A Very Un-British Coup; The Labour Party plan to oust Boris Johnson by a no-confidence motion gains support from SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, she says she is prepared to make Jeremy Corbyn PM, the SNP want a general election because the Scottish Labour Party is weak, the SNP has used this tactic before, they want to wipe out Labour in Scotland before any possible second independence referendum

Dear All

If the UK doesn’t leave the EU on the 31st of October 2019, you will know one thing, democracy is dead and the illusion that it exists has been shattered forever. The people of the UK voted to leave the EU, they won the vote fair and square. The political class transferred sovereign to the British people and said they would abide by the decision. When sovereignty was transferred back to Parliament to implement the will of the people, certain MPs decided to betray us.

This begs the question, who do MPs exactly represent?

Brexit has raised the most serious questions about our democracy, in fact a key question is why you should be loyal to a party if the party isn’t loyal to you? The Labour Party promised under Jeremy Corbyn to deliver Brexit and respect the vote. Now the Labour Party has a problem, in a way this problem is more dangerous to them than the Westminster expenses scandal. In Scotland, if there is an election, the Scottish Labour Party stands to be effectively wiped out again according to polls. Can you imagine a Scotland where there are no Labour MPs at Westminster? It is a hard concept to given the history of the party but increasingly this scenario isn’t that far-fetched.

Toss into the mix that The Labour Party has effectively thrown the Scottish operation under the bus recently in favour of the SNP, and you get a sense of a party that has lost direction to head into the wrong direction. If you could say anything about the current state of Scottish Labour is that it needs reform and revival from the grassroots right up to the very top to combat the threat posed by the SNP. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell’s strategy appears to want to seize power at any cost, and that includes making a deal with the Devil.

Although the SNP has previously said under Nicola Sturgeon that they would put Labour in power under the Ed Miliband tenure as leader, we all saw how that turned out. They didn’t, but what they did was to make Scottish Labour seem unviable as a party to vote for. 2015 is the proof of the pudding, so when Nicola Sturgeon says she is prepared to make Jeremy Corbyn PM to avoid no-deal Brexit, what she is trying is the same trick on the public which the SNP used before. When Miliabnd sat on the fence, before eventually climbing off, he managed in part to wipe out the Labour Party in Scotland as an electoral force. Ed Miliband was lacking in leadership in so many ways.

The SNP won 56 MPs, the biggest bunch of chancers to enter Westminster 2015.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal to other parties to oust Boris Johnson and form a temporary caretaker government is a highly dubious maneuver which naturally has attracted the support of Nicola Sturgeon. Previously the SNP were doing badly, but the collapse of the Scottish Labour Party in the EU election has given them a boost. Not by getting more voters but by others not generating enough votes. Recent polls put the SNP on course for big gains, which is entirely due to the weakness of other parties mainly Scottish Labour. Recently Kezia Dugdale who left as an MSP said the maths didn’t work out for Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/kezia-dugdale-labour-s-electoral-maths-means-jeremy-corbyn-won-t-win-a-general-election-1-4983897

The fly in the ointment for the Labour Party could be the effect of the Brexit Party in places such as the North of England and other strong Brexit supporting areas. However all isn’t sunny and rosy in the garden for them, they need a raft of policies and need a network of people in constituencies something they lack. Given Westminster is fought in a First Past The Post manner, a different type of campaigning is needed, more local, more focused, which means more bodies on the ground. There is no history of ‘long campaigns’ by the Brexit Party, and to try and build a network while at the same time running a six week short campaign is problematic.

When the buzzer is officially sounded, there are 42 days to make your pitch to the voters, and if you lack bodies, you will be working night and day trying to get the max impact with whatever resources you can cobble together. Add to it if you don’t have local knowledge, you are at a real disadvantage, you see as in all things, you need a plan.

I don’t see a Boris Johnson coup or the formation of a temporary caretaker government because, it would a mistake. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn needs to face off against Boris Johnson in a general election, no other option will be seen as honourable by the public. If this scenario played out, if Corbyn was temp PM, he would have to step down for the PM in a general election. You don’t stab Caesar in the back and then be forgiven by the public, didn’t work during the Roman Empire, and won’t work today.

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s plan, he would table a no-confidence motion in the current government as soon as the numbers were there to pass it. He would then lead a “strictly time-limited” administration to extend the deadline for Brexit and call a general election. You might think on paper this looks good, but they forget the 17.4 million who will be an angry mob. Imagine trying to sell a story that explains all this to an unhappy Brexit voter. Do you talk about democracy, do you talk about how you are representing them, do you just ignore the entire issue?

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is an opportunist, she knows that with Scottish Labour weak, divided and involved with in-fighting, this represents the best chance for her lame duck SNP MPs to hold onto their meal tickets.        

Scottish Conservative Jackson Carlaw said Mr Corbyn had been more than amiable to "surrendered on a second independence referendum" to the Nationalists.

He added:

"Both he and [shadow chancellor] John McDonnell are preparing to hand Nicola Sturgeon the referendum she wants in exchange for SNP support for a Labour government. Scottish Labour has been left dangling in the breeze – they are utterly irrelevant even to their own party. It’s clear who’s in charge of Scottish Labour and it’s not Richard Leonard. It’s a complete betrayal of thousands of Labour voters in Scotland who support the Union. It shows once and for all that Corbyn cannot be trusted to defend Scotland’s decision to remain in the UK."

Finally, history teaches us many lessons on the subject of betrayal, and for some people, what seems as a good idea at the time can have consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar

When people decided to do in Julius Caesar, there was an aftermath; the result unforeseen by the assassins was that Caesar's death precipitated the end of the Roman Republic. I really do wonder if Jeremy Corbyn has thought this idea out; really chew this down to the bone? This tactic has disaster written all over it, we need unity now because the decision to leave the EU has been made. In times like this, party interest must be set aside for national interest. Jeremy Corbyn has two choices; go down in history as a statesman or as a plotter. Plotter may seem so much fun, but it is temporary fun, and leaves a bitter after taste. Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for a general election must be clean; no other scenario can be logically played out resulting in success.

Yours sincerely

George Laird

The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University