Health update

Aug30 by weegingerdug

I thought I should keep you all posted about what’s going on and why I’ve not been blogging this week. As regular readers may recall, my mother has been battling ocular cancer which resulted in her losing her left eye. Unfortunately, the cancer has now spread to her liver and we have been told that it can no longer be successfully treated. The best that her cancer specialist can hope for is that immunotherapy can slow down its spread. My mum is a force of nature, she is determined to stay positive and hopeful, and if there is anyone who can beat the odds it’s her. But of course we are all deeply worried and concerned about her right now. She is starting immunotherapy in a couple of weeks and we can only hope that she tolerates it well and that it is effective against her cancer.

On top of this I am currently experiencing all the symptoms of covid. I have a hacking cough, shivers, fatigue, brain fog, and a temperature and have spent the last few days self-isolating. It was so bad the other day that I was considering going to A&E. I have done a couple of covid tests but they came up negative so it must be some nasty flu bug. My own health issues are trivial compared to what my mum is going through. What most upsets me just now is that I can’t go and see my mum as I cannot risk giving her whatever this is.

I am still feeling very rough but my symptoms are not as severe as they were a couple of days ago so I hope that I’ve turned a corner and am on the mend now.

As soon as I feel better I will be going to see my mum, and then I will get back to blogging. Until then I have no doubt that there is more than enough going on to keep you all busy.

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Labour’s moonbeams and fairy dust

Aug21 by weegingerdug

During an interview last week, Anas Sarwar, the branch manager of Labour’s Scottish Optional Identity Mark, told us that even though he personally opposes independence, that ““doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to support independence, or the right to wish a referendum at some point in the future.” Is Anas wanting praise for demonstrating that he has a basic understanding of the concept of democracy? That’s not actually unlikely given that British nationalist politicians of late have appeared to struggle with the notion that when the people vote in a way that they dislike, they are supposed to accept the result.

However while Sarwar tells us that he accepts that the people of Scotland have the right to “wish a referendum at some point in the future,” he decidedly avoided specifying what the democratic mechanism might be for turning that wish into a reality. That would be way above his pay grade and result in him being slapped down by his boss, Keir Starmer. So we are left with the usual Labour party mechanisms for implementing things that people might actually vote for, which would be moonbeams, fairy dust and clicking the heels of your ruby slippers together.

It is screamingly transparent what Anas Sarwar is trying to do. He’s attempting to make a pitch to independence leaning voters in the up coming Rutherglen and Hamilton West by election by making out that he’s open to the idea of another independence referendum but not actually saying anything different in substance from the Labour party’s current policy of refusing to accept the will of the people of Scotland as expressed at the ballot box in the May 2021 Scottish Parliament election. He’s telling us that the people of Scotland can continue to wish for another independence referendum, but the part he is not saying out loud is that his party is going to continue to ignore that wish, and he knows that ignoring it is only made easier if the SNP do badly at the next general election.

Sarwar talks about “wishing a referendum at some point in the future” because he and his boss refuse to accept that the question of whether Scotland wants another independence referendum was democratically settled at the ballot box over two years ago, and was settled in favour of another referendum. But Sarwar and his anti-democratic allies refuse to accept the result of that election, choosing instead to find spurious reasons to weasel out of it, and embarking on a campaign of gaslighting, trying to persuade us that the 2021 election wasn’t really about another independence referendum at all.

The reasons given by Sarwar for refusing to accept that the current Scottish Parliament has a mandate for another independence referendum are reasons which, if accepted, would mean that no government in the UK, devolved or otherwise, would ever possess any sort of democratic mandate to do anything at all.

So what we get instead are more empty words and repetitions of the case that the branch office put to the Scottish people in 2021, a case which was rejected by the electorate.

Labour previously thrived on the kind of deceitful trick that the party is currently trying to pull off in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. Its Scottish representatives would “hint”, signal” or even promise a particular policy which would then be summarily rejected by Labour’s Westminster contingent once the votes of the Scots were safely in the bag.

