“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
It’s one of the most famous lines in the history of cinema. I’ve heard it a hundred times. And lately, to me, it’s a pretty fair summation of everything that’s gone wrong in Scottish Labour’s relationship with both its own members and its voters.
Sometimes I can be a deeply cynical man. I get it from a couple of sources. Some is from my time as a political activist, when I learned the game in the sewer of Glasgow politics. Some is from my media degree, which taught me (to paraphrase the song) to believe none of what you hear and less than half of what your read. An education heavy on sociology, history and psychology helps too.
I didn’t grow up with this view of the world. I came to it, over time, and much careful consideration. Yet at heart I remain a socialist, and I believe that people are inherently good. It’s the systems we build for ourselves that skew the perspective, that bend our good intentions out of shape, that make us less than what we should be.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
