Quoted for truth #8
Posted on
February 17, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From last year, but no less pertinent for it:
“Labour campaigned in Scotland on the basis of being the only party that will stand up to savage Tory cuts in local councils. Whilst the Tories’ vote declined significantly, their influence in Scotland has increased massively due to Labour’s willingness to enter into coalitions with them to keep the SNP out. It goes without saying that this is a complete betrayal of those who thought a Labour vote was an anti-Tory vote.”
(Ben Wray for International Socialist Group.)
Surely the time has come for a forensic analysis of this Labour obsession with the SNP.
Perhaps Mr McWhirter could be persuaded. He has the knowledge and contacts within Labour.
I’m not sure there’s much analysis needed. Labour think Scotland belongs to them. The SNP stole it. Worse, they enacted policies that the Scottish people liked…and they did it deliberately.
Jiggsbro,
“and they did it deliberately“.
Perhaps the greatest unionist comment ever!
During street-stalls for the SSP, the saddest people I meet are Labour supporters. It’s genuinely upsetting to see how lost and angered many of them are. Last week I met an woman (perhaps early to mid-70’s) – she got all choked-up, remembering: being sent to a Socialist Sunday school as a wee girl in the Gorbals along with her brothers; what it was like being part of the crowd who turned out for the cortege of Geoff Shaw, their MP; how hard her whole family campaigned for Labour right up until Kinnock’s showdown with Militant. She had family who were activists in Liverpool at the time, and that’s when the party she knew and loved finally expired. The expression on her face when she mentioned Blair was beyond disgust. It’s not likely she’ll ever attend any party-political meetings or rallies, get active again, but said she’s definitely going to vote Yes.
Also states:
This is a clear indication of where Scottish Labour’s priorities lie: not with providing effective opposition to austerity from Westminster and Holyrood, but jumping in to bed with anyone so long as it helps defend the union.
Labour have given themselves a major problem, it seems their whole mandate since the SNP gained power in Holyrood is to trash/reject anything SNP lead, even if it means voting against matters that they should !! ideologically embrace.
When Margo McD said the other night that ‘half the labour party would vote yes secretly’ she was probably under estimating. This fixation with the SNP is leading them down a dead end road and l think a good percentage of more traditional labour mp’s and a bigger percentage of traditional labour members/voters are getting a bit despondent/embarrassed. (To say the least)
Labour have seen how rejected the conservatives and their right wing obsessions do not get the vote in Scotland but there fixation blinds them.
Desperate times for a desperate party.
Ideologically embrace? They have no ideology, unless you count ‘opposing the SNP’.
Ideologically embrace? They have no ideology, unless you count ‘opposing the SNP’.
I know, l could/should of just said they are a bunch of little wankers feart of loosing their jobs and are quite happy whoring themselves out.
Better ?
I was out for a friends birthday last night and the topic of the referendum came up. I expected, as per previous conversations we’ve had, that only 2 out of the 12 people there to fight the case of Yes. As it turns out things have changed. 4 of us definite yes 3 leaning to Yes the rest still a no. None of these people have any real interest in politics but the one thing that seems to have swayed them…The actions of both Labour and Westminster. Both have disgusted them and both were described as broken.
Things are changing. Slowly. Still lots of hard work to be done
During Labour’s term at Westminster they presided over the UK becoming the 4th most unequal country in terms of the gap between the rich and the poor. Mandelson partied with Tories on Rothschild’s yacht as parents wondered how to feed their children.
A report shows that 1 in 5 children in Scotland live in poverty.
‘Labour MSP Drew Smith blamed Scotland’s child poverty rates on the SNP as he called on ministers to back measures to increase the incomes of hardpressed families.’
Vote Labour and you are voting Tory.
@ turnip ghost
I am sure it was M.K. Gandhi who said, “He who moves a mountain, begins by carrying small stones”. Something like that anyway. I like to think of Newton’s First Law of Motion, which roughly states than an object will continue to move in a straight line until it is opposed by an equal and opposite force.
Er – I was at an SNP conference a couple of years ago where Nicola Sturgeon successfully moved that SNP councillors should be allowed to form administrations with Tories in order to keep Labour out. Pot, kettle etc.
