The future of Scottish shipyard workers remains in doubt. These are jobs that a No vote in the 2014 Independence referendum was supposed to guarantee. That turns out not to have been true, like a variety of other undertakings made in the unionist's 11th hour "vow" and other promises (to the limited extent that these utterances have any substance or coherence once the media scaffold that propped them up is removed).
The Labour Party in Scotland are catching a certain amount of flak about this. After all, it was Labour politicians and officials from Labour-affiliated unions that dutifully repeated Project Fear's apocalyptic prognostications about the consequences for ship building jobs if the electorate failed to vote No. Now threats to these totemic Clyde-built jobs linger nevertheless.
We see breath-taking feats of hypocrisy as Labour claim it is "insensitive" to discuss politics when livelihoods are at stake. As I have repeatedly said, Labour's salvation in Scotland lies in humility, in admitting they were wrong and working on longer term post-Independence credibility. Instead they seem intent on doubling down on every folly. It is as if they had crashed a car and then claimed criticism of their driving was somehow insensitive to their victims. Where humility is required we are subjected instead to their cynical faux outrage and knee-jerk pleas of victim-hood
This comes at a bad time for Labour. The coop is getting crowded with chickens coming home to roost. Labour-backed PFI deals have been exposed to scrutiny by their nightmare consequences. We have seen their leader perform policy pirouettes on key issues as she has made a series of U-turns on the hoof in rapid succession.
The worst thing that could happen would be open discord among the ranks, especially immediately before an election. It is axiomatic that disunity is fatal to a party's electoral fortunes. Yet we see persistent speculation about a leadership contest, and it seems the real reason the leader persists with her policy pirouettes is because she can't afford to leave her back turned towards her internal rivals for any length of time. One can imagine scientists at LIGO detecting gravitational waves as the rapidly spinning super-massive egos at the heart of Scottish Labour spiral towards each other and collide, destroying each other and the party in the process.
The causes of Labour's troubles in Scotland are manifold.
Over the long term they find themselves defending an obsolete constitutional arrangement whose relevance only ever lay in subordinating Scottish labour, capital and raw materials to an imperial endeavour that is now long abandoned. As a consequence they have acquiesced to a post-imperial role in which they manage industrial decline and soothe discontent with nostalgia while their threadbare hand-me-down credentials are exposed to the point of disintegration.
Over the mid-term they find themselves embedded in structures that pit them against a Tory administration at Westminster while trying to defend the powers that very same administration wields in Scotland, lacerating themselves with cognitive dissonance and the extravagance of their self-contradictions.
But most recently, they continue to find themselves being punished for walking shoulder to shoulder with the Tories during the referendum campaign.
The Tory controlled UK Government will happily allow Scottish jobs to remain in jeopardy if it damages Labour. They only care about destroying their opposition at Westminster. They explicitly don't care about Scotland: as David Cameron is reported to have said to Nick Clegg in relation to the referendum "Look Nick, I just don’t care. We've only got one Conservative MP north of the Border. Let Labour sort it out. It’s now their problem." The Labour Party in Scotland are the defenders of a union whose own officers hold Scotland in contempt.
Labour in Scotland have allowed themselves to be stitched up and hung out to dry by the Tories. Better Together will prove as toxic to Labour as coalition proved to be for the Lib-Dems.
The tragedy is that this was all so predictable. The moment they found common cause with Cameron - a Machiavellian psychopath trained in disdain from birth at the best bully-schools to which money and privilege grant access, spoiled and brutalised by cash and casual cruelty and Bullingdon debauch, and initiated into class warfare by inter-generational oligarchs through fornication with a dead pig's head - they placed their fate in the hands of their mortal enemy.
Cameron always knew that Labour could not stand shoulder to shoulder with him without shouldering the blame afterwards. After all, who is more at fault, the devil or the dolt who opens the door to him. Cameron had nothing to lose and therefore everything to gain and in Labour he found his accomplices. How can Labour in Scotland ever be trusted when they blundered so willingly into such an obvious trap?
I have been enjoying your prose on political matters over the last few months. Poetry is wasted on me! Anyway I feel motivated to comment today.
ReplyDelete“The Labour Party in Scotland are the defenders of a union whose own officers hold Scotland in contempt.” Agreed, but puzzling nonetheless. Are its members so lacking in awareness that this is lost on most of them? Hard to believe.
For many of them, there’s probably a process of rationalisation going on, which enables them to deal with the inevitable dissonance caused by the contradiction in their position. For example, at a very basic level, justifying their unionism by wrongly convincing themselves that most SNP supporters are ethnic nationalists at heart. The statement “I’m an internationalist” is possible evidence of this. I suspect their main method of dealing with the contempt is to pretend it does not exist. Or if they admit it does exist, it only exists in the pages of the Tory press and amongst Tory MPs. And Labour supporters can reject these Tory views as ideologically and morally inferior.
One of my objections to the Labour party in Scotland is that it wishes to tie us to a corrupt UK state. That is bad enough, but it can - in theory - be justified by an appeal to working class solidarity. In practice of course it’s a working class / ‘internationalist’ solidarity that stops at Dover and one that was contradicted by the actions of the Blair and Brown governments.
Another objection is related to the idea that they know or should know that Scots generally are being treated with contempt by the same Tory suspects mentioned earlier and by ignorant English right wing voters. Terms like “sweaty socks” “whinging Jocks” “spongers” and “subsidy junkies” come to mind. Labour party politicians in Scotland regularly parrot the “We can’t afford independence” line. They pushed the “too poor” line as their main argument during the Referendum campaign. We might have been a bit poorer, but we would not have been impoverished. Most of us were rightly offended by the pathological glee Labour took in telling us we were too poor.
A third objection also relates to the “too poor” narrative. Labour activists would seem to be either selfish or lacking self respect. Let me explain. Assuming we are currently ‘poorer’ than people in England, then they are subsidising us. Labour supporters are willing to take ‘handouts’ from the people of England. Since I disbelieve Labour in Scotland’s sharing solidarity line, then what you are left with is the following. They don’t mind taking advantage of others or they do mind, but are willing to take the insults for the sake of avoiding a slight hit to their standard of living. They are certainly selfish in that they are willing to sacrifice Scottish people on the altar of maintaining the unity of the UK Labour party (and their individual power as members thereof).
A fourth, and more subtle, objection also relates to the “too poor” line. They try to persuade us to be selfish or to disrespect ourselves by accepting charity from others when we could help ourselves. This is a form of contempt for us. It suggests that this is the best people like us can hope for, the best we can aspire to. How demeaning.
Went on too long there. Hopefully the Labour party (certainly in its current incarnation in Scotland) will not go on for much longer. Though I’m not holding my breath.