Labour did this with its promises for Scottish devolution during the 1970s and again in the 1990s. The final bill for a Scottish Parliament that was eventually passed by the Labour governments of Jim Callaghan in the late 1970s and Tony Blair in the late 1990s was a heavily watered down version of the promises that Labour had previously made to the Scottish people. The original proposal for a Scottish Parliament in the 1990s would have given Holyrood control of broadcasting and greater tax raising powers than was allowed by the Scotland Act when it finally passed.

Labour did the same in 2014, promising that a No vote was not a vote for the status quo, but rather a vote for strengthened and enhanced devolution. We have learned with the painful benefit of hindsight that we were not indeed voting for the status quo, we were voting for a Scottish Parliament that would be constantly be attacked and undermined by the Westminster Parliament. As soon as the No vote was in the bag, Labour immediately resiled on all the promises it made during the referendum and its role in the Smith Commission consisted of trying to minimise as much as possible any additional powers that were to be granted to the Scottish Parliament.

Now Labour is telling us that a vote for Labour in Rutherglen would be a vote to “pressure” Keir Starmer to return to his now abandoned commitment to abolish the abhorrent two child cap on benefits and Anas Sarwar is trying to pretend that he’s not “hostile” to independence supporters.

But you don’t have to be gifted with the power of premonition to know that the second the Labour party gets the result it so craves, we will immediately be told that it’s a rejection of another independence referendum and a full throated acceptance of Keir Starmer’s right wing policies. The Labour party does this repeatedly and there is absolutely no reason to believe that it will not do so again. The people of Rutherglen and Hamilton West, and the people of Scotland as a whole, deserve far more than to be treated as useful idiots by a Labour party which goes back on its word the moment that the votes have been counted. In Gordon Brown’s revealing words when asked about the non fulfilment of his Vow – you should have read the small print.

The Labour party, both at a UK level, and in its Scottish Optional Identity Mark, has become little more than an exercise in finding new ways to promise absolutely nothing. Sarwar does this by pretending that his branch office has far more power and significance than it really does, a deceit which much of the Scottish media is invested in colluding with. To that end he speaks warm words about welcoming the support of independence supporters but the second their votes are in the bag both he and his boss Starmer will declare that those voters have rejected another independence referendum. There’s not even any need to read the small print. Labour is blatant in its dishonesty.

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The BBC’s toxic presence in Scottish public life

Aug18 by weegingerdug

There’s a definite pattern to BBC Scotland’s handling of Scottish Government stories. There is no point in the BBC continuing to deny it. The Corporation is not a public service broadcaster informing and educating the people of Scotland in an even handed and unbiased way about the issues of the day, it is an active and willing participant in Scotland’s constitutional debate, taking the side of those opposed to independence. It has always been that way, but over recent years BBC Scotland no longer seeks to hide it. Its British bias has become blatant and brazen.

Recently I blogged about how BBC Scotland manufactured an SNP bad NHS story to which it gave headline prominence on the same day that NHS consultants in England went on strike while a strike was avoided in Scotland. https://weegingerdug.wordpress.com/2023/07/20/the-drearily-predictable-bbc-scotland/

Now BBC Scotland has done it again. On Wednesday NHS doctors in Scotland announced that they had accepted the revised pay deal offered by the Scottish Government. This means that there will be no NHS strikes in Scotland and makes Scotland unique amongst the nations of the UK by avoiding the strikes by NHS staff which have blighted the rest of the UK.

That is a real Scottish Government success story. BBC Scotland is very quick to give prominence to negative stories about NHS Scotland, all of which have the subtext that if it’s something to do with the Scottish Government, it’s pretty crappy. This is combined with a marked reluctance to hold the Westminster government to the same account.

When there is a Scottish Government success story, BBC Scotland goes out of its way to minimise and marginalise the news. Scottish people must never be allowed to imagine that the Scottish Government could be more competent and effective than the ‘big boys and girls’ down in Westminster. So naturally the news that doctors in NHS Scotland have accepted the Scottish Government’s revised pay offer was going to be glossed over by BBC Scotland. What was especially galling however was the extreme brevity with which Reporting Scotland trotted through the news. It merited a mere fifteen seconds, which was buried in the middle of the half hour show. Far more time was devoted to the cancellation of Graham Linehan’s show at the Edinburgh Fringe, because apparently according to BBC Scotland this latest episode in the culture wars must be a story which is far more relevant to more people than the smooth operation of the NHS in Scotland.

