The stink of a dead goldfish

Dianne Abbott,Labour’s shadow International Development Secretary, has upset the pouters and pettit lips of Labour in Scotland – which to be fair isn’t hard to do – by pointing out the bleedin obvious. All she said is that Labour is screwed and won’t get itself unscrewed in time for May’s Holyrood election. And it’s blatantly clear to any observer of Scottish politics that the entire contents of B&Q’s tools department isn’t enough to unscrew Labour in Scotland. Give the party access to the contents of your average DIY store, and they’d only use the spades to dig themselves even deeper into the hole that they’re in.

A nameless spokespouter huffed that no one pays any attention to Dianne Abbott in Scotland, adding that she doesn’t have a clue about Scottish politics. Sadly for the pouter, you could say exactly the same about the Labour party in Scotland, which goes a long way to explaining why they’re in such a mess.

What a difference a year makes. A year ago Labour had just elected Jim Murphy as its leaderette, and he was striding the stage of the Scottish media and making regular appearances on every single bloody episode of Reporting Scotland telling one and all how Labour, but Jim in particular, was going to kick the arse of the SNP. The Scottish media lapped it up. This was a big hitter hitting big. While the indy supporting part of Scotland laughed with glee, Jim was confidently claiming that the only reason we were laughing was to cover up our existential terror that Jim was going to wipe the floor with us.

The Unionist media cheered in agreement. Without a shred of objective evidence, they accepted Jim’s bluster and got out the red white and blue bunting. Scotland had narrowly voted no, and they wanted to believe so hard that Scotland had passed peak SNP. And then without the slightest hint of irony, they accused independence supporters of being cultists who base their views on emotion without evidence.

Events proved the mockers on the indy side correct. We were not laughing to cover our fear. We were laughing because Jim was risible. He was a big hitter hitting big, but he was just walloping himself in the bollocks with a big heavy hammer from B&Q. The only people incapable of seeing that were the blinkered geldings of the Scottish Unionist media, who promptly decided that the fact they’d lost touch with reality was because reality was delusional, not them. Who’s the culty culty cultbags noo?

Oh right, it’s still us, because once you’ve got a job screaming crap in the Daily Mail you’re never wrong about anything. But then it’s easy to be right about everything when you live in a fantasy world where Jim Murphy was going to trounce the forces of yesness and the Scottish Tories and Labour are perched on the edge of recovery – and not on the edge of a cliff.

But back to December 2015. Despite the concerted campaign of cheerleading over the past year, Labour is as dead in the pond of Scottish politics as an upside down goldfish, just waiting to be flushed away. The party, and the Scottish Unionist media, have the same attention span as the dead goldfish, so hope that if they keep on doing what they’ve been doing for the past year, only do it louder and more vehemently, then they’ll convince the rest of us that the dead goldfish is about to win a gold medal in swimming for team GB.

You’d think that they’d have realised by now that screaming SNPBad isn’t going to change their fortunes any, because the electorate of Scotland has already decided that Labour is as much use as a dead goldfish. Actually that’s unfair, because you can trust a dead goldfish, you can’t trust Labour. But the point remains, Labour screaming that the SNP is bad bad really really bad isn’t going to change anyone’s opinion about the Labour party. In effect, all Labour are trying to do is to make a pitch to the voters of Scotland that the SNP is as crap as Labour is. This is not a positive selling point, even a dead goldfish is more attractive than the Labour party in Scotland – at least the goldfish was pretty once.

The real reason that the remains of Labour are going to be flushed away next year is because no one trusts them any more. It’s not that Labour doesn’t have policies – although aside from SNPBad you’d be hard pushed to find any policies. It’s that even if Labour did have policies, even if those policies were properly costed and accounted for by something more than the Jackie Baillie School of Creative Arithmetic, we’d still not believe a word the party said. Labour has lied too often. Labour have no purpose any more other than to get into power, and just like their idol Gordie Broon they don’t have the slightest idea of what to do once they get there. So the punters will make sure that they never do.

The reason Labour is about to be flushed is the lying eyes of Tony Blair, the self-serving tongue of Gordie Broon, the blustering buffoonery of Jim Murphy, the oafishness of George Foulkes, and the whining excuses of Kezia. And every time one of the party’s media apologists tells us that Scotland has got over the SNP and Labour is about to ascend again, every time that they try and pin the blame for Tory cuts on the Scottish government, another couple of voters decide to prove them wrong.

Now the selfish self-serving time servers of Labour and its media pals are trying to tell Scotland that Tory cuts are the fault of the SNP. The cuts that we’re only experiencing because Labour and its media friends campaigned to keep Scotland under the boot of the Tories, because Labour and its media friends would rather Scotland is powerless because that means Labour can get power. The party that calls itself the people’s party always puts party before people. That’s why they’re dead like a rotten goldfish and the smell reaches all the way to London, and the nostrils of Dianne Abbott.

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