The Govefish and the Baurheid doo

It’s Sunday, and Jim Murphy still hasn’t resigned. The half of Scotland who voted SNP on Thursday wants Jim to remain in post. Jim lost over 97% of Labour’s MPs, he could still repeat the trick with their MSPs next year. You’d think the Labour party in Scotland would have got rid of him by now, being tipped off by the fact that SNP supporters are so keen for Jim to stay, but Strathclyde Uni’s least successful student is still Labour’s Scottish branch manager even though one unnamed MSP told the Sunday Herald that Jim is as popular as herpes.

There is no cure for herpes, and it seems there is no cure for Jim either. There’s nothing in the rules of the Labour party that gives the other members the right to evict him. Labour’s increasingly desperate MSPs and cooncillors must rely on Jim’s grace and statesmanlike sense of personal responsibility to fall on his sword and resign for leading the party into its worst result since 1918. Now there’s a laugh. Jim Murphy and statesmanlike are two concepts that only ever appear in the same sentence if there’s a negative in there somewhere – like that negative there.

Jim Murphy’s like the office manager in the Full Monty who was too afraid to tell his wife he’d been made redundant, so he got up every day, put on a suit and took his sandwiches to a park bench where he managed the doos. As I type this, Jim is sitting on a park bench in Baurheid, telling the doos about his plans for a Labour recovery. I can still be First Minister you know, he told a particularly scabrous and vicious doo he mistook for John McTernan after it crapped on his head.

While all this is going on, Jim’s bosses dahn sarf are concluding that Labour’s problem was that it was trying to be too cuddly and compassionate and in fact if the party wants to be reelected they really need to be more Tory. Which means in turn that they’ve pretty much abandoned Scotland. The only hope for Labour in Scotland now is for them to secede from UK Labour and become a properly Scottish party. There’s a delicious irony, Labour in Scotland fought for a No result in the referendum and will end up having to declare its own independence because of it.

But Scotland has more serious problems than the light comedy relief of Jim’s and the Labour party’s self inflicted predicament. We’re faced with a right wing Tory government far more vicious than any Baurheid doo, and it’s going to crap on the heads of the poor and the vulnerable from a great height. Moreover this Tory government got into power in part by demonising Scotland as well as the usual suspects – the poor, the EU, and migrants.

Speaking on a personal level, as a gay man I was demonised by the Tory party in the 1980s during the Thatcher era, so am thrilled that as a Scot living in an era when gay rights are accepted as the norm that I’ve still got some of that demonic mojo going for me. Because let’s be honest here, if you scare the shiters out of the Tories, you must be doing something right. And now I’ve got all 5 million of you for company.

The Tory attack on civil liberties has already started. Theresa May remains as Home Secretary. She’s the woman who said that Scotland voting SNP would provoke the greatest crisis since the abdication and instead provoked the greatest outbreak of ridicule in the history of Twitter. She has introduced plans for a snoopers charter, allowing the security services access to emails and social media information. Nicky Morgan, who voted against gay marriage, is Equalities Minister. They keep telling us that irony is supposed to be a British virtue, but the Tories show no sign of comprehending it.

Meanwhile Michael Gove, half man half goldfish, has been appointed as the new Secretary of State for Justice. Gove had to flee from his native Aberdeen to Safetoryseatshire in England on account of the fact that even the Tory party in Scotland thought he was unelectable and was polluting the water of their goldfish bowl. Although to be fair, they’re pretty unelectable themselves. Despite the Action Krankie supposedly having a great election campaign, she saw a drop in the Tory vote to a mere 14.9%. So not that great a campaign. More tanks and soleros next time then Ruth.

The Govefish is a man who argued that abolishing hanging was a bad idea, criticised the investigation into police failings during the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation, and didn’t want an enquiry into Westminster paedophiles. Now he’s charged with abolishing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with some hauf-airsed “British Bill of Rights”, which you can be sure will take rights away from you and give them to your boss and to the state. Thankfully Michael Gove won’t be responsible for justice in Scotland, he will just be responsible for injustice throughout the UK.

The Scottish Government is obliged to comply with European Human Rights law, and human rights are devolved. According to legal blogger Lallands Peat Worrier, the Human Rights Act itself isn’t enshrined in the Scotland Act, but there are numerous legal strands connecting Scottish devolution with human rights legislation. Even with the active cooperation of the Scottish Government the Tories would find it neither easy nor straightforward to disentangle them, but there will be no cooperation, Cameron’s new British rights for British mince will run into the implacable opposition of a Scottish Parliament which will not roll over and allow the Tories to run roughshod over Scots law and an SNP which now has representation on every Commons committee. A legal mess is looming.

This is how the UK will end, amidst confusion and legal disputes as the Tories discover that the irresistible force of Westminster parliamentary sovereignty runs into the immovable object of Scottish popular sovereignty. Westminster says that parliament is sovereign and it can do as it pleases, meanwhile Scotland says that the people are sovereign and Westminster can bugger off. It’s going to be a rocky ride and we’re in for a whole lot more crap than can be produced by even the most scabrous Baurheid doo.

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