Scottish Labour’s ticking leadership time bomb, Corbyn’s Momentum crowd want Kezia Dugdale gone as leader of party north of the border, now the Scottish Left Review demand purge of Blairites and removal of Scottish Labour’s general secretary Brian Roy, the party at present is struggling to have a future with the working class

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:

http://glasgowunihumanrights.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/fucking-it-all-up-labour-leader-jim.html

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.

Findlay writes:

"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