Dear All
As you know, I sat out the Westminster 2015 election, I was
just a bystander on the sidelines watching the World go by, the SNP did well
but the success was due to a rejection of the Scottish Labour Party.
Jim Murphy as I commented led the Scottish Labour Party to
the worse defeat in its history in Scotland for over a century.
In Feb 2015 after watching the inept Scottish Labour campaign,
I did this post:
In the post, I said various things but this sums it up:
“Jim Murphy should drop the call for alcohol to be
re-introduced at football matches, in fact, he should drop his ‘fitba’ campaign
all together; he is struggling at present because he isn’t producing policies
of real significance to change lives of those who need it most in society”.
Jim Murphy thought that by offering nothing to the people of
Scotland ,
he and Scottish Labour would be swept in as they thought with independence
defeated at the ballot box; it was back to business as usual.
My take on the campaign was getting bevvied at fitba the
most pressing social justice issue in Scotland , add to it, his campaign
was a fraud because Westminster MPs had no say whatsoever in changing the law;
as it was a reserved matter for Holyrood.
I will be blunt, basically the Scottish Labour campaign team
thought working class people were stupid cunts and as such they could be conned
and duped. The idea as we all know backfired but the episode showed how much
contempt was demonstrated towards people.
Now, it seems two and a half years later, the Labour MSP
Neil Findlay has decided to write a book. In his book, he wrote:
Former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was an
“insincere” Blairite who would “brief and undermine colleagues” to further his
ambitions.
He also added that Murphy “hasn't a principled bone in his
body”.
Findlay also goes on to talk about the disaster of 2015
mirroring what I blogged on years ago in part, recording his take at the time
of the 2014 independence referendum, the disastrous 2015 General Election and
assorted Labour leadership contests which followed afterwards.
"My reflections on Jim Murphy: He was a capable
communicator; a fixer who saw himself as a big beast. From being a student
activist he set out to be an MP and believed his own PR. Every move was about
his power and bolstering his control. He saw everything as the next tactic; little was about
principle. Politics was an exercise in PR. He was insincere and
indulged in every trick and manoeuvre he learned from the Blairite recipe book.
He would brief and undermine colleagues if it suited him."
Murphy’s big thing during the independence referendum was
his 100 day tour which saw him coming in contact with the Nationalists who came
to shout him down. He was playing them like a fiddle for his own benefit. I supported the Better Together campaign in Pollok as I mentioned no one from the Labour
Party came out to help the small dedicated team.
Not a single Labour MP, MSP, Councillor or Pollok Labour
activist came out, Labour decided to do their own campaign which was a complete
farce. Of the two staged managed Better Together hosted at Silverburn Shopping
Centre, you might have been under the impression that they were active.
It was just a photo op, if you research deep enough, you
might find the photos sit on the web, one thing you wouldn’t see was my
picture, I turned up at the event but was excluded from the photo, this wasn’t
just bad manners, it was also to give the false impression that Pollok CLP was
fighting for the Union.
Better Together was run by Scottish Labour however, they had
to let the Tories in as well so that meant the organisation wasn’t properly
supported by the Labour Party, hence their own campaign ran parallel. Their
campaign was beset by problems, no one to work for them, by that I mean
ordinary people. This was Scottish Labour in 2014 but to show you that the
problem of activism hasn’t been addressed nearly 3 years later, check out the
picture. I am putting up this picture for educational purposes, so how do you
understand this picture as to the health of Scottish Labour in Pollok CLP?
Lets start, the number of people in the photograph is 18
people, plus you add in the photographer brings the total up to 19, now, the
trick is subtract everyone who doesn’t live in the Pollok Constituency. The
majority of the activists are either Labour cllrs, ex councillors, MSPs, ex MSPs or party officials.
So, yet again, why won’t working class members in Pollok CLP come out?
The problem is that Scottish Labour is a party in decline,
the reason for the decline brings us onto another toxic topic, Blairites, this
group controls Scottish Labour, when karl Marx spoke of the vanguard of the
proletariat, he didn’t mean the ‘middle class’. Marx said that the leaders of
the working class must come from the working class; this isn’t the Labour Party
at present. The civil war between the Corbyn mob and Blairites to me is in part
a phoney war between one set of middle class people wanting to replace the
incumbent middle class people who claim they are the ‘vanguard of the
proletariat’.
