What is the point of you?

Jesus wept, Keir Hardie spun in his grave, the ghost of Aneurin Bevin howled in impotent rage at the vacuity of the press release, the spirits of the Jarrow marchers sat down and wept, and millions of former supporters raised their eyebrows to the skies and sighed at the Labour party – what is the bloody point of you? And the only answer is the meaningless self-serving waffle of a party that’s lost its way, a party that couldn’t even find a moral compass if it was lodged up its own arse.

There is no point to Labour, none at all. No meaning. No purpose. No bloody sense. All there is is the cold hearted triangulation of a spin doctor who’s never had to struggle against poverty or exclusion. Labour has announced that there’s very little they’re going to do to oppose as the Tories set fire to the social contract that Labour fought so hard to establish all those decades ago. The party is not going to oppose the cuts that the Tories are introducing to the benefits system, not going to oppose the loss of the principle that each mouth deserve to be fed. They’ve abandoned the principle of to each according to their need. Labour not only supports the final cutting through of the social safety net, they’re helping the Tories with the scissors. Spin and snip as they cut their own tendons, and the party falls never to stand again.

What is the point of you Labour? Nothing, nothing but to make us weep and rage at your wilful impotence, to scream silently in the vacuum of your lost soul. The hopes of our grandparents betrayed, their memories traduced. What is the point of you?

When you lose your principles, you lose your soul. A week is a long time in politics, and in fifty years you can lose your soul and turn into a zombie, the living husk of a political party, going through the motions but without any sense of purpose. Labour is the vampire party, sucking on the aspirations and hopes of working class people, existing for nothing but the perpetuation of its cadre of politicians. The lesson this teaches us is that one Labour MP, one Labour MSP, one Labour councillor, is one too many. We must do to them what we did to the Tories – consign them to the wilderness of political untouchability.

The Tories pretend to govern in the interests of the whole country, and Labour pretend to oppose them. The little people are expected to continue with a charade that wouldn’t be out of place in a dystopian novel, living a harsh reality caught between two falsehoods.

Labour in Scotland demand that the SNP set out they’re going to protect Scotland’s poor from the Tory cuts, while UK Labour refuse to oppose them. This is clearly what they meant during the independence referendum when they claimed that being part of the UK produced the best of both worlds. Labour gets to have its austerity cake across the UK as a whole, and still gets its SNP bad headlines in the Daily Record. The Tory media propagates the lie that the financial crisis was the fault of the poor, and Labour doesn’t have the balls to stand up and call a lie a lie. It meekly goes along with it in the hope of sooking up to the middle class voters in Tory swing seats. Labour is happy with the notion of making those who rely on benefits and those on low wages foot the bill for the financial disaster that Labour and the Tories allowed to happen by turning a blind eye to the excesses of the banks. The lost themselves in the pursuit of power and money.

So this is the redistribution that Gordie Broon spoke of, the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. Pooling and sharing means the poor pool so that the rich can share. And Labour is just fine with all of this, because even the most mousy mealy mouthed protest will attract the wrath of press barons that Labour never had the balls to hold in check. Labour created the means of its own destruction, and acquiesces in it meekly. Well they can destroy themselves, but we’re damned if they take us with them.

The party has lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, to tell the difference between good and evil. When you can’t even bring yourself to oppose such an obvious obscenity as insisting that a woman who has a third child as a result of rape must prove that rape to a faceless official in the Job Centre who has an incentive for not believing her, then all is lost.

Labour’s excuse is that it would be wrong of them to tell voters that they were wrong to vote for a party that does wrong. When Labour is too afraid to defend what’s right in case it stops them getting the votes of those who support wrong – what’s the point of you then Labour? If the only way to become the government is to become the Tories, then there is no need to bother with a Labour party at all. We’ve already got evil Tories, we don’t require any more of them. We have them in abundance already.

And this, Labour, this is why we no longer tolerate you amongst us, why you can no longer participate in our struggles. You are dead to us because you’re dead to yourselves. The annihilation you experienced in May was only the beginning, by the time we’ve finished with you you will be a footnote in history. We are the opposition to the Tories, not you.

So to the last few remnants of that battered party – if you have a shred of dignity left, if you still value the hopes and aspirations of the working classes above the pursuit of power for power’s sake, then leave Labour, take to the lifeboats, join the SNP, the Greens, the SSP, and help us build a better Scotland. Help us to push the doors of opportunity open, or decline into a sub-Tory irrelevance, bereft of principle, meaning or morality. There is a better way, a way out of this nightmare. It’s called independence. And now it’s clearer than it ever was that it’s the only escape.

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