Breaking: Kezia Dugdale steps down as Scottish Labour leader

[Ken Burch]

21. There are contradictions, but it's not as simple as saying Corbyn is contradictory

The dilemmas he faces is that even though he is leader and the overall majority of Labour members and paid supporters are on the left, the Blairite party bureaucracy, which has entrenched itself through years of severe restrictions on internal party democracy, is still largely in control of the policy-making apparatus and still has a one-seat majority on the NEC(National Executive Committee, for the benefit of any other North Americans reading this)due to anti-Corbyn fiddling with the resuts, so there are limits, at least until the next couple of party conferences, on the ability of Corbyn and the democratic socialist majority within Labour to establish party policy. My feeling is that it was the party bureaucrats in Westminster and Kezia Dugdale and the Scottish Labour apparatchiks at Holyrood largely setting the policies you AND I(and most of Corbyn's supporters)disliked, and that most of the info Corbyn had on Scotland were filtered through Dugdale. The Labour gains were almost solely due to the promises in the Corbyn stump speech, which was well to the left of official party policy. The bad policies you rightly point out, Denzil, are Blairite holdovers with no support within the party other than the right-wing party bureaucrats and the right-wing MPs who were imposed as candidates by Blair in the Nineties, the ones who don't realize they are only in office because they stand in constituencies that vote Labour no matter what.

Until very recently, Corbyn was unable to move too aggressively to set policy, because there was, right up until polling day, a large faction of bureaucrats and MPs-supported by virtually no one in the rank and file-refusing to accept that seeking to oust the man as leader. It's not Jeremy that's contradictory, it's his party-a massive grassroots majority for socialist and democratic being thwarted repeatedly by a right-wing elitist clique that, in some cases, cares more about avoiding war crimes trials then they do about returning the party that elects or employs them to power or about doing anything to help those Labour exists to stand up for.

Is Jeremy flawless? God no. What I respect about him, though, is that, with his flaws, he is the first UK party leader in decades(I'm counting Nicola Sturgeon as a national, not UK leader here) to actually stand for a positive, idealistic, hopeful sense of life. That's why so many young people(other than in Scotland, where Labour seems to be a youth-free zone-why ELSE would a corporate lobbyist like Owen Smith run ahead there in the leadership race? It's hard to imagine him carrying the day if Labour north of the Tweed weren't mainly a collection of bitter old crooks)respond to him, and I stick with the guy because it's hard to see anything but a return to dreariness and irrelevance for Labour if he were to stand down as leader before internal democracy and grassroots control of the constituency parties and the annual conference were established. Until then, it's either Corbyn or Labour returning to the Harriet Harman era when it stood for nothing and had no reason to exist.



I agree with you on federalism for Scotland-and for much greater home rule powers for Wales as well, and I'd like to see Northern, Southern, Midlands and London regional assemblies for England, all elected by proportional representation. No one to Corbyn's right within the party(and the only people the MPs would allow on a ballot to replace the man would be hard-right sectarian Blairites, no
actual socialists or social democrats would be tolerated by the PLP)would be more decentralist.