WHAT do you call an Opposition that doesn’t oppose? You call it the Labour Party. Labour is to opposition as running away and hiding under a rock is to confrontation. Labour stands up to bullies by holding the bully’s jaickit while the speccy kid gets beaten up. Labour defends the rights of workers by siding with management, but then Labour has long since ceased to be the party of the workers.

For the last couple of decades, Labour has been the party of managing the workers’ expectations on behalf of the bosses, but now they can’t even be bothered to do that. Now Labour has decided that the best way to oppose the Tories is not to oppose them at all, in the hope that Tory voters will take pity on them and elect them the next time round, which puts them in the position of seeking pity on the basis of being pitiless. Vote for us, we have nothing to offer except malice.

Labour is a party that thinks being a loyal opposition means being obedient and compliant. Thon wummin in Fifty Shades Of Grey stood up for herself more than Labour stands for anything. When Labour demands that the SNP set out how it’s going to oppose the Tories, it’s because they’ve not got the slightest intention of doing it themselves.

The last remnants of the Labour-supporting press in Scotland publish anguished editorials bewailing that Labour voters in Scotland find that the party is making political decisions on the basis of English priorities. It was ever thus. Oh if only there had been some way of avoiding that ever happening eh. As a thousand Scottish grannies would say to those tortured leader writers – hell slap it intae ye son.

If this sorry excuse for a Labour Party was opposing apartheid, they’d lock some poor people in a garden shed for 26 years in solidarity with Nelson Mandela. Andy Burnham would appear on the telly fluttering his eyelashes and assure the interviewer that poor people can get by perfectly well on a diet of creosote and old paint, but Labour is the party of striving, hard-working families with two nice cars, two foreign holidays a year and a pony for the teenage daughter. Families like Andy’s. Labour doesn’t want to represent working class people because they appear in those horrid documentaries on Channel 5.

It’s so bad for Labour that they don’t even sit for anything never mind stand, which is why the SNP were able to blag their seats and take over the Opposition benches. It was first-class trolling by the real Opposition at Westminster. It’s the SNP which talks like an Opposition, walks like an Opposition, and votes like an Opposition. Labour is nowhere to be seen, they can’t even be bothered to turn up and vote, although they can and do complain that SNP MPs have taken their seats. Now you know what the real priorities of a Labour MP are.

And then Scotland’s sole Labour MP had the cheek to insist to a BBC interviewer that the party opposed the Tory policies that they abstained from voting on. They can do that safe in the knowledge that they won’t be challenged live on air. Labour is not so much a political party anymore, more an on-going nervous breakdown, and BBC Scotland is its enabler. But the walls of misinformation are breaking down, on the Internet and in papers like this one.

Labour have decided that if they can’t be the Government they’re not going to roll over and become an Opposition – because that’s what the Tories would expect them to do. Instead they’ve morphed into a granny party – appropriately enough since it’s only elderly grannies that still vote for them – they don’t want to make a fuss.

Perhaps if they help the Tories to be really nasty then voters in England will remember just how nasty the Tories are and realise that Labour can be every bit as nasty. Then they might get elected again. It’s a faint hope but in the absence of anything approaching principles it’s all they’ve got. They’ve been forced into this strategy because unfortunately they don’t have any balls they can take home, not since Ed lost his seat, so they’re going to pretend to oppose while not actually opposing at all, if that’s alright with George Osborne.

Labour has got a disease which gives them delusions of adequacy, cognitive dissonance, the inability to accept responsibility, the loss of the spinal column, and the manic repetition of the phrase “SNP bad”. Called gonorrhoea lectus, they contracted it after they were screwed by the voters.

THE party hierarchy is now in full scale panic mode because Jeremy Corbyn looks as though he is ahead in the leadership election. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Jeremy was to stand in order to let the party’s left think that there was actually still a left left to Labour. He wasn’t supposed to win.

Speaking on Newsnight, former Blair adviser John McTernan said it would be an utter disaster for the party. And John ought to know. John has a well-deserved reputation for political wizardry, every Labour Party he’s touched has turned to dust – and not the sparkly fairy kind either. He managed it in Australia, he managed it in Scotland. So the best advice for the Labour Party today is to listen very carefully to what John has to advise, to take his counsel on board, and then to do the exact opposite. Just ask Jim Murphy.

Labour’s hierarchy is already spinning frantically against a Corbyn victory, warning that Labour is not a protest party. But if something scares the plastic Burnhamites and Kendalloids and Cooperites of this world, determined to run a country on the basis of a focus group in Croydon, then that’s got to be a good thing. God forbid that Labour might elect a leader who would bring in Labour policies.

In the unlikely event that Labour does manage to unite behind a Corbyn leadership, that could pose a serious challenge to the dominance of the SNP in Scotland – but the price of a Scottish recovery would be crucifixion by the right-wing press in England. The reality is that there is nothing Labour can do to restore its appeal both north and south of the Border. The malaise of Labour is the fag end of British politics. We’re in the end times for the Union.