ANAS Sarwar has admitted what we all already knew – that in order to get through the Holyrood election in May, the Labour Party in Scotland were only pretending to function. It could be said that Sarwar's observation applies equally to the broader Labour Party across the UK.
Despite the fact that we currently have a British government which is pretty much universally acknowledged to be the most chaotic, incompetent and corrupt in living memory, Keir Starmer's Labour still cannot build up a convincing polling lead over Boris Johnson's Conservative party of misgovernment, and that's before taking into account the Conservative attempts to suppress voter participation, or the Boundary Commission review of Westminster constituencies which is due to report in 2023, which is widely expected to favour the Conservatives over Labour.
All across the UK, there are shortages in supermarkets and shortages of fuel. These have been grievously exacerbated by the Conservatives' needlessly hard and ideologically driven Brexit, but Labour are unable to mount an effective attack on the Conservatives over Brexit because in a failed effort to appeal to Brexit-supporting working-class communities in the North of England, Labour is now also a party of Brexit. The large number of Labour supporters in England and Scotland who oppose Brexit have effectively been abandoned.
Labour have been left without a convincing story to tell. That's a fatal flaw in politics because political success is determined by who has the most convincing and plausible story to tell.
This piece is an excerpt from today's REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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