IT’S time to face facts. Labour in Scotland is no more. It’s still walking and talking, incessantly, but it’s as good as dead and it’s never coming back from the grave that it dug for itself. Jeremy Corbyn can insist all he likes that the branch office is in good health, but there are in fact corpses in morgues that are more lively than Labour in Scotland.
What exactly is the point of supporting a party that’s in favour of exposing its traditional voter base to what very well may be decades of Tory rule while it denies those voters any way of avoiding it? Labour tells Scotland that we can’t eat Saltires while it condemns us to choking on Union Jacks. They’re more interested in attacking the SNP and accusing independence supporters of being anti-English than they are in defending us from the Tories and ensuring Scotland’s voice is heard.
Watching the Scottish delegates to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week was like watching an episode of Zombie Nation, only without any witty dialogue or indeed any semblance of a plot line. They are mere facsimiles of living, breathing politicians, the only part of them that is left alive is their instinctive response to cry “SNP bad”. None of them said anything new. None of them showed any awareness of how to revive their party’s fortunes.
Kezia just gave the same cringe-worthy interview over and over again. Perhaps she was trying to make us feel sorry for her. She hasn’t really changed her mind, it’s everyone else who has changed how they understand what she said previously, and she’s pleased to clear that up for us.
Labour is a party that is so self-absorbed that it decided not to debate Brexit at its conference. The single most important issue facing the country, an issue that could very well spell the end of the United Kingdom, but Labour doesn’t want to talk about it. The UK party’s policy is just to suck it up, while the Scottish party seems to think that it’s still possible for Scotland to remain a part of both the UK and the EU, but it doesn’t have the foggiest idea about how to achieve it.
Kezia Dugdale was criticised over the weekend for contradicting her previous view that Jeremy was unelectable by suddenly announcing he was electable after all, just after he won the leadership. But it was unfair to criticise her for that, because holding contradictory views simultaneously is what defines the Labour Party in Scotland.
The branch office thinks we can stay in both the UK and the EU, they oppose nuclear weapons while supporting Trident, they’re against Tory austerity while leaving Scotland exposed to the worst that the Tories can throw at us. As she tied herself in knots with her contradictions, Kezia was only reflecting party tradition. She wasn’t embarrassing herself after all. It’s our fault for not grasping how Labour formulates policy.
Kezia says that Labour can’t and won’t support an SNP budget that imposes cuts and continues austerity, but the SNP have to operate within a fixed budget, which is set by Westminster. And that’s exactly how Labour want it. If Westminster cuts the Scottish budget, it’s the Scottish Government that has to decide where those cuts fall, and then Labour can blame the SNP for Tory cuts that Labour insists that Scotland remains a victim of.
Leadership doesn’t mean blaming other people, said Kezia in her speech to the party conference. It means blaming the SNP. Speaking to a crowd made up largely of Corbyn supporters who view Kezia’s politics in the same way that an early mammal viewed a smashed dinosaur egg, she told them that her branch office knows what it means to be humbled and rejected by the electorate, and that’s why it’s going to keep on doing exactly what it’s always done.
They’ve built an entire political strategy on the fond wish that the voters will eventually come back to them once Labour has persuaded them that the SNP is every bit as bad as Labour is. It’s not really a very convincing slogan: “Vote for me, because that other guy is as rubbish as I am.”
Labour is promising Scotland nothing and offering us less. Jeremy is opposed to more powers for the Scottish Parliament, he thinks we’re already as devolved as we can be, and he doesn’t want us to have another independence referendum because of that Brexit that he didn’t want to talk about at his party conference. Jezza might have re-animated Labour’s socialist soul but he’s also revived its traditional denial that British nationalism is nationalist.
Once again we’re all expected to troop happily along on the British Parliamentary Road to socialism, a road that ends with a nice cosy seat in the House of Lords.
But Labour now is a party of protests and placards. It’s a party whose role is to provide a spiritual refuge to English radicalism while the Tories take over the asylum and sell it off to the highest bidder. Jezza won the leadership and received 62 per cent of the votes in what’s being described as a landslide, but a Scotland that voted by the same percentage to remain a part of the EU can be ignored and sidelined.
Where Scotland’s problems are concerned, Labour has nothing to say, except to tell us to swallow the nasty medicine. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party wants to transform the world, but Scotland won’t get any say in it.
There will be no help from the UK party to extract Kezia’s branch office from the grave it has dug for itself. Under Jezza’s leadership, UK Labour is now more interested in the struggles of an anarcho-syndicalist vicuña weavers’ commune in Bolivia than it is in the travails of the Scottish branch office. The sole purpose of the dwindling band of Scottish representatives is to warn the rest of Labour of what happens if you think you can win votes by cosying up to the Tories.
Labour in Scotland still hasn’t learned that, and as its Glasgow councillors consider an alliance with the Tories in order to keep the city out of the SNP’s hands after next May, it looks like they never will.
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