THE Labour Party conference is continuing in Liverpool this week and it ought to be abundantly clear by now to anyone who has been paying even cursory attention that the Labour Party is entrenched in the same high-handed, arrogant, entitled, and above all useless mind set which we came to know and loathe from the contingent of Labour no-marks whose bums made themselves cosy on the Commons benches throughout the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, ostensibly representing Scottish constituencies in Westminster.
Many of them are now making their bums cosy on the benches of the Lords.
The Labour Party has learned nothing at all from its long period in the Scottish political wilderness, from which we can only conclude that Labour's long period in the Scottish political wilderness was nowhere near long enough.
Just this morning Anas Sarwar was unable to answer a simple question about one of the key promises he and his party had made during this summer's Westminster General Election campaign.
READ MORE: Stephen Flynn: Keir Starmer has 'broken his promise' to Scottish voters
That is, the promise that a Labour government would bring down energy bills through its establishment of a state owned energy company: GB Energy.
Before looking at Sarwar's comments, it's worth quickly looking at the trajectory of Labour's promises on energy.
When Starmer was campaigning to take over from Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, he vowed to continue the party policy then in place of nationalising the big six energy companies.
This was one of the first policies to fall by the wayside after Starmer secured the leadership.
By 2021, Starmer was telling the Labour Party conference that he would take a “pragmatic” approach to “common ownership” if he became prime minister.
Starmer announced this U-turn on long standing Labour policy without consulting or informing Ed Miliband, who is now Secretary of State for energy but who at the time was Labour's energy spokesman.
Just days before Miliband had told the BBC that the party was about to renew its commitment to common ownership of energy and other public resources.
The promise then became the establishment of GB Energy, which we were told would be a publicly-owned producer of renewable energy and owner of key energy producing assets, which would play a key role in bringing cheap renewable energy to the market, contributing to lower energy prices all round.
However, just a few days before the General Election we discovered that GB Energy would not after all be an energy company in any traditional understanding of the term.
READ MORE: Keir Starmer calls for 'return of the sausages' from Gaza
GB Energy would in fact be an "investment vehicle" with the goal of funneling public funds into privately-owned renewable energy development projects.
It's merely a new incarnation of the public private partnerships so beloved of previous Labour governments which have proven to be spectacularly poor value for money.
The company would neither produce energy for the market nor would it bring renewable energy infrastructure into public ownership.
Any reduction in domestic energy bills would be hypothetical and a long way down a highly uncertain track.
Speaking on the BBC's Good Morning Scotland show this morning, Anas Sarwar was asked when energy bills would start to come down as Labour had promised.
We got a whole lot of waffle about how Labour needed to get moving on this, about upgrading the electricity grid, about the chaos inherited from the Tories.
What we didn't get was any firm commitment on when energy bills would start to come down, or even if they would at all.
It was announced in August that the average household energy bill is to increase by £149 per month from October after Ofgem said it was increasing its price cap.
Sarwar was equally reticent when asked where GB Energy would be headquartered, saying only that it was for the Prime Minister to make the announcement.
Translation: "That decision is way above a branch manager's pay grade."
Rachel Reeves snubs Scottish carbon capture project
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has set out her green priorities in her speech at the Labour conference, and has been accused of snubbing Scotland.
Speaking of progress the UK Government wished to make in the coming years, the Chancellor failed to mention the Acorn carbon capture project based at St Fergus near Peterhead as she spoke to delegates in Liverpool.
The project has been repeatedly snubbed by successive British Governments despite assurances that investment funding will be forthcoming.
The project is working with industrial, power, hydrogen, bioenergy and waste-to-energy businesses, including those in Peterhead, Grangemouth, and Mossmorran in Fife which wish to capture CO2 emissions and send them into permanent geological storage under the North Sea.
The UK Government confirmed the project would progress to its “track two” stage last year, but SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn stressed in July there was a major lack of certainty over the timeline.
READ MORE: Labour told to 'respect devolution' amid Ian Murray interview confusion
Reeves spoke about projects she wished to develop and said in her speech: "Jobs in the automotive sector of the future in the industrial heartland of the West Midlands, jobs in life sciences across the north-west, clean technology across South Yorkshire, a thriving gaming industry in Dundee, and jobs in carbon capture and storage on Teesside, Humberside and right here on Merseyside too."
Noting Westminster's long record of promising funding for carbon capture projects in Scotland, promises which date back to 2007, and then reneging on them, former first minister and Alba leader Alex Salmond said Scots should be “extremely concerned” at Reeves’s failure to mention Acorn and called on the UK Government to urgently confirm its position on the project.
He said: “In the last 17 years, successive Labour then Tory governments have committed to carbon capture projects in the North East of Scotland and then reneged on these commitments."
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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