Matron Dugdale’s Bide-a-Wee Mitigation Care Home

This week’s word is mitigation. It was last week’s word too, and it will be next week’s as well, and the week after that, stretching ahead into a depressing future where it doesn’t matter if you take the red pill or the blue pill – you’re always going to wake up with the Tories. In the nightmares past and the nightmares still to come Labour doesn’t cease with its demands that the Scottish Government mitigate the damage done to public services and the low paid and the vulnerable by bastert Tories looking to mitigate the tax bills of rich people and large companies. Mind you, Labour is a whole lot less keen on doing anything to prevent the need for mitigation in the first place. Labour is the party of respite care, not the party of cure.

Being force fed red pills and blue pills means that periodically Scotland comes down with a bout of the Tories. We live in a country whose body politic is sick and ill, infected by the disease of Toriness giein us the gyp and the humph. Symptoms include weakness, depression, raging anger, and projectile vomiting whenever Fluffymundell comes on the telly and does his colonial governor act. It’s a raging epidemic, when we’ve got one of our regular attack of the Tories thousands of people aren’t able to go into work, because they discover that they’ve been made redundant.

In order to get over the last long lasting attack of the Tories, Labour innoculated itself with the Thatcher virus and stopped being the workers’ party. It became the party of managing the expectations of the workers on behalf of the bosses. Now it makes no difference whether you vote Labour or you vote Tory, you get Tory. Take the red pill, same as the blue pill, they’ll both make you boak.

Labour didn’t vote against the latest round of cuts that the Tories are diseasing us with, they abstained. Then Labour’s peers in the Lords voted down a Lib Dem motion to send the tax credits cuts back to the Commons and instead voted for a motion to delay the effect – but to make them worse in the long term. It’s a bit like saying you’ve helped a family in debt by arranging a bigger loan at a higher rate of interest to pay off the loan that they were struggling with in the first. Vote Labour, get wongapolitics, and pay through the nose for Tory cuts. This is Labour’s definition of voting against the cuts – by voting for deeper cuts later on.

Then having failed dismally to vote against anything, Labour’s miserable shower of maliciously incompetents finally decided it was time that they did something. So they voted against devolving tax credits to the Scottish parliament. After all, who wants the power to stop a mad Tory axeman chopping off your legs when you have Labour to mitigate the damage with some uncosted bandages.

But never fear, Labour in Scotland is organising a national day of action on Saturday against the Tory cuts. They’re going to come to a shopping centre near you for an hour or two and hand out some leaflets, because that’s really going to put the shiters up George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith. No, say Labour, we’re not actually going to do anything to protect you from the Tories, and we’re not going to allow you to protect yourself from them. But look, isn’t this a lovely leaflet. Labour’s Walter Mitties and their mitigation are the methodone of politics, and they’re lost in a reverie where they’re actually relevant.

Now stepping out of the haze comes Gordie Broon, the man who worked his little ex-prime ministerial socks off, pacing up and down church halls in front of tiny invited audiences of media people up and down the land to make sure that Scotland would remain at the mercy of the illness, is terribly upset about how unwell we’ve all become. Labour is more concerned about the hypothetical virus of nationalism than they are about the very real contagion of Conservatism, and by denying us the cure they’re part of the disease.

Scotland wants a cure, not a wee trip to Matron Dugdale’s Bide-a-Wee Respite Care Home, but Labour and the Tories voted down a proposal to give the Scottish Parliament the power to choose when or if Scotland should have another independence referendum. Red pill, blue pill, both stick in the craw. But the red pill and the blue pill pushers don’t want us to stop taking the medicine that makes us sick. You can’t cure yourself, said Labour, you can have some of our mitigation medicine instead. Take this red pill, it comes with a cost to your self-esteem and your self-confidence. Take a dependency trip and we’ll put a bandage on the cuts that the nasty Tories inflicted. But we won’t let you escape from them. Labour needs the Tories to keep harming us all so Labour can pose as the angel with the red lamp, whoring Scotland for electoral profit. All for the myth of mitigation.

It’s not even like our illness is self-inflicted. England suffers from bouts of the Tories too, but in their case they bring it on themselves due to their unhealthy diet of Daily Mails and Telegraphs. Scotland may come under a barrage of criticism for our supposed love of deep fried food, but at least we don’t vote Tory. And now we won’t vote Labour either. Their games are transparent, their lies are obvious. For them politics is a buggin’s turn of pill popping that keeps us all sick and dependent on them. You’d think that the results of the General Election in May might have shaken some sense into them. But no, they’ve got worse. So we’ll just have to do the same in May next year. Mitigate that, Labour. Mitigate yourselves. Mitigate your own oblivion.

When the mitigation medicine is part of the illness then it’s time to cure yourself. We’ve already started to purge ourselves of red pills and blue pills. It’s only a matter of time before we get them out of our system and flush them away for good.

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