As Labour plans tougher immigration rules and Holyrood targets faith schools, Kevin McKenna explores how identity politics and policy shifts risk deepening divisions rather than healing them.

Scotland and the UK’s liberal gentry always insist they’re about healing social division. In truth, they’ve always perpetuated it and never more so than now. Every few years they scan the horizon looking for new territory on which to plant their false flags.

Having now realised that ordinary people, backed by the law, have begun to reject their attempts to re-define womanhood, they’re now looking for the low-hanging fruit of immigration and asylum. While contriving to be outraged about Reform’s racist agenda the UK Labour Government is about to extend the standard qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) from five to 10 years. This will include a series of new contribution-based tests. It’s a vile piece of policy-making which dehumanises people fleeing daily dehumanisation in their countries of origin.

Britain offers no legal routes to these wretched boat people who come here not for the benefit system but because they’d been told the UK still held decency and respect for human values to be important and because they valued the English language. In response, all the SNP can offer is ‘disappointment’ while overseeing a system of placement which puts asylum-seekers in Scotland’s most disadvantaged communities.

Glasgow’s Irish community knows what this looks like. My people were lifted out of poverty and discrimination by the Labour Party and the trade unions. By a happy coincidence, the emergence of these two great forces for social improvement occurred at a time of peak Irish migration into the west of Scotland.

Read more:

Having been forced to flee Ireland because of An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger) and the callous indifference of the British state, the Irish had to contend with being treated like animals by some politicians, local authorities and the big employers in ship-building, banking, the law, engineering........

© Herald Scotland