Breaking: Kezia Dugdale steps down as Scottish Labour leader

[Denzil_DC]

25. Listen. Listen good, because I'm about done wasting my time on you.

What I was saying there that forcing an election at the moment that motion forced it was the worst possible choice for Scotland, in addition to the grievous and still-unhealed wounds it inflicted on people in the rest of the UK.

Can you not see how a lot of people have just as much reason to resent the SNP for putting Margaret Thatcher into power as you feel about Corbyn not giving SNP government at Holyrood the credit it deserves?

Try an experiment. Actually come over to the UK, since you seem so concerned about the situation here.

Talk to people about the late 1970s. Talk to the impoverished, the "voters with humane, progressive values and those not billionaires" you claim to be so concerned about. Ask them about the political situation of the time.

I'm willing to bet good money I can't afford that if they remember it at all, they will recall the utter disaster the Callaghan government made of its time in office.

They'll remember the unburied bodies.

They'll remember the vast piles of garbage festering high in the streets.

They'll remember the three-day week.

They'll remember the regular power cuts.

They'll remember the Winter of Discontent.

They'll remember "Crisis, what crisis?"

They'll place the blame firmly at the feet of those who were actually responsible - the Labour government and the overreaching, irresponsible unions of the time.

A vanishingly small percentage will blame the SNP for all this because they're not fucking insane.

What part of "It would quite possibly have been an even worse result if the election had been postponed" are you unable to grasp?

How the hell do you think Labour would have been able to overturn the polls that showed a landslide majority for the Tories in the few months between March and autumn 1979?

Evidence for this?

People voted for the Tories in large numbers.

They voted for them again and again.

Many who voted for them were from what was termed "the working class".

Many voted against their best interests in the long term because they were bribed with short-term gains or the myth that one day they'd benefit.

Many from across the board, and from those afflicted parts of the population, to this day will tell you gravely that "Thatcher did what had to be done."

Very few will express any affection for Callaghan.

Probably even fewer, even within Labour, will express affection for Foot.

And this comes from someone who actually consistently voted Labour at general elections of the time and after it.

Barely any will express sympathy for the unions.

Labour and the unions have never regained the ground lost during that period.

Labour has spent all its time since then running away from the spectre of it all, and with good reason.

Callaghan refused to do a deal with the Ulster Unionists over a pipeline that would have defeated the motion.

Callaghan decided not to call on MP Sir Alfred Broughton to risk his very fragile health to attend and vote in an ambulance.

The Labour Chief Whip was grudgingly but generously offered a deal by Tory Chief Whip Bernard Weatherill that he would abstain himself since Broughton couldn't vote - a move that would have ended Weatherill's career. He turned it down.

The Liberals - bitter ex-partners in government with Labour - had their own role to play, and would have put forward their own no confidence motion if the Tories hadn't.

The Irish nationalists refused to back Labour, but were generously willing to campaign for Callaghan's re-election if the vote was lost.

And you're going to sit there and blame the SNP?

Away and boil yer heid.