Dear All
For quite some considerable time, Henry McLeish has been
peddling the notion that Scottish Labour should split for the British Labour
Party.
He has been doing this in print and turning up at numerous
TV and radio shows to flog this idea, some people wrongly back it.
Scottish Labour has had some really bad election results
over the last few years, in 2015; the Westminster election produced the worst
result since 1918 for the party.
In 2016, the Scottish Labour Party not only lost the
election, they got pushed into third place at Holyrood by the Conservatives who
played a rather smart campaign.
The Scottish Conservatives backed the Union while some in
the Scottish Labour Party tried to woo Labour voters who voted for the Nationalists.
Why did the Labour voters walk?
They did so because the Scottish Labour Party lost their
trust, they weren’t being listened to and the continual failure to make things
better in a real sense for those at the bottom was growing.
A huge part of 1.6 million Scots voted for independence because
they saw that they didn’t have a future, not just for them but also for their
children.
As part of Henry McLeish’s pitch he says Scottish Labour
must split from UK party before Jeremy Corbyn wrecks chances of election win.
Jeremy Corbyn is not responsible for the decades of decline
in Scotland for Labour; do you remember Jim Murphy and Co talking about deep seated
problems?
How can any of that mess be laid at the door of Jeremy
Corbyn when we think back to the 2007 election and the rapid decline at the
2011 Holyrood election blame should be assigned to those who ran bad campaigns!
So what happens if the Scottish Labour Party splits from the
main party?
Will voters come flocking back to Scottish Labour because
all their decisions will be made by people in Scotland?
No!
People aren’t that simple and easily fooled; what the voters
want in a politician?
They want them to take care of things on an industrial scale
and when they come to them with a problem they want that problem fixed.
And that is a huge part of Labour’s problem, in the past
some people simply relied on the huge majority of the electorate and as such
some elected politicians just fobbed people off when they came through the
door. Over time resentment grew and when the tipping point was reached we had the
Westminster 2015 result.
After that, denial seemed to be entrenched as the Holyrood 2016
election campaign showed where some candidates standing simply didn’t try hard
enough, especially when they ranked high on the list.
Henry McLeish says Corbyn was "not the answer" to
Labour's decline, so who exactly is, someone in Scotland not by intellect but
by having an address here, is that a criteria that makes any sense?
What I suspect is going on is sometime which I have touched
on the push towards federalism, this is being done quietly by the Tories under
the Constitutional Reform Group.
It seems that the ‘elite’ are trying to get a groundswell
for federalism and make it out as a populist uprising.
Federalism doesn’t solve the constitutional question in the
United Kingdom at this present moment in time, because people aren’t buying
into it yet.
Henry McLeish is effectively in bed with the Tories, and the
SNP will come along for the ride later down the line and try and squeeze in as
the people who ‘done all the running’, but the reality is that the SNP and Nicola
Sturgeon are just pawns who have little influence on events.
In 2014, they lost the Scottish Independence referendum badly!
For Henry McLeish to use the "discontent and bitter
infighting" of the current leadership election shows he is just an
opportunist since he was pushing separate party long before this contest was
even thought of.
McLeish said:
"Regardless of the out -come an Independent Labour
Party in Scotland is essential. He also added an independent Scottish Labour
Party could be a "sister party" of UK Labour, which, he warned, had
become dominated by "the interests of London, Westminster and
England".
I just see Henry McLeish as a cheerleader for Scottish
independence and a useful idiot for the SNP who occasionally throw him a bone.
I don’t see the majority of the Scottish Labour Party willing
to vote for a split, this is wishful thinking on his part.
A question which might be worth asking is, does Henry
McLeish have the best interests of the Scottish Labour Party at heart?
At the present moment, there isn’t a government in waiting
sitting on the Labour benches at Holyrood having been pushed into third place.
To show that Henry McLeish is using the Leadership contest
to his own ends:
Read this article of 2014, Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t even the
Labour leader at that time, clearly McLeish falls into the category of not
being the cream of political talent in Scotland.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
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