Wings Over Scotland

Better Together co-ordinator defects to Labour For Independence

With just over four months to go until the referendum, a disillusioned Better Together campaign co-ordinator has defected to Labour For Independence and declared his support for a Yes vote on September 18th.

Gary Wilson, a Labour Party member, was for six months the local “Better Together” co-ordinator within the Edinburgh East Labour Party.

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Owen Jones in the Guardian, 8 May 2014:

“Despite being occasionally portrayed as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, Labour’s key policies are a mixture of backing Tory spending plans for a year, real-term cuts to public sector pay, restoring the 50p tax (apparently temporarily), a short-term energy bill freeze and more secure private-sector tenancy agreements.”

A real revolution to rally behind there, eh viewers?

David Cameron, Prime Minister’s Questions, 30 April 2014:

“I think that what Alex Salmond said [about Vladimir Putin] was a major error of judgment and that all of us in this House should be supporting the Ukrainian desire to be a sovereign, independent country and to have the respect of the international community and party leaders for that ambition.”

(Our emphasis.) It’s not only us finding that just the tiniest bit hypocritical, is it?

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Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer, 8 April 2007:

“With fewer than 30 days until the elections, Labour is displaying its nerves by sounding increasingly hysterical about the prospect of an SNP government. When they did their rather grim double-act in Glasgow, the Prime Minister and Chancellor came laden with apocalyptic predictions about the consequences of a nationalist victory.

Labour screams that an independent Scotland would suffer all manner of horrors, from economic cataclysm to a heightened terrorist risk to family breakdown to a plague of locusts and a rash of boils.

Watching the Prime Minister and his heir-presumptive issue dire warnings about tax bombshells and the Union in danger is to witness one of those bizarre transmogrifications that can happen in politics. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are turning into John Major.”

Imagine if they were still trying that stuff seven years later, eh readers?

Matthew Norman in the Independent, 15 April 2014:

“In the entire global history of the political campaign, has any been more misconceived, wretchedly executed and potentially self-defeating than the one designed to keep Scotland within the United Kingdom?

David Mitchell in the Guardian, 30 March 2014:

“There’s always a chance that people will decide who to vote for according to policy – and by ‘people’, I mean the people that matter: the indecisive minority who change which party they vote for from election to election according to whim, and consequently determine every result.

But it doesn’t seem likely to me that policy is what’s going to swing the swingers this time – although I may only think that because the Labour Party’s policies are still largely secret.”

People only vote for change if they think there’ll actually be some.

Will Self in the New Statesman, 28 February 2014:

“As someone who for the past two decades has visited Scotland at least three or four times a year, and spent a great deal of those visits in and around the former steel town of Motherwell, I cherish few illusions about the country.

On the whole, I’ve considered independence to be something of a no-brainer: if ever there was a small, potentially socialistic state that could do with being detached from its deluded imperialist neighbour, it’s Scotland.”

Despite our misgivings about the shortbread, bagpipes, sporrans, whisky, Nessie and deep-fried Mars bar cover, the magazine’s special “Scotland” issue isn’t bad at all. Of course, as Scots we’re all far too mean to pay £3.95 – £3.95! – for a copy, but do go and browse it on your local newsagent’s shelves.

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Labour Uncut, 11 February 2014:

“In the main race between Labour and the Tories, these figures mean the Tories have a higher core vote than Labour.

Applying the defection rate to the Tories 2010 total gives a core vote of 23%, 1.5% ahead of Labour. It could well be that the generational churn identified by the Fabians evens out this Tory advantage, but in terms of actual voters who participated at the last election, YouGov’s analysis shows us that the Tories have a clear core vote lead.”

It may be worth remembering that these figures also don’t, as far as we can ascertain, factor in those UKIP voters likely to return to the Conservatives when it comes to the crunch of a UK election that might install Ed Miliband as Prime Minister rather than a Tory leader promising to hold a referendum on EU membership.

Don’t come crying to us in May 2015, No voters. We keep telling you what’s coming.

Peter Arnott in The Global Dispatches, 29 January 2014:

“We have been tempted to believe in Scotland that our tactical pattern of voting one way in a Westminster elections and another in Holyrood elections would continue to shelter us from the worst neo-liberal excesses of Westminster – our parliament after all came into existence as a retroactive shelter from what was inflicted on us (and everyone else in non-Tory Britain) the last time the Conservatives were in power. 

We are still behaving as if this is the case even while history is whisking that carpet from underneath our feet.”

And that, readers, is why it matters that I live in England.

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Me, writing in April 2010, before there was a Wings Over Scotland:

“Brown doesn’t have a pig in a sausage factory’s chance of still being PM in a month’s time. So all he’s doing with this disgusting, desperate attempt to grab a few Mail-reader votes in marginals is setting a tone of contempt for the poor that the Tories will seize on, and thereby triangulate their own position to somewhere even more loathsome. God help the poor if Cameron gets in.”

Once in a while it’d be nice to get it completely wrong.

John Crace, the Guardian, 14 Jan 2014:

“Is it conceivable that [Sherlock] Holmes might have been a Labour voter now? Possibly. New Labour changed the rules of political engagement. What the Daily Mail still doesn’t quite get is that voting Labour is no longer a challenge to the establishment, it’s a part of it. There is no major redistribution of wealth and power for the right to fear.”

British politics: elementary.

“Herald View”, the Sunday Herald, 12 Jan 2014:

“The Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is to be commended for refusing to participate in the victimisation of the ‘undeserving poor’. She promises to scrap the bedroom tax, keep housing benefits and reject the forthcoming Universal Credit, which amalgamates a whole range of benefits into one payment. The Nationalists say they will increase social security benefits and the minimum wage annually by the rate of inflation.

However, they cannot secure these protections under the current constitutional arrangements.”

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