The dogged determination of Scottish Labour to insult the Scottish electorate is a source of constant slack-jawed astonishment to us. Over the years we’ve lost count of the number of times the party’s politicians have effectively said “People are just too stupid to vote for us”, in the apparent belief that abuse is the way to win back support.
But it’s not always so overt. The subtler ways in which the party treats voters like morons include the assumption that people’s memories only go back to yesterday’s newspapers, and there can surely be no more stark illustration than its recent adoption of the attack line that the SNP are standing “shoulder to shoulder with the Tories”.
We’re big fans of socialism ourselves, so when a number of delegates at the Scottish Labour conference today, including UK leader Jeremy Corbyn, revived an old Keir Hardie line we were quite excited.
Michelle Mone, the fake-tan-and-diet-pills tycoon who threatened to leave Scotland if the SNP won the 2007 Holyrood election (but didn’t when they did), then threatened to leave if Yes won the referendum (but did when it didn’t), now lives in a very expensive flat by the Thames in London with a lovely view of Tower Bridge.
We always feel a bit bad when we point out in the interests of reality that Labour isn’t going to win the 2015 general election, because notwithstanding the fact that they’re only actually about 1% to the left of the Tories, 1% is still better than nothing.
And as we’re having a bit of an Ed Miliband day today, we thought we should do something constructive for the millionaire leader of the People’s Party for balance, so we’ve put together a nice picture gallery of Not Very Red Ed to show how at ease he is meeting members of the public, and how if he gets elected he’ll be closely in touch with the concerns of ordinary hard-working people.
Take comfort, readers. The Milibot 3000 is ++ ON YOUR SIDE ++.
It’s very rare, viewers, that we get so angry in the course of writing a post that we have to stop.
But when we ran a picture last night of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander MP, opening a foodbank with a cretinous smile on his face as if being a member of the government of a modern industrial nation in need of foodbanks was something to be happy about, a reader suggested making a gallery of similar images.
Wings Over Scotland undertook a research trip to London yesterday – mainly to check out the Propaganda: Power And Persuasion exhibition at the British Library, which we definitely recommend should you find yourself in the vicinity. Later in the day, though, we took a stroll down Oxford Street, and found ourselves horrified by the state of it.
The UK capital’s great retail showpiece looked like the aftermath of a Luftwaffe bombing raid on a run-down part of Burnley. Much of the south side of the street had been ripped to pieces by ongoing and seemingly endless work for the Crossrail project (sound familiar, Edinburgh residents?), but even where buildings were untouched by the builders there were boarded-up shops, tatty frontages and once-proud units now occupied by scores of scruffy tourist tat shifters.
And if even the great West End has now fallen into that sort of dilapidated, thoroughly depressing condition, despite three decades of all the country’s wealth being greedily sucked down to London, then what of the rest of the country?
There’s something different about one of these pictures of all the big-name speakers at the Scottish Labour conference, but we can’t quite seem to put our finger on it.
We decided it was about time we took in some of the Labour conference, and tuned in this morning in time for the special “Better Together” session, when the party devoted around 40 prime-time minutes early on a Tuesday morning to emphasising just how much the UK values Scotland and Wales (although apparently not Northern Ireland).
Several dozen people crammed into a hall with a capacity of 9,000 to hear Gordon Matheson, Margaret Curran and Johann Lamont represent North Britain, followed by a token Welsh bloke we’ve never heard of and finally the fragrant Dame Tessa Jowell to celebrate “Team GB” and the success of the Great Patriotic Olympics.