However you can bet the amount the BBC charges you for the licence fee that if NHS doctors had rejected the Scottish Government’s pay offer it would have been headline news on BBC Scotland, complete with a quote from Jackie Baillie while she was out campaigning for Labour in the Rutherglen by election.

Before the doctors accepted the pay offer BBC Scotland heavily promoted the possibility of a Junior doctor strike even before negotiations had concluded. Opposition MSPs were given the opportunity to attack the Scottish Government and reporters speculated about the problems that would ensue. The BBC was very obviously gearing up for an SNP bad fest should the strike have taken place. You can imagine the frustration amongst senior BBC staff when the possibility of a strike was taken off the table. Oh well back to the ferries, lads.

The First Minister was attacked because of a strike that never happened but surprise surprise didn’t received an iota of praise from BBC Scotland for his actions in avoiding it. There was just a quick 15 seconds mention and then it was on to BBC Scotland’s habitual menu of brain numbing triviality, the murrdurr the fitba and the wee cute kittens. If BBC Scotland was an individual it would be the very definition of a toxic personality.

I have had the misfortune to have had in my own personal life a hypercritical individual who is always very quick to criticise and complain about things I do or don’t do, cares nothing about my needs or well-being, never says anything supportive or positive, and never praises or even acknowledges any of my achievements.

A while ago after yet another instance of this person going out of their way to undermine me as I was about to attempt a major milestone on the road to rehabilitation following my stroke, I decided I had had enough of their toxicity and cut off all contact with them. If criticisms are never tempered with praise where praise is due, then it is merely ignorant carping which says far more about the person doing the criticising than it does about the person who is the object of their ill nature. Since I have got to the age when I realise that I will never have a positive interaction with this person, it is much better for my own mental and emotional health not to have any interactions with them at all.

BBC Scotland is like a toxic individual in that it denies it does anything wrong and gaslights those who complain about it. It is never the BBC that is in the wrong, an easy conclusion to reach when it’s the BBC which investigates complaints made about the BBC.

The big difference between the BBC and a toxic personality type is that BBC Scotland has a blatant political agenda. In an ideal world we would be able to excise BBC Scotland from our lives like breaking off contact with a toxic individual. Unfortunately it’s far harder to stop the BBC’s pernicious influence on Scotland. We can vote with our wallets and stop paying the licence fee, but the BBC sails on regardless, continuing to pump out its Scottish Cringe toxicity.

BBC Scotland is hypercritical of the Scottish Government and avoids praising it, not because of some deep rooted toxic personality trait, but as part of a deliberate strategy of undermining Scottish national self-confidence in order to weaken the political campaign for independence.

Even so, there are people within the BBC who appear to understand the damage that the Corporation is doing to itself with its brazenly one sided approach to the Scottish constitutional issue, the great fault line in modern Scottish politics.

Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe this week, the writer and broadcaster Billy Kay said that “The [Scottish] media is getting worse and it’s a ridiculous set of circumstances where 90% of the media is against 50% of the population.” He added, without naming names, that two senior figures within BBC Scotland were very critical of the Corporation’s coverage of the 2014 referendum with one telling him they were ashamed of it. He added that he thought things have only got worse since then. BBC Scotland no longer even pretends to be even handed. It’s become a toxic presence in Scottish public life, an active participant in the campaign to suppress support for independence.

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Labour’s Scottish optional identity mark: Fantasy politics from a fantasy party

Aug15 by weegingerdug

On Monday Keir Starmer was on one of his trips to Scotland to pretend that he cares about us. He certainly doesn’t care enough to take any Scottish opinions on board, or indeed to show any awareness that such a thing as a Scottish opinion exists. The Labour leader is one of those British nationalists who are of the unshakable view that the opinions of Scottish people are the opinions that he tells us we are allowed to have. Starmer is interested in one thing only, winning a Labour majority at the next Westminster general election. In pursuit of that he will say anything that appeals to the Brexit voters in the English regions that the FPTP system makes the deciders of the next election. He will happily U turn on any policy that does not serve that purpose. What voters in Scotland want does not enter into his calculations no matter how many platitudes he utters about how important Scotland is.

