AS I write this, I have in front of me a four-page leaflet from the self-proclaimed Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. There are half a dozen smiling images of Ruth Davidson and Theresa May and a couple of scowling photos of Nicola Sturgeon.
It’s a change from the pictures of men in grey suits that used to adorn every political leaflet from mainstream parties – which is the only positive thing that can be said about it. Indeed, it ranks among the most abysmal political pamphlets I’ve ever set eyes on.
There’s not a single word about jobs and unemployment. It has nothing to say even about the traditional Tory obsessions of immigration, crime and defence.
Brexit does not a merit a single mention – even though it was the excuse used to justify calling this election in the first place. Almost every sentence however is laden with references to independence. In fact, there are 20 separate references to a future independence referendum which has not even been called. That’s what I would call obsessive.
With every day of this General Election campaign, Ruth Davidson is being revealed as a one-trick pony, a blinkered British nationalist whose knowledge of wider current affairs could be scribbled on the back of a postage stamp.
Paradoxically, the louder the Scottish Tory leader trumpets her Unionism, the more clearly she demonstrates that the United Kingdom is already irreparably fractured. Why? Because even her own dyed-in the-wool, red white and blue party is fighting an entirely different election campaign than in the rest of the UK.
In the past, British General Elections were about choosing the next Westminster Government. Yes, there would be some protest votes from time to time – and I was one of those who cast my vote for independence even when it looked like a forlorn gesture. But for most people, it was a simple two-horse race between the two big UK parties.
That has changed forever. I have political friends in England who in the past year or two have been galvanised by Jeremy Corbyn.
Good luck to them. They have nowhere else to go. If I lived south of the Border, right now I’d be I’d be doing what I could to build Corbyn’s vote.
His manifesto is not nearly as radical as it’s been portrayed by the right-wing press. It supports the renewal of Trident. And, according to analysis by the think-tank the Resolution Foundation, it will keep £7 billion of George Osborne’s £9bn programme of benefit cuts. It looks like an uncomfortable compromise between the Corbynites and the Blairites. Yet it still represents a major shift to the left.
But like the Ruth Davidson’s tartan Tory Party, Scottish Labour is fighting an entirely different election. Here, their campaign is not about social justice, or workers’ rights, or public services. Nor is it about resisting a hard Tory Brexit designed to turn the UK into a citadel of unfettered free market capitalism liberated from such inconveniences as workers’ rights or environmental protection.
Labour’s campaign in Scotland is about locking Scotland into the United Kingdom forever. The rump party led by Dugdale has made it abundantly clear, over and over and over again, that a right-wing Tory UK, steeped in racism and class privilege is preferable to a leftward moving, independent Scotland striving towards Scandinavian-style equality.
Which is why the most recent YouGov polling shows Kezia Dugdale’s Scottish Labour on 19 per cent and stagnating, while Corbyn’s British Labour is on 35 per cent and surging forward.
These figures must make uncomfortable reading for the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, which is stronger in Scotland than in any other part of Britain.
In August 2015, during the first of the two recent Labour leadership contests, Kezia Dugdale warned that a Jeremy Corbyn victory would leave Labour “carping on the sidelines”. In June 2016, she demanded that the Labour leader resign his post because he had lost the support of four out of five members of the parliamentary party. And after Corbyn won a second leadership election, in September last year, she proclaimed that Labour was now “unelectable”.
Yet if the latest poll figures were to be replicated at the ballot box on June 8, Corbyn would end up five points ahead of Ed Miliband in 2015 and six points ahead of Gordon Brown in 2010. Support for Scottish Labour meanwhile has slumped by four points even compared to its disastrous 2015 election, and down 23 points since 2010.
I don’t hold my breath, but surely someone, somewhere within Scottish Labour will be intelligent enough and brave enough to demand that heads should roll and that the party should have a radical rethink on independence.
To some of my pro-Labour friends down south, I will say this. The latest polls are encouraging, but even if the political momentum of the past week can be sustained until June 8, there is no prospect of an overall Labour majority and little prospect even of Labour becoming the biggest single party. That’s not because of Corbyn, but because of the collapse of Labour thanks to the Blairite Unionists, and the disintegration of the LibDem and Ukip votes in England, most of which have been mopped up by the Tories.
But there is at least an outside prospect of a progressive alliance of Labour, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party. So why should anyone on the left in Scotland aid the Tories by voting Labour? In my own constituency, it’s a straight fight between the SNP and the Tories – and I’m pretty sure which of the two parties Jeremy Corbyn would want to see winning Perthshire North and similar seats.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for Scottish Labour whose irrational hostility to independence and tribal hatred of the SNP has driven them into the political wilderness.
Scotland deserves a better opposition than the Tories. Right now, until the Unionist Blairites are defeated and the party wipes the slate clean and starts all over again on its attitude to independence, Labour in Scotland remains moribund. It is entirely their own fault that, in the words of Kezia Dugdale, they are confined to “carping on the sidelines”.
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