Scottish Labour’s raw nerve located
LabourHame, the Scottish Labour blog set up by Tom Harris, started off with a pretty Stalinist approach to reader comments. It used to be the case that nothing even remotely critical of the party made it through their moderation policy (Harris sometimes deleting entire comment threads even of previously-approved posts if he’d had too much of a cuffing from readers in them), but as the site grew increasingly widely-mocked for its censorship the iron grip relented to a degree.
Since two or three months ago it’s generally been possible to have some sort of debate below the line – indeed, it’s latterly been just about the only place there was a chance of engaging Labour supporters in something vaguely approaching constructive discussion, even if you did have to wait two days to get a comment posted.
So we were slightly surprised when we hit a tender spot with this mildly pointed question, which is the first one we’ve had rejected in a few weeks, and which starts by quoting a line from the Labour leader’s speech to conference on Saturday.
“The question is not what powers should Scotland claw back, but which powers should we share.”
Or put another way, “which powers are we too wee, too poor and too stupid to handle for ourselves”.
It’s a cringing embarrassment that someone who wants people to elect her as the First Minister of Scotland doesn’t think she’s fit to handle all the powers of government. In addition to Corporation Tax, can Johann list for us all the other powers she can’t be trusted to wield, and which should therefore be left to that nice Mr Cameron?
Looks like that one was just a little bit too close to the bone for comfort, eh readers? Still, at least now we know which bits of the speech the loyal comrades were embarrassed by. We can’t say that we blame them.
Frankly, without the cybernat comments, that site would be more or less moribund.
True. For a site supposedly set up to promote discussion within Labour, it’s enormously dominated by nationalists and those arguing with them. I’ve seen almost no intra-Labour debate there at all. I suspect that’s actually the other reason they stopped moderating so much.
Tom Harris
The Stuart N Hardy of Politics
One for the folks at home there
Aye, I put in the following comment on Lamont’s conference speech article:
“ Attacks by Scottish Labour over contracts for the new Forth Crossing have boomeranged after it emerged that the procurement regulations used to award them were actually implemented under the former Labour/LibDem Scottish Executive.
The law, which was introduced in 2006, forbids the Scottish Government from discriminating in favour of Scottish companies when awarding contracts.
Please, please keep Johann; like her predecessor she is serving Labour in Scotland well. “
It never saw the light of day…. I just wonder if it was my ‘handle’ that downed it?