Why it's time for Labour in Scotland to ditch its London operation |
In an interview with The Herald last week, Labour MP Brian Leishman said it may be time for the party in Scotland to move away from the London operation. Our columnist Kevin McKenna agrees
In my interviews this month with Monica Lennon and Brian Leishman I was reminded what the Labour Party once stood for.
Ms Lennon, the MSP for Central Scotland is currently trying to guide her "ecocide" bill through Holyrood before Parliament breaks for the Scottish elections. It would criminalise large corporations for poisoning and disfiguring those working-class communities targeted by big business for illegal waste disposal.
Unsurprisingly, it’s faced opposition from an unlovely coalition of high Tories and some individual SNP politicians in a manner which makes one wonder where some of them intend to make their money beyond front-line politics.
Ms Lennon’s intervention comes six years after her Period Products Bill made Scotland the first country in the world ever to introduce universal free access to period products for anyone who needs them. Two years later, the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act became law.
The Bellshill-born MSP has lived and worked her entire life in North Lanarkshire and is one of a tiny few politicians identifying as left-wing who puts basic Socialism into practice by championing issues directly affecting the everyday lives of working class people. Both of these causes are in stark contrast to the dilettante, luxury beliefs espoused by the SNP and the Scottish Greens.
Read more by Kevin McKenna
Scottish Labour must consider breaking from London party, says MP
Scottish Labour is letting down its voters, says MP Brian Leishman
Monica Lennon and the fight to make polluters pay
Monica Lennon’s no-nonsense Socialism is evident too in the values of Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth. Mr Leishman was among the first to back Anas Sarwar’s calls for the resignation of Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister and leader of the UK Labour party.
For him, like many others who still cherish what the Labour Party is supposed to represent, it was quite simple and straightforward. If you had any sense of shame or decency, how can you continue to portray yourself as a Labour politician – let alone leader – if you reward someone like Peter Mandelson with the UK’s most important ambassadorial posting? And to do so, knowing that he had once been very close to the world’s most notorious paedophile and trafficker of under-age girls.
To buy any of Sir Keir’s explanations, you’d have to believe that the UK’s entire intelligence apparatus as well as London Labour’s swollen advisory suite had somehow all contrived to miss the red flags during their security sweep of a man who had resigned from high office twice for issues around financial transparency and influencing a multi-billionaire’s passport application.
In the fall-out emerging from Sir Keir’s gross error of judgment, the dark heart of UK Labour was also exposed. Thus we learned that the party had been hollowed out by a clandestine star chamber of which Sir Keir was merely a glove-puppet. This malignant organisation, funded by shadowy billionaires and wealth portfolios, chose who could become a Labour MP and who couldn’t. It spent significant sums of money to snoop on political and investigative journalists deemed by them to be troublesome.
Effectively, the party had been targeted by right-wing forces representing the interests of global finance and super-corporations to ensure that a change of government from Tory to Labour wouldn’t present any problems for them. Think of it as multi-million-pound, political each-way bet.
In our interview, Brian Leishman told me of his despair at being forced to watch a succession of English Labour MPs in the chamber parroting the ideas of the hard right about benefits and NHS funding. The all looked and sounded like they’d been cloned from the machinery operated by Morgan McSweeney in the sewers running beneath London Labour.
Mr Leishman’s anger was intensified after attempts had been made to block him from talking about the fate of the Grangemouth oil refinery when, in April last year, the party’s MPs were summoned to back plans to prevent closure of the Southend steelworks.
Many facets of London Labour’s social engineering and political gerrymandering are present in the SNP. In the ruinous Sturgeon/Swinney era it’s long been known that you’ll only be considered to stand for the party if you first sign up to a suite of luxury cultural beliefs that betray a deep loathing of Scotland’s working-class communities, especially if you’re a woman who believes in the reality of biological sex. And if you identify as an authentic Catholic then you too can expect to be marginalised by the SNP’s cultural ukases.
Since 2015, the SNP-led Government has failed in every one of its purported missions to improve Scotland’s working-class communities. Closing the education attainment gap turned out to be a cruel hoax, as was The Promise to improve the lives of children growing up in care. Their policy of addressing Scotland’s addiction crisis is to feed addicts with more drugs in facilities sited miles away from the nice neighbourhoods favoured by them and their middle-class acolytes in the political and media classes. It scrapes new depths of callousness.
The SNP’s many manifest failures and its decade-long strategy of gaslighting Scotland’s poor ought to have presented Labour in Scotland with a generational opportunity to take back power. The problem for Anas Sarwar though, is that you can’t really hurt the SNP when the London bosses are also cheating the electorate.
It’s why Brian Leishman’s call for Labour members in Scotland to consider breaking away from the London party is an idea whose time has come. Mr Leishman believes that the members should look at this in the event of Labour in Scotland failing to make progress at May’s Holyrood elections. I think they should be considering this no matter how well they do.
Monica Lennon, who “puts basic Socialism into practice” (Image: PA)
Sir Keir Starmer’s London Labour operation is a non-government, scared of its own shadow and resorting to militaristic, Nato-obsessed fetishism as a means of keeping its multinational globalist paymasters on board.
Mr Leishman cited the campaigning work of his fellow Labour MP Ian Byrne on the Hillsborough Law. The Liverpool Derby MP is also involved with Mr Leishman in the Right to Food Commission. He talked about Monica Lennon and her ecocide and period products bills. We talked about the former Labour MSP, Neil Findlay, who secured justice for the victims of surgical mesh implants and campaigned for miners blacklisted after the miners’ strike.
Labour’s values should always be rooted in these campaigns which help real people in real time. They are a world apart from that in which Sir Keir Starmer’s genuflects to the forces of corporate globalism.
Kevin McKenna is Scotland's Feature Writer of the Year