Ever since the many and obvious policy differences between Starmer and the Labour branch office in Scotland have come to light apologists for the Scottish Optional Identity Mark have been insisting, “We are allowed to have devolved policies,” and Starmer has been like, “LOL. No. Not in a Westminster by election you’re not.”

They are divided on Brexit, on the two child benefit cap, on the bedroom tax, on free school meals. On Monday Starmer insisted that anyone looking for policy differences between him and the Scottish Accounting Unit “would have a very long search.” So now Starmer joins the Tories in the brazen nature of his gaslighting. It took me all of ten seconds to find some policy differences, and Labour is putting a nonsensical proposition to the voters of Rutherglen who are being asked to vote Labour in order to oppose Labour policies. Although exactly how a newly elected Labour MP in Rutherglen is going to get Keir Starmer to change his mind is not explained. It will happen by magic.

But then in a very real sense Starmer is right when he insists that there are no policy differences between him and Scottish Labour, in no small measure that’s because if you are looking for a distinctive political party called Scottish Labour you’ll be in for a very long and fruitless search before you realise that there is no such thing, there is merely an Optional Identity Mark and a Scottish Accounting Unit registered in Newcastle. A party that does not exist cannot have policies of its own. Since “Scottish Labour” is nothing more than a marketing brand owned by the Labour party and registered as such with the Electoral Commission then finding a division between that marketing brand and the political party which owns it will always involve a “very long search.” It’s like searching for a difference between the contents of a branded tin of baked beans and a supermarket own brand tin of baked beans made in the exact same factory. Both are going to give you the exact same amount of bloat and gas. You cannot have a real and serious difference of opinion with your imaginary friend.

But in another sense there are no policy differences between Starmer and the Scottish Accounting Unit because the policies that Labour candidates in Scotland stand on are the policies that Keir Starmer dictates to them. They do what Starmer tells them to do and when they get to Westminster they will be under the exact same obligation to vote the way that Starmer tells the Labour whips to instruct them to vote. This is an election to send an MP to Westminster, not Holyrood. There’s no such thing as a Scottish Labour MP in Westminster.Labour’s candidate is campaigning to become a Labour MP. As such he is simply either lying or is delusional if he’s claiming to stand for anything different from what Starmer has said is Labour policy.

Michael Shanks, the Labour candidate in Rutherglen and Hamilton West recently told the Daily Record that he is “not against” the UK rejoining the EU, this is in marked contrast to Starmer’s espousal of the hard Brexit foisted upon us all by the Tories. However Starmer has explicitly ruled out not just any return to the EU but also to the UK rejoining the European Single Market and Customs Union, rather, he has insisted that his government will “make Brexit work” which is rather like insisting that you will make a computer work after it has been smashed into dozens of pieces and claiming that you are going to make it work even though you do not intend to put any of the broken pieces back together again. It’s an absurdity, but what is equally absurd is for a Labour by election winner in Scotland to imagine that he’s going to change a Labour party policy which was never designed with appeal to voters in Scotland in the first place.

It is telling indeed that in a by election which Labour tells us is so crucial to a revival of its fortunes in Scotland that Starmer won’t even throw it the bone of promising to scrap a policy as universally reviled as the two child cap. “If we win a GE, we’ll ask the boss really, really, hard if he’ll change the policy.” Is the garbage hand that Labour in Scotland has to try and play.

With Keir Starmer all Scotland gets is absurdity heaped upon absurdity, an intelligence insulting exercise in offering the illusion of change but none of its substance. Scottish Labour is a party which is not a party, putting forward policies that don’t exist and which even if they did exist it would have no means of implementing. The entire balloon of unreality only continues to exist because the media in Scotland has a vested interest in not popping it. The media in Scotland knows full well that there is no such thing as Scottish Labour in the context of a Westminster election. There is only Labour.

