Labour’s strange solidarity narrative 23
A curious phenomenon occurs when debating the issues of independence with those of the Labour party – one that was highlighted again in the debate published on this site last week. Labour constantly repeats the mantra of being “stronger together” and asserts that the SNP only cares about a poor child in Glasgow but not about a poor child in Bradford, citing this as a reason to maintain the Union.
(Quite why the Scottish National Party would ever be expected to concern itself with the sovereign affairs of England is a question we’ll leave for another day.)
The “solidarity” narrative insists that both issues must be tackled at the same time, and that it would be unfair to focus on only one of the children while failing to provide the same attention and resources to the other. In order to show solidarity, the fate of both children must be tied to that of the worst-off, and if the fortunes of both cannot be improved then neither should be.
(For some reason this narrative doesn’t usually extend to covering children from Istanbul or Delhi. There’s no discernible intent among Labour activists to create a European superstate so that all deprivation can be addressed simultaneously. The party appears to apply double standards for the UK and the rest of the world, only serving to highlight its British-nationalist ethos rather than any commitment to a global brotherhood of man.)
By way of illustration, imagine that (Heaven forbid) you find yourself in a lifeboat in the immediate aftermath of some terrible maritime disaster, and there are two groups of children in the water. The lifeboat can only accommodate one of the groups, and so a decision must be made which to save. At present the boat is captained by the SNP, who are intent on plucking the nearest of the two groups from the ocean and moving them to safety. Within the lifeboat, however, there are also Labour politicians who insist that as they cannot save all the children, it would be selfish and unfair to save only a few, and that therefore in order to show “solidarity” the lifeboat should pick up no children at all, leaving all to drown or succumb to hypothermia, comforted only by the identical fate of their companions.