Little yellow minions and Wee Dougie’s delusions

Danny Alexander’s other boss, the Cleggy one not the Osborne one, is in Scotland today in a vain attempt to rally what troops the Lib Dems have got left, which basically consist of Wullie Rennie, the Orkney Koalamichael, and those half dozen or so Lib Dem cooncillors who have not yet committed ritual suicide by throwing themselves under the wheels of Clegg’s election battle bus.

Nick made the bold statement that he discounted the polls which show the Lib Dems are facing almost total wipe out in Scotland, a statement which politicians always make in public when faced with impending doom. However unlike the leader of Labour’s Scottish Accounting Unit, who made the delusional claim that his party was going to increase the number of seats it holds at the General Wipe Out in May – sorry, General Election – the Cleggy one simply restricted himself to saying that people were going to be surprised by the number of seats that the Lib Dems held after the election, predicting that his party may not lose as many of its 11 seats as the polls forecast. This is a claim which is much easier to fulfil, as most people will be gobsmacked if the Lib Dems manage to hold onto as many as two seats. Danny Alexander, most assuredly, will not be amongst them.

On Thursday, looking exactly like a prisoner making a plea of mitigation before sentencing, Danny Alexander stood outside the Treasury brandishing what looked like a yellow Black and Decker case. The yellow case may have contained the tools used by the Lib Dems to drill into their skulls during coalition negotiations with the Tories and then extract that part of their brains where their social consciences formerly resided. Or possibly it was Danny’s school lunch box, and contained a half eaten austerity sandwich, his CV and a reference from George Osborne saying “best minion ever”. Danny’s going to need it because he will be looking for a new job very soon, having already been convicted in the court of public opinion and sentenced to vanish like a plook drowned in Clearasil. Whatever it was he was waving sheepishly before the cameras, it was yellow, plasticky, and deeply unconvincing, which is also a fairly accurate description of the person who was holding it.

Allegedly the box contained the Lib Dem’s alternative budget, which bears the same relationship to the real budget as Jim Murphy’s policy diarrhoea bears to socialism. Danny intended to present his fantasy budget to the House of Commons, despite being told off by the Speaker beforehand that he could do no such thing. Apparently the budget speeches in the House of Commons are not the place for making party political points – who knew? Certainly not Danny. Danny’s words echoed round an almost empty Commons Chamber, a pointless charade in a venue dedicated to pointless charades. Even Nick Clegg was too embarrassed to remain longer than ten minutes – proving that he does have some slight sense of shame after all.

Danny’s pathetic attempt to pretend that he’d have done everything differently might have had a modicum more credibility if he’d not spent the past five years enthusiastically out-Osborning Osborne, and giving every indication that he was enjoying himself in the process. However now that Danny is staring electoral annihilation in the nads he cut off and handed to the Tories on a plate, he’s desperately trying to distance himself from the public perception of him as George Osborne’s little yellow minion. The little minions in the animated movie are yellow too, but unlike Danny they’re funny on purpose.

But no one is convinced by Danny’s cunning stunt, Danny is the cut price Dracula in the Blood Bank, the Hammer Horror B-movie variety when they’d just got camp and were no longer scary. Danny and his party are just the supporting act to the main feature. The Lib Dems are merely a side-show, populated by freaks.

The main feature, for which Scotland is already stocking up on popcorn, is of course the impending doom of Jim Murphy’s Accounting Unit. Earlier this week the other Alexander facing doom, the Wee Dougie one, mused that his party’s demise was all the fault of people talking to one another on the interwebbies, and nothing to do with the fact that the Labour party is inhabited by, and a wholly owned subsidiary of, chancers, shysters, placepersons, balloons, doormats, Neanderthals, creatures who make even Danny Alexander look like he’s got some moral fibre, and worse, much worse – Magrit Curran.

The last time Scotland gave Labour a kicking, in 2011, Labour solemnly vowed that it would learn and it would listen, and it made a similar vow the time before that too, back in 2007. Not a great deal happened except for an awful lot of blaming the SNP for everything up to and including increasing the threat of alien invasion and the end of civilisation. Then there’s that other vow that Labour had a central role in just days before the independence referendum. By now it’s clear to just about everyone in Scotland who has a functioning neo-cortex and who isn’t an editorial writer for the Daily Record, that Labour’s definition of “vow” is remarkably similar to that of a junkie who promises they going to change just before they steal your wallet and piss on your flower bed.

In Labour’s case the drug of choice is political power, and since the party shows no signs of reforming itself, nor shows any signs of being capable of reforming itself, and indeed displays no concept that it understands what listening to the voters actually means, then the only solution is to force it to go cold turkey. If Labour won’t change itself, then the voters will change Labour for it, because it clearly takes a voter to do a politician’s job for them. We’ll change Labour from a party of careerist politicians, into a party of ex-politicians who’ve lost their careers. And as a bonus, Danny Alexander and the Lib Dems will get locked into a little plastic yellow box, which will promptly be put in the shed, and forgotten about for the next three decades.

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