The kind of magical thinking offered to Scotland by the Labour party is the kind of froth that only works in opposition, should Starmer make the electoral breakthrough in Scotland that he so craves, it is highly likely to be very short lived. Victory will reveal the true colours of Starmer’s right wing British nationalist pro-Brexit Labour party, and this revelation will occur in a Scotland where support for independence will remain unaffected by whatever occurs electorally to the SNP.

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The looming catastrophe for the Tories

Aug10 by weegingerdug

A new UK-wide poll has been published this week which gives figures which are utterly catastrophic for the Tories, and which gives some hope to the SNP that the outlook for the largest party of Scottish independence is not as dire as some are gleefully predicting.

The mega poll was carried out by Find Out Now and election experts Electoral Calculus for Channel 4 News and interviewed over 11,000 voters across the UK. The poll is devastating for the Tories, giving Labour a lead of 22%. To make matters worse for Sunak the poll appears to show that the Tories are performing poorest in the seats where they had been strongest in 2019. In very strongly Conservative seats their share of the vote plummets from the 64% the party won in 2019 to just 37%. Electoral calculus notes that this is an even worse picture for the Conservatives than Tony Blair’s landslide in 1997. In that election Conservative support held up better than the UK-wide average in their strongest seats.

The results of the poll, if replicated at a general election, would see the Tories left with the embarrassment of just 90 seats out of the 317 that they won at the 2019 general election while the Labour party would have its best ever result, winning a crushing landslide of 461 seats. Meanwhile the Lib Dems are forecast to win 37 seats while the SNP would win 38.

38 seats for the SNP would not be a great result, representing a net loss of ten of the 48 seats the party won in 2019. However it would not be the utter disaster that some have forecast, and the SNP would still comfortably remain the largest party in Scotland in terms of seats and vote share. It also needs to be taken into account that this poll will strongly discourage the Conservatives from going for an early election, particularly because it forecasts that Sunak and seventeen other cabinet ministers would suffer the humiliation of losing their own seats. Sadly the horrendous Suella Braverman is not amongst them but the Tories would lose the Viceroy General’s Dumfies and Galloway seat, so it’s not all bad. This would make Rishi Sunak the first British Prime Minister to lose his seat at a general election since Arthur Balfour in 1906. We could also be seeing the back of “but we’re family Penny Mordor, sorry Mordaunt, the woeful Greg Hands, and the personality free zone that is Oliver Dowden. Upon hearing that Mhairi Black would not be standing for re-election Dowden remarked that he entered the Commons at the same time as her, to which she retorted that he’d be leaving at the same time as well.

All this means that the Tories are likely to cling on as long as possible in the hopes of minimising their losses, so it’s unlikely that the election will be held until the end of 2024.

This gives the SNP over a year to turn their fortunes around in Scotland, by that time the interminable police investigation into the party’s finances ought to have long since concluded, hopefully with no charges being brought, in which case perhaps someone could recommend a good grief counsellor for BBC Scotland and the Herald’s Tom Gordon. Although no doubt the Scottish media will quickly find some other SNP bad issue to bang on about incessantly.

This poll proves that Starmer’s claim that he needs people in Scotland to vote Labour in order to kick the Tories out is complete nonsense. It was always nonsense but this poll ought to kill the claim off for good. Labour currently looks set to win a majority of well over 200 seats, and since there are only 59 Scottish seats in Westminster just now, a number set to be reduced to 57 at the next general election, you don’t have to be a genius at mental arithmetic to realise that the outcome of the election in Scotland will have no impact at all on the final result. It merely makes the difference between Keir Starmer having a massively overwhelming majority or a hugely overwhelming majority. But no matter how enormous the majority, you can bet that Labour still won’t abolish the House of Lords or remove charitable status from private schools.

Starmer wants to target Scottish seats for the simple reason that he wants to neutralise the prospect of Scottish independence, then he can enjoy his huge majority without troubling himself with Scottish demands.