@ Vronsky
Aye, that’ll have been the least right wing option!
@ Rev Stu
Seems you’ll have to maintain a high output today with the BBC journalists(?) being on strike. Still we can look forward to ‘call Kaye’. Bound to be on isn’t it? She’s just a pretendy wee interviewer….. not a real journalist is she?
I hate the Labour Party. I hate them for their lies over a 100 years, I hate them for doing nothing for my country in a 100 years, I hate them for giving up every principle they ever held, I hate them for Kinnoch, Smith, Blair, Brown, McConnel, Lamont and Milliband. I hate them for Iraq, I hate them for poverty and sucking up to the rich, I hate them for taking voters for granted. I hate them for stopping aspiration within their party, if you didn’t go the right school, didn’t know Cameron and Osbourne you aint getting on no front bench of Labour. I hate them for now being the party of the independently educated career politician.
I hate them for becoming on of the three Tory parties.
I finally received a reply from Anne Begg, my local MP. I wrote to her back in January regarding Anas Sarwar’s dictatorship comments and also told her how I had gone from a Labour supporter to voting SNP basically along the lines that I felt Labour no longer represented progressive politics, were treating their supporters and the people of Scotland with contempt and thought we were stupid.
In her reply, and I quote, she wrote that Anas Sarwar’s comments in the HoC were “a slip of the tongue” and that was all she said on that matter. Her letter was 3 pages long and was so full of crap such as implying that the SNP were anti-English (I have been with my English partner for over 10 years) and also that the Union allows Scotland to share in events such as the Olympics. She also went on about the BBC and the Queen etc.
I guess, though, it answers my point about them thinking we are all stupid and treating the electorate with contempt.
PS just away to make my donation now as today is payday.
Hope you wrote back to Anne Begg. My wife is from Birmingham and only came to Scotland for the first time 13 years ago – she is now a Nationalist! Our local Labour party performer, Thomas Docherty, wants a statue to warmonger Tony Blair put up at Westminster. Clowns and liars all of them. Like the chap before I have gone from being a Labour supporter for 40 years to a staunch nationalist. We need to govern for ourselves not the warmongers, thieves and big business that Labour have come to love. What a bad way to start the week. Is there anything lower than Labour in Scotland?
O/T
Today, when I travelled to work (through London) this morning, I noticed something for the first time. I live near a large NHS college hospital and I saw an ambulance which proudly displayed on the side of it ‘NHS Ambulances in Partnership with G4S’ with G4S branding. If anyone has doubts that the NHS is slowly being privatised bit by bit in England, then look no further. But of course who is a non-executive director of this global security firm? Former Labour Health Secretary John Reid (now Lord Reid of Cardowan), he who voted for Trident replacement and against Lords reform, was once a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Secretary of the Young Communists League, adviser to Neil Kinnock and supposedly an Uber socialist who joined the Labour Party to tackle poverty in Glasgow!
@ Bill McLean,
I did contemplate replying back but think I would be wasting my breath. My partner read it and just shook his head about the SNP are anti-English remarks. I also think he might be considering Yes as well. He was born and bred in Manchester and voted Labour like me, but has voted Green and local independents since 2007.
The Labour Party’s problems didn’t start with the SNP gaining control in 2007. They didn’t even start when Tony Blair, that war mongering bastard, took control of the British Labour Party.
Labours long descent into corruption and venality began away back in the twenties. That was the reason that R.B. Cunningam Graham left them and helped to found the SNP.
I recall back in the sixties talking to a woman and her husband in Glasgow who had swung over to the SNP some years before. What had sickened her was when Davie Kirkwood MP, ‘the peoples hero’, ‘the staunch believer in Scottish Home Rule’ deserted his principles and became Lord Kirkwood of Bearsden in 1951.
I’ll never forget how she put her hands together and said that as far as the people had been concerned Davie Kirkwood and God had been like this, and she pressed her palms firmly together. You could just feel the distaste for him and his like coming out of that woman and her husband.
Him and Baron ‘Manny’ Shinwell. From Heroes to Zeroes; the story of the Labour Party in Scotland.