FORMER Labour MP Tom Harris has “genuinely” apologised for creating a “fair amount of the bad feeling between Labour and the SNP” .
In a strikingly open and honest blog post about where he thinks politics should be, Harris also said that Jim Murphy “picked fights too much” and that there is “little difference” between the administrations of Jack McConnell and Nicola Sturgeon.
In his post on the Labour Hame website, titled “Time to grow up, boys and girls”, Harris says that it is disingenuous for Labour to claim that schools and hospitals are worse off under the SNP.
Harris writes: “On the main devolved areas of policy, it’s very difficult to see much difference in the approach of Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish Government to that of Jack McConnell’s Scottish Executive. That’s not to say we don’t try. Scottish health and education are not the success story the SNP would like us to believe. But then, neither were they under the last
Labour-LibDem regime.
Policy is still pretty much the same, and in an alternative universe where Labour were still in power at Holyrood, the budgets would be indistinguishable too.”
The former MP for Glasgow Cathcart, who saw a 25 per cent swing deliver his SNP rival Stewart McDonald a majority of 12,000 in May’s election, also wrote that he found much of political discourse “tiresome” and “dishonest”.
Harris, who was forced to stand down from his position as Scottish Labour’s “New Media Guru” in 2012 after posting a video jokingly comparing Alex Salmond to Hitler, says the majority of people who stand for election “are good people” with “far more to agree about than to disagree about”.
“Yes, we’re let down by the fringes,” he writes, “by the abusive who use Twitter to make up for their own lack of friends. But they can be so easily ignored. Instead we raise them up to the full glare of publicity and invite the world to regard them as typical of whichever party they represent.” They are not, he says.
Harris continues: “Maybe it’s easy for me to say all this now I’m no longer an elected politician.
“And maybe (certainly, actually) I’ve been responsible myself for a fair amount of the bad feeling that exists between Scottish Labour and the SNP. And for that I genuinely apologise.”
He saves praise for Jim Murphy, who, says Harris, is a “good guy” who “maybe likes to pick fights a bit too much,” and Nicola Sturgeon, who is “a committed social democrat with values that the vast majority of Scottish Labour members would share”.
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