What Labour will do is deny Scottish democracy every bit as much as the Tories currently do. Starmer doesn’t want people in Scotland to vote Labour in order to keep the Tories from power, an SNP vote is as effective for achieving that as a vote for Labour’s optional Scottish identity mark. Indeed the Labour party under Starmer proves the old adage that you should not listen to what someone says, you should pay heed to what they do.

What Starmer is very obviously doing is formulating policies designed to appeal to voters in Brexit supporting seats in the North and Midlands of England, the so-called Red Wall seats that fell to the Tories in 2019. He is not proposing policies which are in tune with Remain voting Scotland, and he is certainly not advocating anything remotely close to the federalism that Gordon Brown swore was just around the corner in 2014. What we are in for with Keir Starmer is Blairism on steroids, more Westminster centralisation, more privatisation in the NHS in England, more cruelty to those on benefits, migrants and asylum seekers. Plus of course the hard Brexit bequeathed to us by the Tories will remain intact as will the fetishisation of the monarchy, and the inequalities and injustices which characterise the British state.

Martin Baxter, CEO of Electoral Calculus noted: “With every month that goes by, Labour are edging towards a grudging landslide victory at the next general election. Without overmuch enthusiasm, the public look likely to reject the Conservatives and are mostly embracing Labour.”

This is true, there is little eagerness for Keir Starmer’s grey centre right managerialism but there is certainly widespread despair with the Conservatives and a desperation to get them out of office. We have probably reached the point where nothing Sunak can do will be able to rescue the Tories from the electoral thumping which awaits them at the next general election. But their politics shall live on in Starmer’s Labour party. Tory peer Zac Goldsmith one of Johnson’s allies who was criticised for colluding in Johnson’s campaign of abuse and intimidation directed at MPs on the Privileges Committee investigating his lies to Parliament said this week that he could see himself voting Labour at the next election. That’s how far to the right the Labour party has grown under Starmer.

But if Labour does get its landslide,after a few years the electoral pendulum will inevitably swing back to the Tories and the entire sorry cycle of the rightwards drift of British politics will take another turn, screwing down the misery, and Labour will yet again ape Tory policies in order to get back into power.

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When is a party not a party: When it’s an optional identity mark

Aug7 by weegingerdug

Whatever happens after the next Westminster General Election we will still have a Conservative government, although if the polls are reliable indicators it will be calling itself Labour. In his desire to attract the votes of former Labour voters in Leave supporting constituencies in England who defected to the Tories in order to “get Brexit done,” Keir Starmer has led his party on a headlong dash to the right because under the undemocratic Westminster system it’s only a few marginal Labour-Conservative constituencies which matter, no such seats exist in Scotland so no matter what Starmer claims about the importance of Scotland to him, the reality is that Scotland does not matter at all and Starmer has no interest at all in shaping Labour policies in a way that might appeal to voters in Scotland.

One after another Starmer has abandoned any policy that might appear dangerously social democratish in favour of hardline Tory positions. Gone is any opposition to the hard Brexit given to us by Boris Johnson, Labour is now a full throated Brexit party. Starmer has given up on abolishing student fees or renationalising public services. Just this week Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced that a future Labour government would expand private sector involvement in the NHS in England. On Sunday Labour took steps to prove that it would be every bit as cruel and heartless to migrants and asylums seekers as the Conservatives are. Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s immigration spokesman, has announced that controversial military camps and prison barges would still be used to house asylum seekers if Labour wins the next election.

Labour is also hurriedly U-turning on its previous commitments to environmental policies following its failure to take Uxbridge from the Conservatives in the recent by election held after Boris Johnson’s resignation. Labour’s failure to win the seat was widely put down to the proposed expansion of the London Ultra Low Emission Zone to include the outer boroughs of Greater London.

The “Scottish Labour Party” has failed dismally to shift Starmer’s hardline Daily Mail pleasing policies in a more humane direction. Jackie Baillie insists that “Scottish Labour” opposes the two child cap on social security which UK Labour has said it’s not going to repeal. So currently the Labour party is urging voters in the upcoming Rutherglen and Hamilton West by election to vote Labour in order to change Labour policy. Labour’s candidate in the by election, Michael Shanks, has vowed to oppose his own party if it tries to keep the two-child policy in place. Vote for me because I oppose my own party’s policy, that’s where Labour in Scotland is these days.

