Breaking: Kezia Dugdale steps down as Scottish Labour leader

[Denzil_DC]

10. The "poll" Ken's referring to,

Last edited Thu Aug 31, 2017, 12:37 PM - Edit history (2)

which has been eagerly seized on by Labour hardline loyalists up here, is a small subsample of a national poll which amounted to around 125 people. You might as well disembowel a chicken.

Unless things have changed, all the evidence is that the "Corbyn bounce" has passed Scotland by. At the election, the most optimistic projections put it at an extra 10,000 votes - just enough to put Labour in third place behind the Tories, which is where they've remained in all the full pols I've seen (not that there've been many, and none I'd wager on).

Corbyn's visit up here was a damp squib. He had healthy audiences at indoor gigs in the Western Isles, Glasgow and at the Edinburgh Fringe, but other than that, the turnout's been pathetic. And even at those well-attended events, most were likely party loyalists, union delegates and Labour apparatchiks or elected members, so hardly effective outreach.

Corbyn also made a series of gaffes during his visit.

He accused the SNP of failing to mitigate Tory austerity in Scotland. Bollocks. The Scottish Government spends millions mitigating the likes of the bedroom tax, while Labour at Westminster either abstains or actively supports a great number of austerity measures, even in its last manifesto.

He claimed that the SNP privatized the Scottish railway system (earlier, he also wrongly claimed the SNP had privatized Scottish ferry services), indicating he's either a liar or a dunce. The SNP only gained the power to have a public-sector bidder for rail services last year, after the most recent contract with Abellio had been signed. Doing otherwise, let alone going for nationalization, would be have been illegal under current legislation.

He promised that Labour would build over 100,000 new public sector houses in Glasgow to overcome the drastic shortfall in supply. Labour was in control of Glasgow City Council until earlier this year, and had evidently done far too little to address this need. The SNP are now in power there and have already instigated a programme to address it. When Labour was in power in Holyrood, it built all of 6 (yes, six) public sector houses (some argue only one got built, and the other five were completed after Labour were ejected). Under the SNP, there's been a concerted programme of hundreds of thousands of public sector and affordable houses.

I could go on and on with examples where he's insultingly ignorant about Scotland (contrast this with his lifelong interest in Ireland), including an interview statement from Corbyn about having different rules under Brexit for different parts of the UK being impossible because you can't have different legal systems in the same country. Scotland has had its own famously discrete and independent judicial system since the Act of union. You'd expect a long-serving MP to know this.

Corbyn is largely irrelevant to Scottish Labour's problems except as a focus for division, as the weeks ahead will no doubt show. Those problems will always exist no matter who's the leader while Scottish Labour is literally just a branch office (technically, in electoral terms, an accounting unit) of UK Labour. We have different priorities up here, and asking us repeatedly to subsume them to the needs of the UK as a whole is one major reason Labour foundered in Scotland in the first place.

He majored on criticizing the SNP, only criticizing the Tories in the UK (and Tories in Scotland not at all) by blaming the SNP for the outcomes of policies over which it has no control - and Labour should know this because it voted against giving meaningful control to the Scottish Parliament during the Smith Commission (whose recommendations were further watered down to neuter Holyrood by the Tory-controlled Scottish Office). Labour only ever had the ambition of Holyrood being a sop to nationalism and a talking shop like a glorified regional council. Now it's no longer guaranteed to be a party of control in Scotland, it's got little interest in using the parliament as anything other than a venue to bash the SNP.

Almost all the positive messages Corbyn had to convey on his brief visit to Scotland were things the SNP is actually doing anyway - and often against bitter opposition from Scottish Labour! It would be a surprise to many of you who're used to critical coverage of the man in your media to see how easy a ride the press up here is giving him about all this.

He'd do better with the likes of me on his excursions to the northern reaches of the Empire if he acknowledged the good things the SNP are doing as an example of how things could work in the rest of the country. But he's tribal. Like a lot of the remaining Labour supporters. And while Labour in Scotland (and probably the rest of the UK) sees the SNP as "the true enemy", rather than Tory policies, he'll get nowhere with me. Make the most of him Down South. He doesn't have a message I'm convinced by, and I've lived long enough to have seen how Labour promises evaporate once they're in power more than once.