I WRITE in response to Mr Walkers’s tongue-in-cheek article in Friday’s National, wondering about Labour’s behaviour in office (Why are Scots not angrier as Labour treat us like mugs?, Oct 4). Is it because the modern Scot is so brainwashed and docile that we are treated with such contempt?
There is nothing new in official Lab-Con coalitions since the dapper Ramsay Mac headed the Westminster official coalition. He said that the ladies would be queuing up in the morning to kiss his hand. Labour have been kissing the Tories’ backsides ever since then, to get into deals formed in their London clubs.
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The wartime coalition agreed to the welfare state, with minor differences. All agreed that the German soldier was taller, fitter and better educated. Germany had had a welfare state since the 1870s under Bismarck.
The Iron Chancellor was no socialist. In fact, he was quite the opposite and executed thousands of socialists and liberals. Rome had a welfare state, as did many other pre-industrial societies. Germany was just the first to do so in an industrialised state. England did not receive public education, due to the Church of England’s demands for a monopoly, till the 1870s. Their bishops still sit in the House of Lords as a right.
The Army Education Corps canvassed the returning troops after World War Two to vote Labour. Lord Beveridge, the liberal civil servant who tried to oversee the transition, resigned in disgust as Labour kept cutting vital parts of welfare “from the cradle to the grave”. (Viscount Earl) Atlee presided over the division of Palestine into the Zionist state of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. King Hussein was educated in England and Sandhurst. He took an English wife and accepted £9 million per annum to keep a British base in the Gulf of Aqaba, on the Egypt and Israeli Border, not far from Saudi Arabia that was created after World War One by British and French imperialists after the collapse of the Turkish empire. Lords Wilson and Callaghan ran a basket-case economy and austerity that paved the way for Thatcher/Blair and Starmer.
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Some are worried aboot a millionaire buying claes, including undergarments, for Sir Keir’s wife. Others say that it is fitting for the head of an imperial state to dress properly. Does the English government not provide such an allowance from Lewis’s?
A late SNP Provost of Clydebank, Bill Johnston, told me that he and his late wife, Agnes, were provided with such an allowance. He bought himself a formal kilt outfit, something he could not afford. You could argue that it was only fitting, excuse the pun, for a working-class rep to afford to dress properly for civic functions and responsibilities. Keir Hardie, ex-factory worker, liked to dress in a cloth cap, unlike ex-barrister and son of a factory-owning toolmaker. There is much more serious hocus-pocus going on at all levels.
Bill Johnston was no broon-envelope cooncillor. He had served as a full-time union rep in Chicago. He was a founder member of the Association of Scottish Trade Unions with an office at the bottom of Hope Street, Glasgow and advocated smashing the trade unions’ political levy to the Labour Party. The Scottish Trade Unions and Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society gave up their independence and were asset stripped by the English trade unions and English Co-op in the early seventies, without a cheep. It is almost as if it never happened, along with nearly every other Scottish institution.
Bill told me that the British establishment had older ways of dealing with the peasants. Sitting Bull said that America had other ways of murdering the natives than shooting them.
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
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