NOT SO LONG AGO we snorted as a Labour leader made a tube of himself by slipping on a beach, getting his breeks wet; one of his successors couldn’t manage to eat a roll unaided, and morphed into a cartoon, about the same time as he unveiled a massive gravestone memorial to his party. In between were the Greatest PM this Country Never Had and The Warmonger, who still lurks with his sunken eyes, his tan and millions. There’s his erstwhile sidekick of the lurching reprise slightly late this week. That party prolonged the agony of countless millions of British citizens who once had trusted the values of Hardie and Bevan and Lee. There’s the rub; you always know what you get with a Tory; Labour though are the real political chameleons of Scotland. I have dear friends who are Labour members; I respect their views, but I hope for change.
Is it a good thing that children and adults in Glasgow hunger in solidarity with the needy of Liverpool? Should the unemployed of Cockenzie feel an affinity with the jobless of Cockermouth? Is a food bank in Edinburgh destined to share the hardships and shortages of that in Scarborough? Are they wheech! The reason why this alleged, contrived commonality is perpetuated is because that’s what Westminster requires and always will. There remains an unholy alliance of Labour and Tory, Tory and Labour - no friends of the people of Scotland - in modern times, they exist to maintain a comfortable pretence, semblance, charade. Coalitions of chaos and camaraderie. See a Labour politician? That’s a Tory you’re looking at; take my own former MP, Lord Martin O’Neill - he of the infamous quote - ‘the purpose of the Labour Party in Scotland is to lower the expectations of the Scottish people’ - just about the only time he was in Hansard for he never spoke much when he was an MP. He didn’t need to. Now he’s a Lord, he only has to dab his thumb print on the ledger for his £300 a day. Think about that - he gets as much for a day in that dive as you’ll get for a month on your Universal Credit. Perhaps in Scotland we’re just not genetically programmed for the big decisions. We think we’re a Big Noise if we’re the wee daftie tagging onto the back end of the big boys who laugh at us when they think we aren’t watching, or conscious. Pisshead Jocks.
This shape shifting ability of the Labour Party is a tremendous concept; it gives them the power to criticise Jeane Freeman for her hapless stewardship of Scotland’s NHS when she’s performing far better than the Labour controlled NHS in both England and Wales. It means that dross like free prescriptions, dental check-ups, minimum alcohol pricing and other stuff that was daft and short sighted when the SNP introduced it in Scotland can be pure Midas when Labour decide it’s a golden policy for elsewhere in the YooKay. There’s also an issue about women’s wages in Scotland which seems to impinge upon political health - for Richard Leonard appears to have got a brain disease which obliterated from his memory banks the fact that he, his Union and his party denied women equality, and spent millions of pounds in so doing. Was it not the SNP who corrected Labour wrongs? Somehow that aspect appears almost unreported. Like the Oil Fund, Mr Grey - where did the money for that come from? (Cue John Swinney’s heaving shoulders of truth and hilarity).