Wings Over Scotland

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?

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Tony Blair quoted in the Independent today:

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#1 in a series.

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?

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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.

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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.

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We weren’t going to do anything on last night’s episode of Australian news show 60 Minutes, because we assumed it would be all over the newspapers today, but they seem to be more concerned that an SNP MP followed someone who may have said some nasty things on Twitter. So here it is.

Be warned: some of it is difficult to watch. More details here.

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.

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The Sunday Times has today released some more of the data from the joint poll it conducted with this site a couple of weeks ago. As well as giving the SNP a 31% lead over Labour for Holyrood 2016, there’s a very interesting stat on Europe.

That lead in England for the UK leaving the EU is surprising – most recent polling has shown something like a 60-40 margin in favour of staying in. We’ll need to wait and see if the poll is an outlier or if there’s been another shift in English opinion.

It’s also interesting in that it blows a hole in the regular assertions of Unionist pundits that there are no real differences in social attitudes on either side of the border. At a time when England is split down the middle, Scotland’s resounding 2:1 majority for staying in Europe has never, to our recollection, been higher.

There’s one more thing of note about the poll, though.

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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.

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