From a bizarre, rambling Torcuil Crichton column in today’s Daily Record:
It’s Torcuil Crichton, so we’d better check that, eh?
The battle-cry of right-wing Labour apologists all this week has been “realism”. It’s all very well people like Jeremy Corbyn having crazy old principles about what Labour is supposed to stand for, runs the argument, but you can’t argue with public opinion and public opinion is desperate for Labour to become Tories with a slightly softer edge.
“Mental John” McTernan, for example, told the readers of the Telegraph yesterday that Labour’s disastrous, shambolic abstention on the welfare reform bill was the right thing to do because the party “had to show the public it got the message over welfare”.
But what actually IS the public’s message on welfare?
From “Record View” in today’s Daily Record:
If only there’d been some way of ensuring Scotland was never “skewered by political decisions made on the basis of English priorities”, etc etc.
We’re sorry to keep going on about this, readers, but we’ve been going over and over it in our heads and we just can’t get it to make sense.
Below is the failed Labour amendment to the Welfare Reform And Work Bill:
As you can see, its sole intended purpose was to refuse a second reading to the Bill. Labour voted for their own amendment (an achievement, we suppose), which means they didn’t want to see the bill get a second reading.
You’re with us so far, right?
In fact he abstained, along with roughly 80% of his Labour colleagues.
(NB The glitch in the middle of the clip is on the original broadcast.)
After last night’s debacle in the House Of Commons, various Labour activists and cheerleaders have been scrambled on social and print media to firefight the appalled reaction from voters on the left to the party’s abstention on the Tory welfare bill.
And as usual, they’re talking cobblers.
The government’s brutal, monstrous welfare reform bill passed its second reading in the Commons tonight by 308 votes to 124, meaning that somewhere in the region of 80% of Labour MPs abstained on it.
Half an hour earlier the party tweeted this:
Presumably as a joke.
SNP MP Tommy Sheppard nails the EVEL situation in a paragraph:
UK MPs get to vote in the UK parliament. Everyone clear now?
Alert readers will have noticed that for the last week or so we’ve been challenging some of the conventional wisdom about Labour’s election victories from 1997-2005. While the right wing of the party and commentariat regularly insists that Tony Blair was its most successful leader ever, we demonstrated that over the course of his leadership he lost Labour over two million votes, whereas Neil Kinnock’s reign had resulted in a GAIN of three million.
In short, New Labour’s victories were primarily the result of the Conservatives being in a catastrophic state during Blair’s rule, exhausted by almost 20 years of power and scandal and infighting about Europe. With William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard at the head of a shattered opposition, Labour could have won those elections with Piers Morgan or a Teletubby in charge.
What our research also found was that the most striking thing about the period since Blair became Labour leader in 1994 was a staggering and almost overnight increase in the number of British voters turned off politics altogether.
In 1992 just eight million people entitled to vote stayed at home. By 2001 that number had rocketed to EIGHTEEN million, a 125% increase in nine years, and in May it was still at almost 16 million.
Since Blair, eight million UK citizens who used to vote have simply walked away and washed their hands of the entire political process. That’s quite a legacy, but it’s also an opportunity, because it’s a lot of people waiting for a reason to vote for someone. (Most of them young and/or poor, two traditionally Labour-friendly demographics.)
Bizarrely, it’s an opportunity Labour and its allies seem utterly determined to shun.
This week, as the UK’s new Conservative government brought forward a bill to impose tax on renewable energy projects, just seven Labour MPs turned up to oppose it.
You know these guys that you used to see wandering round the city centre with a sandwich board telling us “THE END IS NIGH”? It seems they were right.
Since Germany decided to punish Greece for daring to try to exercise democracy and national sovereignty, there’s been something of an upsurge in commentators on the British left questioning whether the EU is really the progressive institution they’d assumed it to be, leaving their vote in 2017’s EU referendum potentially up for grabs.
(Unlike Scotland, of course, at least Greece didn’t have to ask permission to hold its plebiscite on austerity, even if it appears to have counted for nothing in the end.)
Coming hot on the heels of the European Parliament ignoring concerns over the highly secretive TTIP negotiations, the European dream is turning into a nightmare for many.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