Scottish Labour in my opinion is a mirror image of the SNP;
just as the SNP have no progressive left wing policies, neither does the Labour
Party. As such the people of Scotland
dumped the Scottish Labour Party because they had nothing to offer, and on the
key issue of representation, there was a void.
We are at the stage were people are speaking out and
demanding that Scottish and UK Labour's most senior officials should be
purged from the party to stop Blairites seeking to “undermine” Jeremy
Corbyn. This is the view of influential left wing journal, the Scottish Left
Review. They are going to state that Scottish Labour’s general secretary Brian
Roy should be removed, he is the son of Frank Roy, the former Labour MP. If you
look at the Labour Party senior people, their relatives seem to get candidacies
and positions with complete easy.
However in time, every organisation which operates that way
reaches a tipping point, the spear to get rid of so many Blairites is headed up
by Momentum, they have an agenda and they want Kezia Dugdale gone as Leader of
the party in Scotland .
I have no fixed view on whether she should come or go basically because I don’t
care. As well as Roy being removed the Labour's UK general
secretary Iain McNicol should also be ousted according to the Scottish Left
Review. During the leadership contest I think many would sign up for the
removal of Iain McNicol. In the case of Roy ,
his association to Dugdale means his position is seen by some if one goes; the
other goes as well.
Corbyn's supporters need "control of the party
machine" to promote radical policies and build a mass movement, however,
having one thing, control doesn’t guarantee the rest of the agenda. In the past
under what was termed the ‘loony left’, the Labour Party was unelectable and
for good reason. In the election of 2017, I held my nose and voted for the
Labour candidate Matt Kerr, I had no faith in him whatsoever, I even walked
away from his campaign because the attitude displayed towards me.
I get the impression, that it doesn’t matter who controls Scottish
Labour from what is presently there as members, Henry Ford famously said of the
model T Ford, ‘you can have any colour as long as it is black’, this tends to mirror
the attitude towards the working class in Scottish Labour and why so many
deserted the party as members and voters.
Kezia Dugdale is finished as leader, it is a question of
when she goes, not if, because the Momentum crowd want her gone.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
11 comments:
Speaking of Labour, George, just to bring up Brexit, what's going on with Corbyn trying to keep Britain in the "single market" and "the schengen area" atm? Because it seems to me his attempt to do that would make Brexit pointless, and us restricted by and beholden to the EU, and unable to do anything about it.
I mean, if we're leaving the EU, we might as well try and take the opportunities and get the advantages of it, because the last thing we all want is the worst of both worlds.
lie@bour will have to wait until 2030 before they ever get a majority again - if ever. They will have to wait till the generation under 45 votes them. A generation that has no experience of a Labour government. Regardless who the leader is, regardless what their manifesto says. Nobody older than 45 will ever vote that scum again.
Britain isn't in the Schengen area, which is the passport free travel zone that covers many of the nations of the EU.
I agree we do need to leave the single market. All the bad stuff comes with the single market so it has to go, in the long run. We could perhaps stay in temporarily while setting up our own free trade deals. But once that's done we need to leave.
Corbyn has historically been very anti EU so I wouldn't worry too much about him. In the event he does start playing up, he has little influence. The legislation passed earlier this year plus the triggering of article 50 means that parliament can't do much to stop brexit - even a hard brexit, if the government desires it.
Perhaps it's best if kez does go. The Scottish central belters want a socialist party to vote for. Give it to them and let's get rid of the SNP.
Cheers Aldo, that sheds some light on the subject.
iTS LIKE FIGHTING THE Nazis right now we must destroy the SSNP at ANY cost
Then its get rid of the red loons
Crookie
ALDO
Here's Tae Us; Wha's Like Us?......Damn few
Aye, let's vote for a socialist party that is not a socialist party. Or a nationalist party that is not a national party. Or we could just vote Tory and get Tory.
Great call and can I say George Laird right again as many of us do in private.
Barely a day since posting of this and she's gone with some journalists quoting close sources as saying " (she) hounded out by JC's mob".
Either very insightful George (which iv come to expect from you) or you had a source close to it.
Either way another nail in coffin of labour in general but Scottish labour overall. As for the reports of momentum having a hand in her ousting they remind me more and more of hitlers brown shirts when he was rising through power.
She's gone but was she pushed or decided to jump first ?
Hi Richard
I have as you note a habit of being very insightful, I just look at things as they are without fluff.
George
Post a Comment