The experts in ‘annihilation’ are back
By GRAY ALLAN , Falkirk Labour member
An unattributed article in the Glasgow Herald on December 4 based its report on unnamed sources, including Labour members of the House of Lords and former Labour cabinet ministers. They predicted an “annihilation” for Scottish Labour in the May elections, unless Leonard was ditched. These whisperers represent the Blairite faction that never got over the defeat of their Labour Party by the SNP. They are in the longest sulk in British political history, deprived of what they feel is their ‘right’ to control Scottish politics.
They represent no socialist or even social-democratic trend in Scottish Labour but a stifling managerialism that killed all enthusiasm for Labour. For decades voters turned out and voted Labour, more or less on autopilot. Having fought tooth and nail against socialist policies, the right wing then had no answer when the SNP re-orientated their party towards the urban working class.
Former Blair cabinet member
Sources in the SEC, the Scottish Executive Committee, believe that George Foulkes, a Labour Lord and former member of Blair’s cabinet, along with failed deputy leadership candidate, Ian Murray MP, are behind the briefings. It is believed that there is no serious backing for such a move and that this is no more than a fishing expedition.
Ian Murray is the last remaining Labour MP in Scotland, a Blairite and one of the ‘chicken coup’ plotters. Both he and Foulkes should be experts in “annihilation” because they presided over Scottish Labour’s “wipe-out” at the general election in 2015.
In an unforeseen development, Michael Sharpe, Scottish Labour General Secretary, announced his resignation in December. Sharpe was said to be on the left and as one ‘having Richard Leonard’s back’ on the SEC. He said he needed to “pay more attention” to his young family, but it is suspected that he was put under pressure from elsewhere. Sharpe has been replaced in an acting capacity by Drew Smith of the GMB union. No one knows who made that appointment, but if it turns out that it was London and if that becomes public, it will serve to confirm the “branch office” slogan used by the SNP against Scottish Labour.
Scottish leader isolated
Smith spoke in favour of the earlier, failed no-confidence motion against Leonard, despite his union abstaining in the vote. Now the Scottish Labour Party has an acting general secretary, a deputy leader and Scotland’s sole Labour MP who all think that the elected leader of the Party should not be the leader!
What makes this scenario all the more dangerous for Labour is that the constitutional question still dominates every political debate in Scotland. The Right Wing is still strongly committed to the “Better Together” tactic. They allow debate to concentrate exclusively on the constitution and take an absolutely inflexible position against a second referendum. But to concentrate exclusively on the fight against Independence is to be, in essence, Labour Unionists. Labour’s right wing seem to be hoping to pull in the votes of the mainly Protestant, Loyalist, traditionalist working class, and some Tory voters, as if these types of voters are the best way to stop the SNP.
Labour’s natural ground
Leonard and the left have at least consistently attempted to move the debate onto what ought to be Labour’s natural ground; on fighting poverty, social inequality, the protection of jobs, social housing and so forth. Labour should be relentlessly attacking the neo-liberal line of the SNP-controlled Scottish Government. The Nationalist reply to every socialist demand that is put to them is to claim to ‘agree’ but then say it is impossible to implement anything because the English (Westminster is the code used) are “inherently Tory voters” who will always return a Tory Government. So, while Scotland remains in the UK, a socialist programme will be impossible.
This is the fundamental lie, based upon a complete lack of confidence in the English working class – and the British working class as a whole – that needs to be taken on before Scottish Labour can make any headway against nationalism.
December 29, 2020
