Don’t kid yourself on – Starmer wants to put Scotland back in its box

No-one will shed a tear.

Every aspect of the economy has been severely damaged by the wilful madness of Liz Truss, the self-harm of Brexit, and the economic mismanagement which led to warnings this week that millions of mortgage payers face extra monthly payments of up to £500.

The pressure on even formerly comfortable incomes has now reached levels once scarcely believable.

It’s not just its monetary failures which mark down the present UK Government as the worst in living memory. It’s morally bankrupt too.

While ordinary people are left at the mercy of relatively new terrors such as the rape clause, benefit cuts and the downright evil Illegal Migration Bill, passed in the House of Commons this week and so inhumane that even the likes of former prime minister Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith were moved to protest.

The next UK General Election is around a year away but surely the Tories’ fate is already sealed.

READ MORE: Scottish tree huggers don’t like Keir Starmer either

It’s hard to imagine any developments which will rescue their chances at the polls. The problem now is not how to muster the necessary support to throw them out of office but to decide who is worthy of replacing them.

The terrible truth is that the only realistic contender – the Labour Party as reimagined by Keir Starmer – is so very much not up to the task; that the changes we need to see will be no closer to becoming a reality.

Labour have already made it plain that it will do little to reverse the moral decline of the UK Government and we would do well to listen to them. Starmer’s refusal to remove the infamous rape clause has shocked and infuriated members of his own party.

When it was introduced, this requirement for women to fill in an eight-page form to prove they had been raped to avoid the two-child tax credit cap seemed too callous to be true. But true it was, albeit hidden in the finer detail of the Tories’ 2015 Budget.

It was the SNP MP Alison Thewliss who exposed this policy but the SNP simply doesn’t have the numbers to reverse this shameful legislation. Labour is almost certain to have the numbers if it joined forces with the SNP to scrap the clause – but Starmer has already made it clear that it is not his party’s policy to do so.

That must have been news to Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth, who just a month ago described the rape clauses as “heinous”, said it was “absolutely keeping children in poverty” and suggested the party would scrap it. Starmer’s most recent volte-face is yet another of the cowardly changes of heart for which he is becoming well known.

Labour’s Scottish leader Anas Sarwar described the legislation as “horrific” but his promise to do everything in his power to scrap it was another victim of his UK leader’s shameful U-turn.

Labour MSP Monica Lennon has since described the rape clause as “abhorrent” and slammed her party colleagues for being cowed into submission by the fear of deselection or “being exiled to the back benches” if they spoke out.

If Labour will not act to scrap such an “abhorrent” and “heinous” attack on women, what on earth would it do? Certainly not act against the Tories’ vile attack on refugees risking their lives to leave behind war and violence in their homeland to seek safety in the UK.

Just this week the Westminster government dismissed appeals from within its own ranks for protections for refugees coming to Britain from legislation which MPs have been warned could topple the world refugee system.

Under the guise of acting to stop small boats risking lives by bringing refugees across the Channel to the UK, the Illegal Migration Bill – in reality – will consign more people to slavery. Those aren’t my words. The warning came from former prime minister Theresa May who argued hard – but in vain – to have more protections added to the bill.

In fact, every one of the amendments suggested by the Lords to make the bill less dangerous for refugees was overturned by the Tory government in no fewer than 18 separate formal votes on Monday, so desperate was it to inflict the maximum pain on the maximum number of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Yet where is the righteous anger of the Labour Party’s leader in the face of such callousness? Where is his vow to throw this legislation where it belongs – in the dustbin? Is there anything so terrible that it moves Starmer to disgust and fury?

The legislation “brings shame to the House of Commons and is not in Scotland’s name,” said the SNP’s justice and immigration spokesperson Stuart McDonald.

But then so many Westminster follies are carried out in direct contradiction to Scotland’s wishes.

Few have proved as damaging as Brexit, pushed through in the face of Remain majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland and despite warnings of dire consequences that have proved to be even worse than the worst predictions.

Yet despite the devastation that has followed – ironically worse in Scotland than anywhere else – Starmer has set his face against rejoining the EU, ignoring the clear majority who now believe that leaving it has proved to be an unmitigated disaster.

God forbid Labour should scare off those defectors from the Tory Party sickened by Boris Johnston’s illegal Covid parties but generally OK with the economic recklessness of the extreme right. This explains Starmer’s weak response to this week’s news of mortgage payment rises of up to £500 a month

Starmer also failed to say whether his party would back independent recommendations that public sector pay should rise.

All of this suggests there will be little to celebrate if, as expected, Labour emerge from the next General Election with more MPs than any other party. Yes, the Tories will have been trounced but there is nothing to suggest we will see the radical plan we need to even begin to move the UK back on anything like the right tracks.

Yet if we are to believe some political analysts even some independence supporters fed up with what they perceive as inaction on that front by the SNP may lend their vote to Labour simply to see the back of the Tories.

There are many reasons this would be a serious mistake. Firstly, it would move the independence campaign forward not a jot. When Labour says it would not support another independence referendum it is NOT joking.

Only the need to win the support of a substantial SNP Westminster group would encourage even the slightest deviation from that party line.

Indeed, left to its own devices Labour is far more likely to ditch its previous sympathies for Gordon Brown’s devo max mythology and jump on the Tory let’s-block-Scottish-Government-plans-for-ABSOLUTELY-ANYTHING bandwagon.

Witness the attack by Labour’s George Foulkes on the Scottish Government spending money on furthering independence, which was in the manifestos of both the SNP and the Scottish Greens.

An attack swiftly followed by an equally unhinged suggestion from the same politician that Scotland Office ministers were being undermined by “Nationalist” HQ.

Do not believe that the Labour Party offers a left-wing radical alternative to create a truly federal UK. It is a centre-right party in thrall to voters in middle England and every bit as committed to pushing Scotland back in its pre-2014 box as the Tories.

If you truly believe the SNP have lost touch with its core mission and run out of ideas and energy you did not live through the days when a supine Labour Party presided over the dilapidation of so many Scottish towns and threw its lot in with an unjustified and illegal war to keep America happy.

That conflict was in 2003 – but it’s still far, far too early to forgive.