Rifts continue to grow between the Labour party’s Scottish branch office and the increasingly right wing UK party, which is now considerably further to the right than it was under Tony Blair. Both Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie have previously spoken out against the cruel two child benefit cap, a policy which has been described as a machine for manufacturing child poverty. But their protests have had zero influence on braking Starmer’s lurch to the right.

Now a second rift has opened up on the controversial issue of Self-ID for trans people, Labour’s shadow equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds MP recently wrote in The Guardian that under a Labour government, trans people will need to get a medical diagnosis before being awarded a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), a shift from Labour’s previous policy which now means that Starmer is directly contradicting the position held by Labour in Scotland, which voted in favour of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill and which continues to support the demedicalisation of the process by which trans people receive legal recognition of their gender identity.

Unhappiness about Starmer’s increasingly right wing positions has been increasing amongst party members in Scotland with reports of younger party members warning that they feel “disheartened” by the party, with many considering resigning their membership. Scotland’s sole Labour MP Ian Murray has denied there is ‘disunity’ in the party. Well he would say that, wouldn’t he.

There is in fact increasing focus on the question of whether “Scottish Labour” is a party at all. Spoiler alert, it’s not. Earlier this year Anas Sarwar dismissed claims that “Scottish Labour” was not really a political party as “conspiracy theories.” Yet the Electoral Commission recently confirmed that “Scottish Labour” is merely an “optional identity mark” used by the UK Labour party in Scotland. Who knew that the Electoral Commission was a hotbed of conspiracy theorists. Eh, Anas?

In other words “Scottish Labour” is not a distinct political party, it is merely a branding exercise used by the UK Labour party. “Scottish Labour Party” also appears under the Electoral Commission’s list of “accounting units” of the wider UK party. The Scottish Labour accounting unit’s given address is not even in Scotland, it is in England, at Labour Central, Kings Manor, Newcastle, NE1 6PA.

“Scottish Labour” is essentially an exercise in deception, permitting the Scottish accounting unit of the Labour party to pretend that it has policies and an identity distinct from that of the UK party. This is what enables the likes of Jackie Baillie to continue to insist that the party she represents in the Scottish Parliament continues to oppose the two child cap on social security even as the UK party has stated that if elected in Westminster it would not attempt to abolish it. The Scottish media is complicit in this deception, rarely questioning “Scottish Labour” on how exactly it can force Keir Starmer to change tack or to demonstrate how it has managed to steer UK Labour policies in a direction more in tune with Scottish public opinion.

Certainly on the key issue of Brexit the Scottish accounting unit has dismally failed to ensure that the Labour party adopts policies which are even mildly reflective of Scotland’s overwhelming opposition to Brexit. “Scottish Labour” has proven itself to have no interest in trying to ensure that Starmer’s Labour party respects the democratic will of the people of Scotland on the crucial issue of Scotland’s constitutional future. Labour calls itself the “people’s party” but that too is merely a branding exercise as devoid of substance as “Scottish Labour”.

Labour is not some cuddly and friendly party that is on your side. The reality is, if you vote “Scottish Labour”, you are voting for a right wing Anglo-British nationalist party which panders to the worst prejudices of the Conservatives from the English shires. You are voting for a party that will not repeal the two child cap on benefits or the Tories’ authoritarian legislation that suppresses peaceful protest. You are voting for the expansion of private sector involvement in the NHS. You are voting for Brexit and the continuing suppression of Scotland’s right to decide its own future. And worst of all you are voting for a system that will inevitably return the Conservatives to power sooner or later.

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Wee Ginger Dug

Biting the hand of Project Fear

Monthly Archives: August 2023

Health update

Labour’s moonbeams and fairy dust

The BBC’s toxic presence in Scottish public life

Labour’s Scottish optional identity mark: Fantasy politics from a fantasy party

The looming catastrophe for the Tories

When is a party not a party: When it’s an optional identity mark