Scottish Labour in crisis, Anas Sarwar announces he will stand for Labour leadership against Richard Leonard, Anas isn’t the man to unity the Scottish Labour and lead it to power; a ‘10 to midnight’ conversion to being a Corbyn supporter isn’t going to wash with the Momentum crowd in Scotland, Scottish Labour needs a leader from the many not the privileged few

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’.

http://glasgowunihumanrights.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/scottish-labours-ticking-leadership.html

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