IT was always a safe bet that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party would become very unpopular in government as it became apparent that Starmer's promise of change was merely the biggest of the many lies that he has told in order to secure the power that he has craved for many years.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Labour MSPs were striding about Holyrood like avaricious landlords eagerly anticipating the sitting tenants. Anas Sarwar was eagerly looking forward to performing a weekly miracle at First Minister's Questions, standing up despite not having a spine, and securing his position as this year's Saviour of the Union.
He put on his best sneery face and taunting his SNP rivals with the runaway popularity of the Labour Government in Westminster whose great success had led to an outpouring of British flag waving and pro-Union sentiment amongst a grateful Scottish populace.
But no one, not even a hard-bitten cynic like me who is old enough to remember Labour party betrayals going back to the 1970s could have anticipated the rapidity of Labour's fall from the good graces of the electorate, not just in Scotland but across the UK as a whole.
Every new government comes into office with a store of political goodwill, voters are generally prepared to give the new government the benefit of any doubt, and governments can typically make use of this to get some politically challenging decisions out of the way early.
However, despite coming into office promising change, Labour squandered this political capital on punishing the poor and the elderly, by voting to keep the two-child cap on benefits and axing the universal entitlement to the winter fuel allowance for the elderly, all in order to avoid raising taxes on the rich, so far so Tory.
Then the party was mired in a scandal about political donations which revealed Keir Starmer to be greedy, entitled, selfish, and completely out of touch. The rest of us are expected to buy our own clothes, Starmer thinks he should get his for free.
Labour's flagship election promise of lower fuel bills due to the new publicly owned GB Energy company has also unravelled with alarming speed. When Starmer was elected as leader of the Labour Party he promised that as Prime Minister he would nationalise the big energy companies.
That promise did not long survive contact with Starmer's corporate centre right interests. It was quickly replaced with a promise to establish a publicly owned energy company, generating energy from renewable sources. Yet that too was soon watered down, in a pattern which is drearily familiar with Labour Party promises.
Shortly before the General Election we learned that this new energy company would not in fact be an energy company in any normally understood sense of the term. GB Energy will neither produce and sell energy to the energy markets, nor will it own any energy infrastructure. Instead, GB Energy will be an "investment vehicle" for funneling public money into privately owned renewable energy projects.
Calling GB Energy an energy company is like calling Dracula's castle a blood bank.
GB Energy will not create highly skilled trades jobs to replace those lost in the transition away from oil and gas, at best it will created admin and clerical positions which the tradespeople who lose their jobs won't be qualified for.
Then Labour MPs voted against an amendment to the bill establishing GB Energy which would have given the new company a statutory duty to have a "strategic priority to reduce domestic energy bills by £300 by 2030.
That would still have given the Labour Government plenty of wriggle room, but Labour voted down an attempt to ensure that the Labour party is bound by one of its own manifesto promises.
But Labour pinkie promised that this new energy company that is not really an energy company will be headquartered in Aberdeen. So that's OK then. Only we quickly found out that the boss of GB Energy will not move to Aberdeen but instead will work out of offices in Salford.
The whole point of headquarters is that they have a head, the clue is in the name, but if the head of GB Energy is working elsewhere then what we have in Aberdeen are quarters not headquarters. A branch office in other words.
GB Energy's headquarters in Aberdeen bear the same relationship to the normally accepted sense of the term headquarters as GB Energy does to the term energy company, so that's appropriate.
Labour could struggle in Holyrood
No wonder then that two recent opinion polls have shown how far and how fast Labour has lost popularity. A UK wide poll published last week found that the Tories have overtaken Labour for the first time in three years.
A BMG Research survey for the digital newspaper inews, found that only a quarter of the public feel positive about the Government's first Budget, with 40% disapproving of the package set out by Rachel Reeves.
Asked how they would vote if a fresh General Election were held now, 29% of respondents said they would back the Conservatives with just 28% opting for Labour.
Meanwhile in Scotland, where Labour will face an electoral test much sooner than the almost five years until the next Westminster election, a new poll has found that support for Labour has dropped to such an extent that not only will it be impossible for Anas Sarwar to become the next First Minister, but if this trend continues Labour could even struggle to keep as many seats as it currently has in Holyrood.
The poll from Norstat finds that in the constituency ballot, Labour’s support has fallen seven points to 23% – the lowest level since Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation – while it also fell six points to 22% on the regional list.
If replicated at a Holyrood election, this would give Labour 29 seats in the Scottish Parliament. Labour currently has 22 MSPs.
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