Wings Over Scotland

The raison d’être of a government is to act in the interests of their populace, yet there’s a widespread perception that they instead now exist solely to serve the political and corporate elite, sometimes with not even lip service paid to the wishes of the public.

It’s a perception backed up by hard fact in the form of opinion polls, which demonstrate that the clearly-expressed desires of the electorate are regularly ignored by all parties in favour of blind ideology, cuts to services the public value, and tax breaks for those who don’t need them.

Whoever’s in power, the assets of the nation are sold off against the will of the people, in the name of a private-sector market ideology, for the short-term profit of wealthy City speculators, and for the benefit of other countries who ironically often end up running British industries as (foreign) state-owned public enterprises.

This happens because the votes of most of the electorate don’t count for anything.

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The coalition government’s horrific new immigration bill passed its first hurdle in the House Of Commons last night by 303 votes to 18.

The administration that brought us vans touring cities telling foreigners to leave or be arrested, gangs of armed officers sweeping tube stations for any dark-skinned undesirables, British citizens being harassed by text message and incomers to Scotland met with UK Border Agency posters urging them to go home intends to make life even more wretched and intolerable for vulnerable refugees and people who want to come here and contribute to our economy and culture.

And Labour? Labour bravely abstained from the vote.

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Next year, you can decide to always get the government you vote for.

Or you can pick one of these three. Your call.

Particularly alert readers will have noticed that this site isn’t called Wings Over Wales. Which is a shame in one sense, because “WOW” would be a great acronym to have.

But we’re going to make an exception to our normally all-Scottish, all the time agenda today, because of something that happened in the smaller of mainland UK’s sub-states about which we happen to have some personal experience, and which ties in to Labour peer Lord George Robertson’s extraordinary assertion in a debate last month that Scotland has “no language or culture or any of that”.

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Alert readers will doubtless have spotted the news that the UK government is to press ahead with the sell-off of the Royal Mail. After all, with brutal job cuts under both Labour and Tory/Lib Dem governments having put over 50,000 people out of work in recent years the post is now not just viable but profitable, and we couldn’t possibly have hundreds of millions of pounds in annual profits flowing back into the Treasury’s hands to provide public services for taxpayers when they could be flogged to private companies to enrich the wealthy.

The sale is overwhelmingly opposed by Royal Mail employees, and by the public at large, across party boundaries. But it’s far from unique in that regard. It’s just hard to see how anything can be done about it.

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We wish we were joking. But we’re not.

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Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 12 August 2013:

“Labour’s senior figures, notably Ed Balls, have assuaged their contortions of guilt with much sound and fury, but little by way of alternative policies. Miliband and Balls have concentrated on noisy performances in parliament, with some effect, but have failed to emerge as plausible national leaders.

Their programme has been a pale imitation of the Tories. They are for cuts, but not too deep, for glamour projects, for monetary caution, for the Afghan war. A fear of seeming too leftwing has led them to fudge every opportunity the ineptitude of the coalition has offered them, on welfare capping, on immigration, on the NHS, on housing.

It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.”

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A reader recently sent us an article from Humanitie, the magazine of the Humanist Society of Scotland, in which (apparently after much delay in finding anyone willing to put the No camp’s case) a “Better Together” activist made the case for the Union, in response to a Yes piece in the preceding issue. You can read it by clicking the image.

We’ve carefully redacted the person’s identity, because we don’t want to make this personal. But reading through the litany of tired old falsehoods, we were overcome not with anger or even contempt, but with sorrow.

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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.

This is as many as we could bear.

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Our old pal Tom Harris fits awfully comfortably into the pages of the Daily Telegraph for a Labour MP representing a poverty-blighted Glasgow seat. But there’s something a bit odd about the ugly little piece on immigration he penned for the paper this week.

See if you can spot it.

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ComRes for ITV News, 20 July 2013:

“After a fortnight which included high-profile debates around Labour and Ed Miliband’s relations with the trade unions, Britons are saying they do not believe that the Labour leader will be the next Prime Minister. Fewer than one in four (22%) expect Ed Miliband to be the Prime Minister in 2015.

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Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, 2 July 2013:

“The only place to cement social change is in the hearts and minds of voters. Blair and Brown were defeatists, convinced Britain was essentially conservative, individualist, imbued with Thatcherism.

Confronted with the Mail, Sun, Times and Telegraph, the culture looked immutable, a force to be appeased. Not even when ordinary living standards plummeted as banks were bailed out did Labour seize the chance to make a stronger social democratic case.

Ideas matter. Had Labour changed the political climate (as Cameron briefly thought), this government could not dismantle the social state. But like tumbleweed, Labour policies put down no roots to anchor ideas of collective provision and social protection.”

In the full article, Toynbee rather glosses over some of Labour’s failings in power in her eagerness to present a rosy picture of 13 years in which inequality grew almost constantly. But the paragraphs above concisely and surgically extract the heart of the party’s betrayal of not only its own voters, but the whole concept of British democracy – and inadvertently also the reason why it won’t win the 2015 election.

The only mistake Toynbee makes is to imagine that it matters.