish Republican pamphlets on Lenin, etc, and you will see him further left, in opposition, to the old Viscount Tony Benn and the Foot faimily. In power, Benn ran true to Labour form. The old CND marcher actually built more nuclear stations than the official Tories, including Torness and Hunterston and agreed to dump English nuclear waste on Scotland.

As The Muppet Show put it at the time, he was exchanging our oil for their nuclear waste. Lord Harold Wilson instructed that the North Sea be pounded and extracted as quickly as possible for fear of the rising SNP.

As Lord Callaghan put it, it was not the number of seats the SNP won, but the number they came second in that worried him.

They were followed by the Broon Bomber of Iraq, who pounded the pensioners and working class in true Labour tradition. The class traitor’s record is ignored, as are his infamous vows. He is now revived as a British nationalist spokesperson against Scottish independence. Tony Benn supported a 0% Labour pay freeze and troops into the six occupied counties in the nine-county Irish province of Ulster. He also signed the Prevention of Terrorism Act leading to Diplock Courts, or trial and detention without jury status and other repressive measures that gave Labour the lead in anti-human rights legislation in the whole of Europe. He supported Labour’s Troops IN - to empty dustbins in Glasgow, drive bin lorries; ambulances and fire engines to scab on the worker’s “unofficial” strikes, as their tame union leaders joined their peers in the House of Lords.

Clement Attlee, another old viscount and member of the wartime coalition cabinet, is wrongly hailed as the creator of the welfare state.

The coalition cabinet agreed to a welfare state with minor differences, and the Keynesian Liberal civil servant architect of the welfare programme resigned in disgust at Labour’s retractions on the promised land.

Lord Wilson upped prescription charges to sixpence, and Labour kept adding to the fact that fewer poor and sick English families have to pay a huge amount of other income on prescription charges. Similarly, the Earl of Argyll promised free rent to the MacIntyre clan. A shipwright managed to save his boat from sinking by sticking his finger in a leaking plughole as the fleet took hold of the territory. As a reward, the MacIntyres were granted free rent. All they had to do was bring a snowball every year from the top of Mount Awe. A future Campbell chief offered to charge only sixpence in rent to relieve them of the climb. Of course, like Lord Wilson, he upped the charges, leading to starvation and their eviction from the land. Lord Wilson’s increased prescription charges led to similar scenes of poverty.

Viscount Earl Attlee also reneged on the promise to the Arabs and Jews they would inherit the “Protectorate” of Palestine.

Instead, the protection racketeers set up two states, bribing and betraying both sides.

King Hussein of Jordan was to receive £9 million per year for allowing a British base and sea and airport in the Gulf of Aqaba, on the border of Jordan, Israel and Egypt. Lawrence of Arabia and I both spent time in this desert outpost. I also happen to be related to Ramsay Mac. That is enough dishonourable confessions from me today.

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Labour still have a thing about supporting divisive borders from Ireland to Palestine, India, Korea, Vietnam, EU etc. yet oppose the imperial Border that once kept the Caledonians out, and support the imperial border at Dover to keep the British lorries in line.

Michel Fry also pointed out Tory Blair’sNew/Old Labour’s shift to the right. “Maggie, Maggie Out”,When Thatcher was asked about her legacy after being ousted by fellow Tory colleagues, she pointed to a photo of Tony Blair. I warned everyone in 1983 that 1984 was coming. Did they listen? George Orwell changed his name from Blair because he thought it was too Scottish. Later, when he retired to the Isle of Jura, he supported the Scottish Socialist Republic afore he died.

Ramsay MacDonald, in opposition, was a Scottish republican socialist, as were many independent Labour Party members. Keir Hardie, the republican, promised to end the House of Lords.

Instead, successive Labour governments increased the number of House members, and genuflected to the monarchy and the capitalist system.

Aye, a funny old world indeed.

Donald Anderson

Glasgow