Dear All
At the present moment the Scottish Labour Party is running
with the slogan ‘for the many, not the few’. As slogans go, it is okay, but it
is a slogan. The Scottish Labour Party is in crisis, the next leader of the
Labour in Scotland
is said to be inheriting a ‘poisoned chalice’. Anas Sarwar has today announced
that he will be a candidate in the Scottish Labour leadership contest.
This means that the former Deputy leader will go head to
head with left-winger Richard Leonard.
Richard Leonard is pro Corbyn and that is what the Scottish
Labour Party needs, what makes Anas unsuitable is that he previously was the
Deputy leader then he resigned, if elected the Momentum crowd who were in the
process of targeting Kezia Dugdale with just switch focus to him.
Anas Sarwar will not as he says lead the party "back to
power", I don’t know where he gets that idea from, he won’t unity the
party and he certainly won’t bring back the working class voters.
Why is it; some in the Labour Party thinks that a privately
educated millionaire should be leading a supposedly working class party? Why
can’t they find a true working class person to lead a working class party? The
middle class university educated Blairities took over control of the Labour
Party and led it to disaster by relying on the working class vote. In a
previously article I wrote:
‘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’.
It seems that the few still seem to think that saying that
‘for the many, not the few’ makes up for the fact that the Scottish Labour
Party is still clinging to its old Blairitie control structure. Anas Sarwar
says he is a centrist, but that is not what is needed, he doesn’t represent
change.
Anas Sarwar said:
“Labour is revitalised in Scotland and I am ready to unite
our party and lead us back to power”.
The first part is bullshit, Labour isn’t revitalised in
Scotland, this is delusion on his part, I suspect that is based on the increase
in seats, however the reasons for many wins in 2017 is that the public support
for the SNP is going backwards. You could equally say that the Scottish
Conservatives are revitalised in Scotland
since they took more seats in Scotland
than Scottish Labour.
So, don’t they have more of a claim to say that they are
ready to be the primary challenger in the 2021 Holyrood election?
After all, they won more seats in Westminster
and they won more seats in Holyrood, in case it slipped past Anas, the Scottish
Labour Party is the third party of Scotland as recent elections have
proven time and time again.
As to his claim that he is ‘ready to unite our party’, isn’t
any contender, where is the substance to support this claim? He made it when is
the evidence because beyond the platitudes someone is bound to ask for proof.
As to his last part of his claim that he will Scottish
Labour back to power, I find that to be just rhetoric, he is living in the same
dream world that Kezia Dugdale was staying in during her leadership which when
reality kicked in she bailed out.
On the other side of the leadership battle sits Richard
Leonard, if you haven’t heard of him don’t worry, neither has the majority of Scotland .
He claims the party, which won seven seats north of the border, could
have been even more successful if it had aligned itself more closely with
Jeremy Corbyn.
Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t a factor in the 2017 Westminster
election because the Labour Party in Scotland is Blairite controlled,
and Kezia Dugdale as we all know didn’t back Corbyn which was another one of
her catalogue of mistakes during her two year spell as leader before bailing
out.
Leadership isn’t for everyone, and Kezia should have
remembered what she said before that she wasn’t a leader.
As I have repeatedly blogged, the Scottish Labour Party is
in no fit state to campaign, in my last Labour post, I highlighted that the
Cardonald campaign was effectively being done by a small group of elected
people and staffers from across Glasgow .
This is a serious problem in constituencies which means that some of deadbeats
standing for public office require a national bounce to get them elected
because they don’t have the ability to do so off their own back. A national
bounce got Tasmina Ahmed-Shiekh into public office in 2015, when the public
wised up to her, they got rid of her a mere two years later.
So, the choice for the Scottish Labour Party in the 2017
leadership contest is poor, there needs to be more candidates, there needs to
be more choice, and I would suggest that there needs to be a Richard Leonard
victory.
If Anas Sarwar is elected the first question which then
follows is when will he resign, Scottish Labour doesn’t need a privately
educated millionaire MSP to lead it, it needs a working class leader to connect
with the public.
If Richard Leonard gets in, does he know what his job is? In
case he doesn’t I will state it, his job is what Corbyn should be doing,
finding and training up the next leadership class of working class people to
run the Labour Party and represent it effectively.
Finally, in writing this I did factor in the help that Anas
Sarwar has given to help the homeless at the Cadogan Street soup kitchen along with
other people from the Labour Party.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
4 comments:
Scottish Labour needs a Corbynite. If the Scottish Central Belters want socialism, give it to them. Anything that sucks the life out of the SNP and their mini me Green pals has to be good. Whoever is the most left wing candidate should get the gig. Plain and simple. Then we have a conservative party, a socialist party and a centrist liberal party - the best possible combination to pick apart what remains of SNP/Green support.
I have been rather amused though at the thought of the super PC SNP going up against Sarwar. They'd be so afraid to do or say anything that could be seen as racist, I think it would be genuinely quite funny to watch.
But, no, it has to be Leonard.
Sarwar is a smelly remnant left over from the Bliar\Broon years. He believes the poor are scum, he’s 100% Blairite. Let him win. Lie@bour will truly be finished in Scotland. While we’re at it ‘let’s hope Krankie face stays the leader of the SNP' At the next Holyrood election. The Tories, even with mental Ruth at the helm, will win by a huge majority.
Dear Anon
I think you are being a tad unkind.
George
"He believes the poor are scum".
I've got news for you - some of them are!
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